As a user, I fear it is increased monetization in the form of more aggressive tracking and advertising.
Their pushes for email registration and the feed-based ads in the mobile app make that direction pretty well telegraphed.
But I'd draw an interesting parallel here with the fact that, like Snapchat, many Reddit users do it with some expectation of anonymity/privacy. It is difficult to command the kind of CPMs Google and Facebook can without knowing an awful lot about uniquely identified users. Reddit has a comment and engagement data goldmine at their fingertips, but they need to burn through a heck of a lot of user trust to leverage it to its full potential.
Their pushes for email registration and the feed-based ads in the mobile app make that direction pretty well telegraphed.
But I'd draw an interesting parallel here with the fact that, like Snapchat, many Reddit users do it with some expectation of anonymity/privacy. It is difficult to command the kind of CPMs Google and Facebook can without knowing an awful lot about uniquely identified users. Reddit has a comment and engagement data goldmine at their fingertips, but they need to burn through a heck of a lot of user trust to leverage it to its full potential.