The Reddit Revolt, Turpentine, & Shaan's Latest Business Venture

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
So that was the other thing that sparked drama. Now you got leaked phone calls, you got the CEO calling a guy crazy, he said, she said. And so that raised the profile of what was otherwise kind of a small thing.
As the thing on Reddit, small things can turn into big things. That's like part of the beauty of Reddit, and that's what was happening here.

**Sam Parr** (0:20)
Dude, first of all, your energy is getting me psyched. This is a great story.

**Shaan Puri** (0:26)
We'll just wait, because I have a little more for you here, all right? This is the part. That's the background.

**Sam Parr** (0:31)
Okay.

**Shaan Puri** (0:32)
Now let me give you some foreground, right? Let me give you a little future play here.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:36)
Some foreplay?

**Shaan Puri** (0:37)
Let me give you a little foreplay. All right, what's up?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:49)
We're here.

**Shaan Puri** (0:50)
Dude, have you seen this Reddit revolt that's happening? Are you aware of this?

**Sam Parr** (0:55)
I am aware of it, and is it gonna matter, really? So basically what happened is there's this app called Apollo, right, Apollo?

**Shaan Puri** (1:03)
Yep, here's kind of the, I would say the zoomed out version of the story. So what's happening today is, if you go to Reddit right now, the whole site is down. So they broke all of Reddit. What they were trying to do was just a bunch of subreddits. So these communities on Reddit were trying to protest some new Reddit policies. So it started with a few of them that said, you know what, we disagree with this policy change that's going on.
We're gonna do this 48 hour blackout. We're gonna go private. We're gonna go dark. And they called it Reddit go, this subreddit is going dark.
And more and more started joining to the point where 7,000 subreddits, including some of the biggest ones on there, like r slash funny and r slash pics and stuff like that.

**Sam Parr** (1:47)
And I believe that's 30% of Reddit. That's what I read.

**Shaan Puri** (1:51)
Yeah, it's basically, it's a huge amount. There's a couple of cool websites that you can go to. In fact, we should go to one of them right now. So go to this site. So it's reddark.untone.uk. Very strange site, but you can see in real time, this thing's almost like this tool's even almost broken because so many are going dark at the same time.
And Ben, if you could share your screen. So it says 7,240 out of 7,806. That's like 90% or something, right? 740 out of 7,806. 93% of subreddits have gone dark, which is just an insane number. And if you do it, if you click the large thing, there's like a live feed. It'll be like, animals with jobs has just gone private. 5,000 members. Music hoarder has gone private, 5,000 members.
Krusty Windows has gone private. And you just see like in real time. And I've been watching this since yesterday. It's crazy. When I opened this up yesterday, it was at 2,000. And now it's basically all of them. It's 7,200 out of 7,800. So almost every subreddit has decided to join this protest.
And so you say, well, what's the policy? What's so bad? And what happened is Reddit wants to IPO. So Reddit wants to go public in the future. Reddit is not currently profitable. They make about, I don't know, somewhere between $400, $500 million a year, roughly.
And they're still not profitable.
And these apps that other people have made called third-party apps were just used to, like you could browse Reddit and they built like special features into them that made them maybe easier to use for certain types of people, power users or moderators, things like that. So that's why people loved Apollo is because they had some power user features that were great for moderators.
And Reddit made the mistake of not, they were thought they were picking on Apollo, but in fact, they were pissing off moderators. And that was a really, really big issue. I'll tell you why in a second. So Reddit goes and says, hey, look, we can't keep giving these third-party apps full access to Reddit. This has a couple problems. First, they're hitting our servers with a bunch of requests. That costs us, he said, what the CEO said was, tens of millions per year in server requests. The second thing is those server requests are now serving Reddit content onto someone else's app. So that person could monetize their app and Reddit doesn't get a piece of that. So they were like, all right, we wanna cut costs. We wanna increase revenue. And they had a third problem, which was they didn't want their data going to all these different places because basically OpenAI and ChatGPT had the scraped Reddit. Reddit was like one of the key sources to make ChatGPT so good.