In this podcast, Motley Fool host Dylan Lewis caught up with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman for a conversation about:

  • What’s driving Reddit’s 50% year-over-year user growth.

  • How the social network targets ads.

  • What Reddit is doing with large language models.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool’s free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner’s guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

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Steve Huffman: But I will point out far and away the most common user-written rule on Reddit, community-written rule, is some form of be nice. Be nice, be civil, be respectful, and they write that for themselves and they enforce it for themselves

Ricky Mulvey: I’m Ricky Mulvey, and that’s Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. Reddit is a social networking site. If you haven’t visited, it’s broken up into communities or sub-Reddits for just about anything you can imagine. News, sports, local food, hobbies, memes. It’s more focused on conversation than other social networks, though. My colleague Dylan Lewis caught up with Huffman for an interview about the state of Reddit now that it’s a public company. They discussed its ad business, what’s driving Reddit’s user growth and artificial intelligence, what the company can do with one of the largest corpuses of human conversation. We played a part of the interview on Friday’s syndicated radio show. It offers a higher level view of the business, and that’s a great place to start if you’re unfamiliar with Reddit. Today’s show is a bit of a deeper dive. Both pieces work together, and neither show is a replay of the other.

Dylan Lewis: I do want to dig into some of the company numbers a little bit and talk through some of that. I was impressed as a long time follower of the business to see the growth that you guys put up in 2024. Because platform has been around for a very long time. The revenue growth of 50%, to me, not crazy, surprising for where you guys are at in the modernization story. The user growth story of 50% was a surprise. What was behind that growth?

Steve Huffman: There’s a couple specific things which I’ll get to, but the big picture idea is, this goes back to what I said when I was describing Reddit. Everybody’s got a home on Reddit. Then that raises the question. If everybody has a home on Reddit and Steve, if you say the content so great and it’s so unique and it’s such a great experience, then why isn’t everybody on Reddit ready? I think there’s two possible answers for that. Well, actually three. The first, they haven’t heard of Reddit. Well, certainly in the US, that’s increasingly less likely. Number 2, they tried Reddit, and it didn’t work for them. That’s the group we’ve really been focused on is making it so the new users who are coming to our front page or opening the app for the first time are either primed to experience Reddit as opposed to coming from search or something like that. Make sure they find a community that speaks to them.

We made sign up much easier. The community on-boarding helping you find your home on Reddit much more effective. We made both the website and the app much faster. We just redesigned it in a lot of little ways, so it’s easier on the eyes, there are fewer bugs, and our home feed has gotten much better at making recommendations of communities that you might like. Really getting people into their home on Reddit and then finding all of their interests much more effectively. That’s been working very well. Then at the same time, we made our website substantially faster, 2-5 times faster, and we launched this in May of 2023. Google Bot likes speed. Faster pages rank higher, and faster pages also get indexed faster. The Google search works in mysterious ways, and as close a partner as we are with Google, we have no idea how search works.

Dylan Lewis: Nobody does.

Steve Huffman: Nobody does, but speed matters. When our website got a lot faster, we started ranking higher. Then combine that with the product improvements, users are having better experience on Reddit. Now it creates this flywheel that we’re really benefiting from as we see a lot of new and core users coming from search, and we’re much more effective at getting them into their home on Reddit. I said there’s two things, either you haven’t heard of Reddit or it didn’t work for you. That number two we’re really focused on. There’s a third one, which is you don’t speak English. That’s the next frontier of Reddit. Reddit’s corpus today is still mostly English, but growing outside of the United States, outside of English, that’s a part of the next chapter of Reddit unlocking that.

Dylan Lewis: What does tackling that look like? What are some of the challenges and things that you guys are working through to make Reddit localized to some of the other big international markets?

Steve Huffman: Sure. All the things I just mentioned around speed, performance, all that, all that matters. That’s the foundation. There’s other parts of the foundation. Safety is a big part of it as well. The foundation helps everybody, but on top of the foundation, there’s a chicken and egg problem. You need content to attract users, and you need users to create content. We come at this from two ways. One is just program work. We target a market, and then there are users in every market. We’re not starting from zero anywhere, so we go to the communities there, we reach out to the mods, we figure out, what communities probably should exist that don’t? Like cities, sports teams, local passions, things like that, and we work with Mats to try to bring those communities to life, make sure they’re in discovery, make sure everything’s humming there. The second thing we’re doing, which is working very well, at least off to a great start is machine translation. New technology here with large language models. We can actually translate the existing Reddit corpus into other languages at human quality.

