When I saw Reddit's Q3 earnings report flash across my screen, it wasn't the 68% year-over-year revenue growth that made me sit up straight. It wasn't even the stock's spectacular 17% jump in after-hours trading. No, what truly captured my imagination was a quieter number tucked inside: a 19% surge in daily active users, bringing the total to 116 million people.
To most of Wall Street, that number simply translates to more eyeballs for ads. More clicks, more engagement, more revenue. They see the branches of the tree and are rightly impressed by the fruit. But I believe they're missing the colossal, world-changing significance of the roots. What we're witnessing with Reddit isn't just the maturation of another social media platform. We are watching the stock market begin to price in the value of something far more profound: a living, breathing, indexed archive of human consciousness.
This is the kind of breakthrough that reminds me why I got into this field in the first place. For years, we've talked about data as the "new oil." It's a clumsy metaphor. Oil is finite, inert, and you burn it once. The data Reddit is built on is something else entirely. It's generative. It's a chaotic, beautiful, and unending conversation about everything and nothing—from the most profound scientific debates in r/askscience to the heartfelt anxieties of r/relationships. It is, in essence, a real-time record of us.
The Digital Library of Alexandria
Think about the sheer scale of this. For almost two decades, hundreds of millions of people have been anonymously cataloging their thoughts, their passions, their problems, and their solutions. It’s like the Library of Alexandria, but instead of static scrolls, it’s a dynamic, ever-expanding organism of human thought. What Reddit has built, almost by accident, is the single largest, most candid dataset on human interest and behavior ever assembled.
And now, we're entering an age where that data has a clear, almost terrifyingly high value. The future isn't just about selling ads next to funny cat videos. The real gold is in using that conversational data to train the next generation of artificial intelligence. This is the paradigm shift that I think is being wildly underestimated. An AI trained on the entirety of Reddit wouldn't just be smart; it would be culturally fluent, sarcastic, empathetic, and deeply, weirdly human. It would understand nuance, inside jokes, and the emotional context that sterile datasets lack. We're talking about a quantum leap in machine intelligence—in simpler terms, we're giving AI a soul, cobbled together from millions of our own.
So when you see that 116 million daily active user number, don't just see ad revenue. See 116 million librarians, unknowingly contributing to the most important archive in human history. The question is no longer if this archive will be monetized, but how we'll steer its incredible power. What kind of intelligence will we build from our own collective digital ghost? And what responsibility do we have to ensure it reflects the best of us, not just the loudest?
A Tale of Two Signals
But here’s where the story gets fascinatingly complex. While Wall Street analysts at Needham and Citigroup are falling over themselves to issue "Buy" ratings and slap on price targets as high as $300, buoyed by reports that Reddit Stock Surges 17% After Q3 Earnings Beat Expectations, the people inside Reddit's walls are sending a very different signal.
The data is stark. In the last six months, company insiders have conducted 321 transactions of Reddit stock. Of those, 321 were sales. Zero were purchases. CEO Steve Huffman, COO Jennifer Wong, CTO Christopher Slowe—the very architects of this digital civilization—have been cashing out tens of millions of dollars in shares. You have this incredible forward-looking potential and a chorus of market optimism on one side, and on the other, you have the people who know the company's guts best quietly, methodically, consistently heading for the exit—it's a fascinating and dizzying contradiction that speaks volumes about the disconnect between long-term vision and short-term reality.
So what are we, as observers and participants in this future, to make of this? Is this just the predictable post-IPO payday for founders and executives who have had their wealth locked up on paper for years? A simple, pragmatic diversification of assets? Or does the crew that built the ship see a storm on the horizon that the euphoric passengers can't?
Frankly, we don't know the full story behind their motivations. But the divergence is impossible to ignore. It’s like watching the lead scientist of a Mars colonization project sell their ticket back to Earth right after a successful rocket launch. It forces us to ask a critical question: is the current stock surge a reflection of Reddit’s true, world-changing potential, or is it a momentary fever dream fueled by a single great quarter? I tend to believe in the former, but the actions of the insiders are a sobering reminder that the path to the future is never a straight line.
The Conversation Is the New Capital
Ultimately, the insider selling might just be a footnote in a much larger story. The quarterly earnings reports, the stock fluctuations—they are all just tremors on the surface. The real tectonic shift is happening underneath. We are finally building the tools to understand ourselves at scale, and Reddit, for better or worse, is the bedrock of that new understanding. The true asset isn't the platform; it's the conversation. That raw, unfiltered, human dialogue is the most valuable commodity of the 21st century, and we've only just begun to understand its worth.