I’ve seen some rat-adjacent accounts tweeting about the subreddit purge- @Aella_Girl especially but also @eigenrobot and others- and I feel like they’re all missing an important piece of the puzzle - Reddit as a horribly underperforming business

In 2019 Reddit made $0.30 in revenue per monthly active user- that’s really fucking weak. Twitter and Facebook perform 30x(!!!) better on that metric! https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-valuable-of-any-social-network.html

Why is Reddit so bad at making money?

It has better potential for contextual ads than literally anyone else since advertisers can target specific communities (ex: selling basketball merch on /r/nba), and there *should* be potential for targeted ads based on user data too

The #1 cause of Reddit’s weakness is that their tradition of building shitty products extends to their adtech.

The #2 cause is that Reddit is a tool for building echo chambers, and some of those echo chambers look fucking horrifying to the normies who control advertising budgets

Jailbait, gamergate, incels, the_donald and it’s derivatives. Not to mention the *actual nazis*.

Ad budget normies have to worry that they’ll be tried in the court of public opinion and found guilty by association.

In 2019, Reddit received a huge funding round from profit-motivated parties like Tencent and Snoop Dog.
( is illuminating on Snoop’s perspective.)

They committed to bringing in more cash, which requires fixing Reddit’s image problem.

Now they’re deleting toxic-seeming-to-normies communities.
Which generates positive press like https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/612958/
Which gives advertisers cover to use their product, especially if they’re “boycotting” Facebook.

So here we are.

TLDR: Reddit purges are gentrification, not cancel culture.