Now, not all the content is relevant, but a lot of it is. We have been testing this in French in the first half this year, and it’s gone very well. Now we’re adding on more languages. We’re doing German, Portuguese, and Spanish. That will get us just a bigger content foundation. Then from there, we need to see the next step which is organic growth, or call it native organic growth on top of that. International, it’s real work. One of the difference between Reddit and social media is Reddit’s communities. People don’t just join communities overnight, let alone create them. We can’t force it. What we try to do is really create the conditions for growth. But we can’t actually force anything. We’re getting a little bit better at that, but there’s a lot of, I think, finesse required to get that right.

Dylan Lewis: On that note of getting people to join communities, you mentioned people finding Reddit via Google Search. I find that particularly true when it’s around stuff like product reviews or information or something where you really want a human’s perspective on something. I know you guys have a split when it comes to your active users. You have the logged in users and the folks that are not logged in. I imagine some of those folks are coming in through Google Search. What does the process look like for turning somebody like that into an active logged in user? Or how important is that for you guys?

Steve Huffman: First, it’s interesting. Something I learned just last week. If you go to Google Trends in 2024 in the US, you can actually literally go to trends.google.com and see this. The Reddit is the sixth most searched word on Google in 2024 in the US last year. I think it’s like number 5 is news, and maybe number 8 is Maps. It’s a thing people are going to Google looking for Reddit. A lot of those users are already logged in. They’re actually core Reddit users. They’re using Google navigate Reddit, but then if you’re also just searching on the Internet, there’s a good chance you end up on Reddit, but my point is, there’s broad consumer demand for Reddit’s content. Now, in that moment, if a user visits from Google, we used to be more aggressive about hey log in, download the app. We found that, that worked in the short term, but long term this was just annoying, and because in that moment, that person probably has a question and Reddit likely has the answer, but they’re not looking to be on Reddit in that moment or screwing around on the Internet.

They’re trying to do something. I’m trying to buy this thing or I’m trying to get an answer to this question, and so our attitude now is give the user what they want. Give them the answer, let them see all the content, let them go about their day. Trust that, we’ll see them again on the front page or opening the app when they’re more primed to have the community experience, but every time they come to Reddit and get the answer, they’re learning. Reddit has the answer to my questions. That alone, I think is really valuable. I think across the Reddit product, our goal is to give the user what they want. We have this joke, but it’s not really a joke. I used to say people come for the cats and stay for the community. In this case, they’re coming for the answers, and then they’ll come back for the community, but we understand there’s this bimodal, different ways of using Reddit, and that’s OK.

Dylan Lewis: Knowing that advertising such a large part of the business, in terms of ad targeting, how important is it to have a logged in user versus a logged out user? You’re getting a certain amount of intent when someone is looking at information from a specific community. You’re getting some information about them, but it’s not maybe as robust as they would be if they were logged in. I would imagine.

Steve Huffman: Our ad server doesn’t care if you’re logged out or logged in. They both have a user ID. The main difference between a logged in user and a logged out user is logged in users spend more time on Reddit. We’ll have a more fulsome view of what your interests are because over time. People join more and more communities on Reddit. Those accounts, when they’re as old as yours, you might have 100 subscriptions or more, and a logged out user doesn’t have any. They may have just visited a few sub Reddits. The main difference in value to us between a logged in user and a logged out user is time spent of the logged in accounts. They just have more inventory. But we monetize logged out users as well.

Now, there’s broadly two ways that we’ll target an ad. One is based on your explicitly express interests on Reddit. If you join the skiing sub Reddit, you’re likely to see outdoor ads, things like that. Then the other is the context of what you’re looking at. If you’re on a comments page, we call them post detail pages now. If you’re on one of those specific pages, that page is likely mentioning a company or companies by name and often specific products, and so we can target an ad based on the context as well. Big picture, we think targeting based on your explicit interests or the context of what you’re looking at, are I think healthy and explainable and not creepy ways of targeting ads. What we don’t do is we don’t target ads based on your personal information, your Internet browsing habits, anything like that. It’s really, what are you subscribed to? What are you into? What are you doing on Reddit, and what are you looking at right now? The math behind that targeting is much simpler than maybe what’s required elsewhere. That’s been working for us as well.

Dylan Lewis: I know in the grand scheme of the ad monetization story, it’s still probably early innings for you. One of the places we look when we’re looking at a business like yours is average revenue per user, stacking it up against some of the other players in the space, and just trying to get a feel both for where you are and also where the opportunity is, a lot of the revenue growth we’re seeing is driven by user growth, not necessarily average revenue per user growth right now. How are you feeling about the way that you’re monetizing user time, balancing ad load with the experience, things like that?

