The Guide to Unbundling Reddit

At the community level, then, Reddit presents an array of structural barriers to unbundling. Trying to compete with Reddit community-for-community will likely lead you down the wrong path.

In effect, an unbundling project has to overcome two different network effects on Reddit - the subreddit community itself, and the community’s connection to Reddit as a whole.

While the unbundling of Craigslist created billions of dollars of value, it pales in comparison to the unbundling we’re currently living through. Outside of commerce, unbundling is now affecting a much broader domain of everyone’s lives: work is being unbundled from traditional employment.

As the amount of content grows, so does the market for credible curators.

A great case study is Nathan Baschez and Dan Shipper’sEverything Bundle. In April, they decided to offer a bundled version of their newsletters, expecting a few extra subscribers from the experiment. Instead, they grew together from 600 to 1,000 paying subscribers within the ... See more

We’re already seeing this unbundling of consumer platforms starting within communities that have a deep affinity and sense of identity, and are not well served by general purpose social networks – for example, gaming communities assembling in virtual worlds such as Minecraft and Roblox and using Discord to communicate, communities that coalesce aro... See more

To me, online content consumption seems to exist on a pendulum of sorts: we love content to the extreme — Unbundle!! Give us more! — until we are overwhelmed with choice and analysis — It’s too much!! Bundle it back up again! — and swing to the opposite side. In the end, we always end up somewhere in the middle... but it’s a lot of swinging back an... See more