China’s Tencent puts $150M Investment into Reddit [upvote]

Reddit is a community where people share content on the web with news, articles, media and many other things. Members can upvote and downvote the posts that they like and as of 2018 has more than 500 million monthly visitors. Reddit confirmed the investment deal, saying it raised $300 million in a funding round led by Tencent and joined by several existing investors. The deal gave Reddit a $3 billion market value post money.

User Backlash Tops Reddit Upvotes

Redditors voiced fears about censorship — and shared many pictures of Winnie the Pooh (censored in China for being to used to mock president Xi Jinping) and Tiananmen Square. The posts quickly made it to the top of r/pics, one of the most popular subreddits on Reddit, with the highest Reddit upvotes. Reddit users posted threads and memes ridiculing the investment, arguing that Reddit would be challenging freedom of expression outside China. This one particular post recorded over 200,000 Reddit upvotes, easily one the highest Reddit upvotes ever recorded. This is especially impressive considering there were no evidence of upvote tempering (i.e. buy instant Reddit upvotes) on the post, suggesting that the hundreds of thousands of Reddit upvotes were in fact genuine.

Pro Investment Received Much Lower Reddit Upvotes

Not all Redditors are against the investment though. Some argue that Reddit has definitely gone from being the best website for comprehensive information sharing and lengthy debate over the past 5 years to being one of the most censored websites on the Internet, with many subs secretly (no notification or reason given when any content is removed) removing more than 40 percent of the content. Others argued that $150 million investment is not a controlling share in the company, which was valued at $3 billion post investment.