Steve Huffman: Look, I think we’re in great shape. Last quarter, we grew users 51% and revenue 54%. We’ll be happy of those numbers in any quarter. Nobody manages RPU at Reddit. We try to grow revenue and we try to grow users, and then RPU is just revenue divided by users. That number can move. The way we think about it is, are we growing users in the right way? Are they finding their home on Reddit? Are they making more community connections? Are they joining communities? The primary way we grow inventory is by creating happy users. Better user retention equals more users, equals more subscriptions, equals more time on the platform or inventory. Then on the advertising side, it’s also similar line of thinking. Are our customers happy? Are our customers returning? Are the ads performing? Are we meeting their needs? If we’re accomplishing both of those things, we feel great. Now, you mentioned ad load. Every investor asked about ad load.

Steve Huffman: On our list of ways of growing revenue ad load is Number 10.

Dylan Lewis: That delights me as a user.

Steve Huffman: We grow revenue by creating more inventory, so more users. We can also create inventory by putting ads in places that don’t have ads. Now we’ve got ads in the comments. It’s something we’ve been testing. There’s a couple of opportunities down the road. We create inventory by users coming back more often, by logging in more, all of these things. Ad load is just not the first thing we go to. It’s just not high on the list. I think that’s just a healthier way to grow. Because advertisers they’d much rather show 100 people, one impression than one person, 100 impressions. We’re not trying to get people to go deeper and deeper for ads. I want you to have a great time and read it and make the connection. But I also really in the answer, and it’s in our mission, community belonging empowerment for everyone in the world. The last phrase for everyone in the world, we’re trying to go broader. That’s how we create more inventory and ultimately create more revenue as well.

Dylan Lewis: On the advertiser’s side, when they are thinking about their spend, they’re looking at you guys, but they’re also looking at digital channels, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google search and often ad budget dollars are mutually exclusive. There’s a little bit of a trade off. You spend some money in one place. You don’t have it for the other places. What do you feel the pitches for advertisers spending on Reddit versus some of the other platforms? What’s unique?

Steve Huffman: Well, sure. There’s a couple of angles we can come out it from. One, your customer is very likely uniquely on Reddit. Thirty to 60% of our users are not on the other platforms and so unduplicated reach is one. Two. Because Reddit is so broad, every interest, passion, hobby. A lot of hobbies boil down to what should I buy? The most fun part about picking up a new hobby, I think is noting out and acquiring the new gear.

Dylan Lewis: It’s all about the gear.

Steve Huffman: Like 40% of conversations on Reddit are actually about products or about product recommendations, people talking about that. It’s naturally commercial and so we can go to companies and say, look, your customers are on Reddit, talking about your brand, or maybe talking about your competitor’s brands or making a purchasing decision in your space. What should I watch? What should I listen to? What should I wear? Where should I go on vacation? What cars should I buy? What’s the best video game this and that? Those are commercial conversations. There are also normal human conversations. There’s a natural fit there. With advertisers, we also get into just how the platform is different. Like how we think about safety? We’re not trying to make Reddit addictive. We’re trying to bring people into conversations. We try to be proactive about safety and having good fun experiences. They appreciate all of this. I think one of the other just interesting things about Reddit is the way a user may age out of social media. You actually age into Reddit. We start to pick users up. I call them late state teenagers. They finish high school, start going to college. Emerging adults. Literally when you picked me up.

Dylan Lewis: And me.

Steve Huffman: For that matter. I was 21 when we started Reddit. Then we just keep them. You can. Certainly, I have, and many users they’ve gone through life on Reddit. Your sub Reddit subscriptions today I’m willing to bet are very different from what they were 10 years ago. Some of them are your hobbies, some of them are your interests, and some of them I’m guessing are what you’re going through right now. People’s life can play out on Reddit. That’s something I didn’t appreciate, obviously, two decades ago, but now we’ve seen it.

Dylan Lewis: While we’re talking advertisers, I do want to ask. We have seen advertisers be a bit more careful about where placements are going to and the trust in a platform. I think this has been very prominent and very in the news with a platform like X or Twitter. Big brands having some concerns about having their ads next to what they would view as objectionable content. Reddit has perfectly benign communities, but there are some controversial ones. There are some political ones. There’s adult content on Reddit. I’m curious how you find the middle ground on something that’s good for users, good for the company, good for advertisers, when it comes to moderation, content policies, things like that.

