In the wake of the Proposition 19 fracas earlier today, which pitted the Reddit community and admins up against the site’s Condé Nast overlords over pro-marijuana reform advertisements, Ben Huh, the CEO of the omnipresent Cheezburger Network that includes sites like I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, and The Daily What, has offered to buy Reddit, saying that the site would “benefit from more resources and less corporate interference.”
The Daily What has the scoop:
Condé Nast, I’m publicly offering to buy Reddit.
Hi TDWers, I’m Ben Huh, and I run the Cheezburger Network (which includes The Daily What, if you were too Prop 19’d to notice). I have made this offer privately to a few people associated with Reddit, and I’ll say it publicly now:
I believe that Reddit is one of the best communities I have seen on the Internet. I also believe that Reddit would benefit from more resources and less corporate interference. We can offer all of the above. And we’d love to buy Reddit and all those pesky troublesome users that we love so much.
Condé, we’ll be waiting for a call.
Cheers,
Ben Huh.
How likely is this? At a glance, I’d say, “not very,” especially given Reddit’s focus on discussion rather than standalone images, which are Cheezburger Network’s forte, and also Reddit’s distaste for copy-pasted, unattributed content — at least if it’s got ads running next to it (thus, granting the so-called “Imgur exception”) — and Cheezburger Network sites’ at times gleeful embrace of it. Still, one cannot deny that Cheezburger Network is a company of and for the Internet, and it’s arguably more closely aligned with Reddit than is a magazine publisher that has by and large squandered the potential of its remarkable online community.
(via TDW. title pic via CNET.)
