Reddit—among the last places online you can be reasonably confident contains the searchable writing of real humans unmediated by algorithms that hate you—is finally turning a profit. The income is driven by sharp growth, presuambly refugees from all the other places.
Reddit just turned a profit for the first time. As part of its third-quarter earnings results released on Tuesday, the company reported a profit of $29.9 million, along with $348.4 million in revenue — a 68 percent increase year over year.
The company hasn't been profitable at any point in its nearly 20-year history. Since going public, Reddit lost $575 million during its first quarter on the market, but it decreased that loss to $10 million last quarter, and is now finally in the green.
Reddit also grew to 97.2 million daily users over the past few months, marking a 47 percent increase from the same time last year. That number exceeded 100 million users on some days during the quarter, Reddit says.
Vibe is important and Reddit has a chaotic one that allows for local norms and salients of inclusion and exclusion within subreddits. The trend is toward corroding those defenses but they remain fairly strong there. Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky are nice to have around but all of them stink of the late-era-Twitter universal engagement factory they are all replicas of. The world needs also-rans. It needs more of them: thousands of functional and profitable public platforms, not five.