Steve Huffman: Sure. First, we should just talk about how moderation works on Reddit. User cement to content. Every content starts at zero points. Human beings have to vote on a piece of content up and not down to make it popular. Stuff that’s out of alignment with the community or if you’re being just like a jerk in the comments is likely to get voted down. In that sense, every user is a moderator on Reddit because every user can vote. But then we have users called moderators. They’re not employees. These are the users who create communities on Reddit. They write the rules that can be as strict as they want for their communities. But I will point out far and away the most common user-written rule on Reddit, a community written rule is some form of be nice. Be nice, be civil, be respectful. They write that for themselves and they enforce it for themselves. That gets you a sense of the tone of conversation on Reddit. Of course, we have our own safety team. Those are our employees. We enforce our policies at scale. We have all fancy tooling for doing so.

By the way, we expose much of that tooling, all the AI stuff to the user moderators as well. They have all filtering and this and that. By and large, Reddit is a really safe and welcoming place because it’s organized by community. We organize advertising by community. In order for a community to have ads on Reddit it has to be approved by Reddit for advertising. A chunk of our content on Reddit there’s just no ads at all. Then we also go further and classify some of our communities as super safe, rated G. We can go to a customer and say, you’ve got these options of where you are in Reddit. You want to be in that squeaky, clean, G-rated area. We’ve got that. You want to be on the broad middle of Reddit, which is where most people are. We’ve got that. If you want to be over here, sorry, we don’t sell ads there.

Look, we’re not in the business of putting customers where they don’t want to be at the end of the day. We want happy customers. Again, we try to make sure everything is intentional, transparent, predictable. Look, when I came back to Reddit, we were not as good at a lot of these things and so every conversation with advertisers started and ended with brand safety. Today, that’s not the case. They may ask, we’ll explain it, but they can see the results and then we spend much more time just trying to find the right home for them on Reddit and try to help them be successful and take the right tone with communities. I think brand safety and safety in general is now a home field advantage for us.

Dylan Lewis: Outside of the ad business. I know it’s a small piece of the pie for you guys right now, but you do have a data licensing business. I think it was about 28 million in the recent quarter. That is, as I understand it, allowing other companies to use platform data for LLM training, for AI applications. What was the decision there and what are you guys seeing there?

Steve Huffman: Reddit is one of the largest corpuses of human conversation on the Internet. For better or for worse, but I think overwhelmingly for better, Reddit has been an open platform. Reddit’s content was used for training these AIs. Now, our terms of service are Reddit open. You can use content for non-commercial use but for commercial use you need a license. I want Reddit to stay open. I also want to be practical. Reddit’s content is useful for these things. Look these AIs, these large language models. They help our business. I think they advance humanity. It’s one of the most important technologies of the last generation. Help us make Reddit safer, help make the whole Internet safer. We like these technologies existing. We’re proud that Reddit’s content can be used to create these technologies or advance them.

I think just as a matter of business practicality, commercial use of Reddit’s public content requires a commercial agreement and so that’s what we’ve been working on. We still do non-commercial agreements, so we’ll give Reddit count on away to researchers or other non-profits like Internet Archive. Now, there’s terms on all of these things. We created a public content policy. We released this earlier this year. Every platform has a privacy policy. That basically says, this is what we do with your private information. We have one of those two. Now, we don’t have a whole lot of private information, but what we do have, we don’t share.

It doesn’t leave Reddit. The public content policies basically says, this is the content that you put on Reddit. In a public community, it’s on the public Internet. You should know that. If you don’t want it on the public Internet or in search indexes or showing up in research potentially or potentially being used for training, don’t put it on Reddit. We want the terms of engagement to be clear there. Then we said, look, if you have any agreement, you have to use this content, you have to have agreement with us. To use it, you can’t do certain things, like reverse engineer the identity of our users, or use it to target ads against users, things like that. I think under those terms, and under those policies, we’ve been able to strike a few deals that I think are important. Google and OpenAI are the other biggest ones on the training side and then we’ve done others like with Sisson and Sprinkler on the social listening, like what are people saying about these brands, that thing. It’s a new business for us. It’s off to a good start but I’d say we’re still in early days in what is quite frankly a developing market.

Dylan Lewis: We were talking a little bit earlier about Google search as a path for users coming onto the platform. Search engine pages look a little bit different now than they did a couple of years ago, and part of that is AI. We see Google experimenting with the AI overviews, sourcing things from the web. There is a risk there in how they’re featuring information and how that may affect downstream traffic for you guys. What are your thoughts on that?

