5. Reddit is owned by neglectful billionaires.

Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in June 2005, acquired by Condé Nast in October 2006, and in 2011 shifted over to being an independent subsidiary of Condé's parent company, Advance Publications.

Under Condé's purview, Reddit was cash-strapped and understaffed -- a sort of redheaded stepchild of the famously luxe magazine empire. Under Advance, it's not as sidelined. But thankfully, given that Advance is owned by octogenarian print-media billionaires Si and Donald Newhouse, neither of whom are exactly web-savvy, it's not like Reddit is a major focus of corporate attention, either.

I'm convinced that if just about any other major media or tech company had bought Reddit, it would have been smothered to death through micromanaging by now.

Hooray for neglectful old-media billionaires!

Reddit spun out of Conde Nast in September 2011:

http://blog.reddit.com/2011/09/independence.html

It is now independent.

Still, with 37 billion pageviews and 400 million readers in 2012, Reddit IS the mainstream.

Which is why it's pathetic that so much of Gawker and BuzzFeed come from Reddit.

A lot PW comes from Reddit too.  I imagine my top two PW sources are NYT and Reddit.

PandaWhale isn't journalism; it's a place to save awesome links, gifs, etc.

So of course Reddit (and Imgur and Tumblr) are saved to PandaWhale a lot.

New York Times is interesting because most stuff I read there I don't feel compelled to save.

PW is not journalism but it is a kind of higher quality stumbleupon for some of us.  yay curation

Yes, yay curation! The PW community does find some true gems out there.

Variety of source materials is one of the things I appreciate about PW. 

Me too. Do you have any favorite sources? My favorites besides Reddit, Imgur, and Tumblr:

http://bakadesuyo.com/

http://brainpicker.org/

http://mlkshk.com/

http://grantland.com/

http://pandodaily.com/

http://io9.com/

I used to like 9gag but now I can't stand it.

I used to like BuzzFeed and Upworthy but now I'm mostly bored by them.

Twitter is super frustrating to me. It's so slow and there's so much noise. I find an occasional gem there but it frankly never seems worth the time.

yes i do enjoy grantland and avclub...my flipboard has more standard reads like VF or RS or MH

RS = Rolling Stone?

VF and MH are what?

What about http://theverge.com/ and http://newyorker.com/ and http://theatlantic.com/ ?

MensHealth and Vanity Fair.  I also have the newyorker and atlantic on flipboard...I seem to only use the ipad as a magazine for flipboard or for googlereader.

Google Reader is going away, right? So Flipboard becomes the center of your iPad consumption. Cool.

VF = Vanity Fair.  Mot sure about MH (Men's Health?)

I like AdAge and Business Insider.

Thank you for curating from those sites since I don't normally visit them.

Longform.org is a great curated set of, what else, longform articles.

Chris, true, I regularly forget about that one but it's great: http://longform.org/

ReadWrite.

Haven't been there for a while: http://readwrite.com/

How about LinkedIn lately?

Also for sports do you prefer Bleacher Report, SB Nation, or something else?

I always go Grantland first.

Grantland is it for sports.

Grantland is sports and pop culture, right?  I tend to go to Bleacher Report first (because they show up in my inbox with flashy subject lines I can't resist). And I've been with them since their inception, so we've imprinted on each other.  Brand loyalty, who can explain it?

Brand loyalty is a very powerful thing. The mind uses brands as shorthand for relationships.