The power of Reddit
Plus: Substack continues to expand its reach
Good morning,
I hope you all had a good weekend. It is high spring here in Austin and my fiancee tried our hand at landscaping (e.g. planting flowers) our front yard. Here’s hoping we don’t kill everything we planted.
We also saw One of Them Days (2025). I’d wanted to see this movie when it first came out but things didn’t line up and I was worried I’d missed a chance to support a studio comedy in an actual movie theater. Luckily they brought it back to one of our local Alamo Drafthouses and good thing too because this movie ripped.
Look, One of Them Days isn’t revolutionary. It’s a standard “one crazy day/night” movie. It’s honestly a modern day version of Friday (1995). But you know what was sick and hilarious? The movie Friday. And so is One of Them Days.
Keke Palmer’s performance was a revelation. I mean, I loved her in Nope (2022) but her performance in One of Them Days is another level. Maybe it was the neon green outfit she was wearing but I felt like she was channeling Shawn Michaels in 1993-1994: an up-and-coming mega star who is capable of carrying anyone or anything to a great performance. She is always doing something interesting and it is almost always funny. I hope she takes over the world. And by that I mean movies.
OK, enough of that. Let’s get to today’s newsletter.
On most weekends, I usually catch up on longer form stories in print: whether that’s reading my stacked New Yorker issues with dogeared articles or plowing through the weekend editions of the New York Times that my future in-laws ask me to take off their hands.
(Sidenote: I was a weekend edition paid subscriber but when I moved to Austin, for whatever reason, the delivery company they use here somehow could never find my freaking street even though it’s pretty central in the city!)
And this past week I was taken by this story from the middle of March. The title online is “‘Will I Lose My Job?’ Federal Workers Flock to Reddit for Answers.”
I liked this story because, while it is about the mass layoffs happening to government workers, its also a story about how important Reddit has become in a world where there is no true home for breaking news in the way that Twitter once was.
Full disclosure: I own Reddit stock so take what I say with a grain of salt but I do firmly believe more and more that Reddit will continue to be one of the most important surfaces on the internet over the next ten years.
Why?
Because even if AI chat surfaces or agents improve, there will always be a desire to know what people are saying. And, sure, ChatGPT may get better at pulling in and summarizing what people are saying on Reddit about a topic (say, what the best swimming spots are in the lake region on the Swiss-Italian border) but it won’t be the same as actually reviewing those comments for yourself.
Because sometimes looking at what people are saying in a community space is more informative than having it summarized for you. And, to be honest, it is very often more entertaining.
This story in particular highlights the fact that Reddit has been able to fill the void, for a lot of people, that exists when people need to know what is going on. The government layoffs are high stakes. But so is a near collision on a Delta flight over Reagan Airport this past weekend.
Know where I found out about that? On Reddit. Their search and explore function has gotten much better over the past year. I constantly find myself pulled into news topics that I don’t open the app for (sports, reading the Bill Simmons subreddit, reading what people are saying about a new movie or the latest episode of a TV show, looking for random Beatles and Paul McCartney detritus, etc.) more than I did a year ago.
Reddit offers a powerful service. And it continues to build it out and make small improvements around the edges that keep it from becoming too complicated or bring it too far from its primary appeal.
And that might just keep it in a position of power even has other platforms (see below) continue to increase their ambitions.
Two it’s Substack’s universe quotes
“In January, the start-up best known for email newsletters gave all users the ability to publish live video. Now it is home to a handful of cable stars marooned from their mainstream media jobs amid reshuffled lineups, salary cuts and other controversies. On Substack, where politics is the most popular and lucrative category, anti-Trump publishers have been performing particularly well.”
“Substack continues to double down on video amid TikTok’s uncertain future in the U.S. The company announced on Monday that it’s rolling out a scrollable video feed in its app, making it the latest platform to introduce a TikTok-like feed. Given the timing of the launch, Substack is likely aiming to capitalize on the potential void left by TikTok if it faces a ban in the United States.”
The first quote is from this New York Times story on cable news personalities like Jim Acosta, Joy Reid, and Don Lemon coming to Substack and embracing “authenticity” in the way they speak to audiences now.
The second quote is from a TechCrunch story covering Substack’s further push into being a platform for multimedia creators to build subscription services. Substack’s growth and expansion is honestly kind of astounding. The number of product features they have shipped and added over the last 18-24 months may be something we look back on as a real turning point in the next era of media.
A few links to start off April
Speaking of Substack, over at the…uh…Substack The Loop they ran a good little interview with a golf reporter who left CBS Sports to start his own outlet on Substack. There will be more and more of these kinds of small stories.
Mike Isaac of the New York Times reported that Facebook will be repurposing its Friends tab to show you a “feed of posts, such as photos, video stories, text, birthday notifications and friend requests.” According to Facebook, this is being done to create “a central place of what’s going on with your friends, that was like the magic of the early days of social media.” No comment.
I thought this Yahoo piece on the Trump White House having a Barstool Sports problem was fascinating. There’s more and more stories about how 18-34 year old men are easily swayed by the podcasters or creators they follow and politicians want to stay in the good graces of the personalities whispering in their ears.
This is why I’m still not sold on AI being used in an audience-facing way yet.
The New York Times appears to be investing in more video formats for their podcasts. And it's starting in their Opinion section with the Ezra Klein Show.
You thought you liked SEO? Well, welcome to the era of GEO.