This is a guest post by author Bob Calhoun. Last week, Yishan Wong resigned as Reddit CEO because he wanted to move the company's office from the hip SOMA district in San Francisco to Daly City, a fog-enshrouded stretch of suburbia on the city's southern border.
When Reddit CEO Yishan Wong announced that the crowd-sourced news site had raised $50 million, he called his financiers "patient, long-term investors who support our views on difficult issues." But less than two months later that patience seems to have run out and over a suspiciously simple dispute.
When Reddit quietly announced their new Redditmade project last night, we worried it'd be a quasi-Kickstarter knockoff where titillated teenagers crowdfund the release of hacked nudes. But Redditmade is much, much more pitiful: it simply allows Reddit's moderators to hawk depressing merch to the site's volatile masses.
If female celebrities break into a cold sweat over Reddit users, just image how investors feel after throwing down $50 million in the hopes of profiting off the crowd-sourced site. But lead investor Sam Altman and CEO Yishan Wong appear to have come up with a plan to appease "the often volatile Reddit community."
This weekend, the CEO of Reddit tried to defend r/TheFappening, a section of his website trafficking in illegally obtained nude photos of young female celebrities. His argument? "Every man is responsible for his own soul." Not long after, Reddit backtracked and shut the page down anyways. Perhaps it was out of concern for Reddit's upcoming A-list Silicon Valley investors?
Business Insider reports that Yahoo began "serious talks to buy" Imgur, the meme-laden photo-sharing site that grew of its symbiosis with Reddit, this fall. We heard a similar rumor from a source in late October that we weren't able to substantiate. At the time, the source said the deal "might be up to $200 million."
