Will Cady is the Global Director of KarmaLab, Reddit's in-house creative agency. In the interview linked below, Cady shared a potent notion that a person’s port of entry to the internet is a person’s first experience of accessing information online. So far, we have experienced two waves.

The first wave was search. Introduced through search engines like Alta Vista, Yahoo, Web Crawler, etc. People came onto the internet basically to find answers. When Google improved on this function, the whole internet reorganized itself around this principle.

The second wave was social. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, X (Twitter), etc. made the internet a place to hang out. In this wave, a person’s port of entry was the desire for human connection, reflecting their offline interactions online.

The third wave will be community, says Cady. People will go online to find groups that support their interests, niche hobbies, thought processes, lifestyles, etc. Platforms like Reddit and Topia are leading this wave by empowering community-builders and confluencers.

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