Reddit is giving away 10% of the company to its users

Back when Reddit — bastion of the internet’s weirdest conversations — raised another $50 million in venture funding, the investors involved agreed to give a combined 10 percent of their shares back to the site’s users. For almost three months, none of us knew exactly how that would happen, but now Reddit’s talking specifics… sort of. Next year, the company will distribute via lottery some 950,000 Reddit Notes, a kinda-sorta digital currency that’ll let users “tip, donate, or trade” with peers who also bacon at midnight. The key words in that previous sentence are “kinda-sorta.” In interview with Inc., Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian looks at Reddit Notes as something akin to, but not quite, a currency. Instead, he considers them more of a digital asset — they’ve got some sort of intrinsic value “like sugar or gold or bacon” and can be used to fuel transactions between people, but they don’t have any actual financial value.