TheOldTone

LA is worth saving. Vote Spencer Pratt.

$RDDT Reddit was ranked on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies 2026, today. -Reddit owns something AI can't replicate: 20 years of authentic human conversation across 100,000+ communities. -It monetized that moat through licensing, built AI tools on top of it, and is now positioning itself as a primary search destination rather than just a back-end data source for everyone else. -Reddit isn't just striking deals with AI behemoths like OpenAI and Google. It's smartly using AI itself to serve users and marketers. Nasdaq -Rather than getting rolled over by AI, Reddit turned the inflection point to its advantage, signing major data-licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, with more to come. Google pays roughly $60 million a year, while licensing to OpenAI could add another $40 to $50 million. -Reddit's innovation has focused on making the platform more searchable and shoppable, integrating LLM-based summaries at the top of search results to directly challenge traditional search engines. -Weekly active users of Reddit's search tools grew 30% year over year, reaching 80 million users, while Reddit Answers usage surged from 1 million to 15 million weekly active users throughout 2025. -For Q1 2026, Reddit projects revenue of $595 to $605 million, representing 52 to 54% growth, with Adjusted EBITDA of $210 to $220 million.

They not like us

⚡ The woman in that photo is being used as a political prop by the NYT and she probably doesn't even know it. The framing wants you to feel outrage at the cruelty of the cuts. But the actual data point buried in the story is devastating to the narrative it's trying to build. 272k for a senior VP at a USAID-funded nonprofit is not a real salary. It's a subsidy. That job existed inside a closed loop: taxpayer money flows to USAID, USAID funds NGOs, NGOs hire professionals at inflated rates, those professionals build lives around compensation that was never stress-tested against the open market. The entire salary was a function of proximity to the spigot. Not output. Not value creation. Not demand for her specific skills. The $19/hour number isn't the system being cruel. It's the system being honest for the first time. The market is saying: without the government funding stream, your skills at 57 command 39k. That's the real price. The 272k was the fiction. And here's what nobody in that thread will say: there are tens of thousands of people in the DC metro area alone sitting in exactly this position right now. Government-adjacent professionals whose entire compensation structure was built on a funding model that is being unwound. Not by AI, not by automation, but by simple political reallocation. And the market is going to reprice every single one of them. The deeper pattern is that an entire class of professional jobs in America were never real market jobs. They were artifacts of institutional spending that created its own employment ecosystem. Government, corporate middle management, DEI departments, compliance layers, consulting firms that exist to service other consulting firms. The whole structure was a series of jobs that existed because the money existed, not because the work needed doing at that price. That structure is now being compressed from multiple directions simultaneously. AI from one side. Spending cuts from another. Corporate efficiency mandates from a third. And the professional class that built its identity, its mortgages, its kids' tuitions, its retirement plans around those salaries is about to discover what the open market actually thinks they're worth. That's the repricing. This woman is just the first photo to go viral.