Ask HN: Should Google Buy Reddit?

Prompted by people on twitter saying Google has become useless since the shutdown as you can’t search stuff like “Aeron chair review reddit”

Reddit wants to go public at around $15 billion. Fidelity has marked it down to around $11 billion. Assume fair value somewhere in that range.

More expensive than your average google acquisition but they get:

1. A guarantee that Reddit won’t run Reddit into the ground and/or do away with the text based communities that power google

2. The ability to run google’s ad network on reddit, including reddit video. Google could surely get more profit from the content than reddit does

Is this insane? There’s probably also some leverage for Bard as we enter the AI era

Reddit was even run in a hands off way during the Conde Nast era. Google could emulate that

I don’t think Google has any incentive to buy Reddit. Financially, Reddit is nearing IPO, which means it’s being sold at a short term peak valuation during a time where they need to raise capital.

From an operational standpoint, Reddit sparked the outrage over measures they’re taking to (theoretically) start turning g a profit. Google profits will be very unlikely to have noticeable decline from a temporary protest over Reddit increasing API fees. So I don’t think there’s much business sense in Google investing in Reddit compared to other avenues that would more directly affect their bottom line.

I had the exact same thought when I saw that headline. It would also be a way for Google to finally break into social media, and maybe it would be useful as a source of AI training data.

Reddit is not valuable for its tech, but for its content. They would buy reddit content, and likely they wouldn't need to rush making it profitable per se, as the data sets Reddit can provide would be more valuable in today AI race.

Reddit dying and us all going back to forums? I'm fine with this.