Steve Huffman: Look, we’ll see how it evolves. We have been a beneficiary of Internet search for a long time. As we discussed, it’s a super helpful way for even our core users to navigate Reddit so there’s a lot of value there for our users, and it’s how new potential users discover Reddit and learn that Reddit has content and communities for them. We’ll keep an eye on things. We have partnerships with both Google and OpenAI. Obviously, they’re going to evolve their products but at the end of the day, the point of their products is to help people find information. A lot of that information is on Reddit. We start from the position of, let’s advance the state of the art, let’s see how this ecosystem evolves, let’s help people find what they’re looking for. So far, I think it’s been going great. You can see it in our numbers. We’re growing faster than we have a long time. Google algorithm changes and product changes. Sometimes they help, sometimes they hurt, but we don’t live or die by them by any means.

Dylan Lewis: I’m curious how AI fits into the picture for Reddit itself, and the product, the app, the site experience that users interact with.

Steve Huffman: It’s very exciting. There’s so much hype around large language models but one thing that is undeniable is they are very good at jobs involving texts and words. Reddit has a lot of texts and words. I think some things I’m most excited about we’ve been playing around with this idea of post guidance so if you’re a new user, you’ve grown up on social media, you’ve come to Reddit and you’re submitting your first post, but you’ve never submitted to Reddit before. Maybe you don’t understand that this is a community space and this community has very specific rules. What used to happen is you’d submit this post and then a moderator would be like, oh, this violates a rule. In the science community, no joking allowed, for example.

Then you get banned. That’s not a good user experience. Now we can use things like LLMs to detect, hey, this is a joke, and you can tell the user. They click submit and say, hey, too funny. Funny is not allowed here. We know you mean well, but try again. Much better experience. The user can adapt their post to something that should be a better fit for the community. The community gets a new user, Reddit gets a happy customer or a happy user, so I think that sort of thing is really, really powerful. Obviously, for safety, things like harassment and bullying, or whatever idiosyncratic rule someone have, I was just give you another example, LLMs can help detect. I think that’s really powerful. I was a moderator for a little bit last year. We have a program called Adopt and Admin, where our employees guess moderate sub Reddit, and so I did it with [inaudible] It’s a large community on Reddit.

Dylan Lewis: Have you explained the community?

Steve Huffman: You submit a post as a user. I wore, a cream colored dress to my, sister’s wedding, and everybody got mad at me, am I to pick a real example for my wife, and then the community debates and gives you feedback. Yes [inaudible] no, you’re not. It’s a really interesting community of people basically debating these social situations. But they have a rule. You can’t use the word Karen, and you can’t use the word Man child. Now, I’ve been thinking about rules on the Internet for a long time. I don’t like word rules. You can’t say this word because I think they’re too brittle. Because there’s always this context. Indeed, on that sub red, we’d spend a lot of time adjudicating uses of the word Karen. Were they saying it meanly, or are they correcting somebody else, or is this the story literally about a person named Karen? This is like so much time spent on that rule. Now, they eventually convinced me, it’s an important rule because it sets a tone for the conversation and a tone for that community. I came around to their viewpoint, this is important and it’s had a good effect on this community. But I’m looking forward to when an LLM can do that work so that the human moderators can do something else because some of the rules are really complex. I think LLMs will make reddit safer. Honestly, for that matter, the whole Internet safer. I think that’s very exciting as well.

Dylan Lewis: I don’t want to take too much of your time. I have just a couple more questions for you here. One of them is taking a step back on the business as a whole. We talked through some of the different components of it. Recent quarter, loss has started to narrow for you guys. You have a very high margin business at core, when you look at the gross margins. What does the path to profitability look like for you guys? Is that a near term priority? Or are you happy with what you’re seeing and you want to be able to continue to invest in the business, even if it means running out a little bit of loss?

Steve Huffman: I like the progress we’ve made. Last couple of quarters, we’ve been profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis. We’ve been positive cash flow last couple of quarters, and so the next milestone for us is GAP profitability, and we’re getting closer to that. It’s an important milestone. We’re also a growth company. I think one of the most important levers for us over the last couple of years has been we’ve been very disciplined on headcount growth. Reddit is like the simplest business you’ll ever see. Add revenue comes in. We’re 89% gross margin last quarter. We basically spend money on two things, computers and people. If we’re disciplined about how many people we have, we can control costs that way, and so our management goal has been to grow revenue twice as fast as costs.

Now we’ve been able to do quite a bit better than that the last couple of quarters, and so we’re getting closer and closer to GAP profitability. I wouldn’t say it’s a direct goal for Reddit on any particular timeline. But I do think it’s important to get there. It’s a sign, I think of a healthy, sustainable business, something we’ve been working toward for a long time. But Reddit’s business model is truly advantaged. We basically have no CAP X on top of that. If we can continue to grow users and grow revenue and be disciplined about headcount, I think we’re in a great shape, and I think it puts us in a from a business point of view, a unique position in the market.

Dylan Lewis: Here at the Fool, we’re long term buy and hold investors. We’re typically looking at businesses with a five plus year time horizon. I’m curious with that setup. For a multi-year outlook, what type of thing would you like to be graded on? Or what would you want the rubric to be for Reddit itself and for yourself a CEO?

Steve Huffman: When we set goals internally at Reddit, I like to use both words and numbers. The numbers are important. I’ll tell you what the numbers are. We want to grow users, DAU, we want to grow revenue, dollars. But not all users are the same. There’s social media stuff we could do to grow that we’ve not done. Not all dollars are the same. You get into short term, long term, sustainable or not. The answer is in our mission. Community belonging and empowerment for everyone in the world. We know if you speak English, everybody has a [inaudible] Can we grow users in English by making the product better by making on-boarding more effective? Then can we grow outside of English using machine translation and some of our program work? Then on the revenue side, we like having direct relationship with advertisers, and we try to make our ads, more and more relevant, more and more effective for the advertiser. You should grade us on users, you should grade us on revenue. There’s all sorts of input metrics that we don’t necessarily report, but things that I think about are new user retention, what we call our good visits. Like when a user visits Reddit, we call it a good visit if they find a post, they spend more than 30 seconds, and headcount is another one that we report. Hopefully you see high revenue growth, good user growth, you see us building products in harmony with Reddit and its mission and disciplined headcount growth, those would be the things that I would watch.

Dylan Lewis:To wrap us up here, on Reddit, you are Spez and for folks that haven’t used it and want to check it out, what’s a sub Reddit community that you think they should check out to get a good feel for what Reddit is at its best.

Steve Huffman: When I demo Reddit, and this is what I do for investors a lot, I think. Broadly speaking, our investors can and should be users, and of course, the inverse is something I was very excited about for our users to be investors. That’s one of the reasons we went public. When I’m showing somebody Reddit for the first time or talking about Reddit for the first time, I often just pull it up, so I show them Ask Reddit because on Ask Reddit, you’ll see people asking all these funny or interesting questions. A typical ask credit post might be, like, what’s your funniest memory from elementary school? Then you’ll have thousands of people telling stories. They’ve probably literally never told before, and that’s one post out of thousands every day. I do Ask Reddit. I often pull up science just so you can see a serious side of Reddit, and then I’ll show them data. Data is a sub Reddit for dads.

I have a couple of kids, and what I like about data is you usually see like a funny post like a serious post asking for advice. Maybe next to like a profound post. Somebody grieving something very difficult that’s happened or relationship challenges as a result of having kids, things like that. Like really stuff that you wouldn’t talk about on social media, and then similarly, I might pull up like Photoshop request, which is a subreddit where people pay $5-$10 to alter photographs. But again, you can pull it up almost any time. You’ll see something funny, you’ll see something that’ll make you cry, you’ll see something sentimental, and it really, I think captures this idea that this is how humans are, that they spend their free time with no other incentive than like it feels good, supporting each other, helping each other, sharing a few laughs, just going through life’s journey together. I think that’s really incredible, and I think it’s not a Reddit thing. It’s a people thing that Reddit, I think uniquely reveals.

Dylan Lewis: Steve, I have to thank Photoshop request for the birthday gift I gave my father last year because I had found a picture of his father at a store that he ran when he was younger, and there was a famous person who had come and visited the store, and it was this great picture, but there were, like, all these random people in it, and I wanted to just give a photo of my grandfather and this NFL player, and sure enough, the photoshop request community delivered, and I wound up being a great son for my father’s birthday, and it cost me, I believe, $10.

Steve Huffman: That’s what it’s all about. That’s super cool. What a great example.

Dylan Lewis: Steve Huffman, thank you so much for joining me. Really appreciate the conversation.

Steve Huffman: Thank you. My pleasure.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against so don’t buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. I’m Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back tomorrow.

Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Dylan Lewis has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Ricky Mulvey has positions in Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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