This smells like the dot com again.

Seems extremely true. Just look at all the recent purchases and IPOs. Mojang for 2.5 Bio. $, a company with mainly one game, where the hype is already over, 1 B for WhatsApp, a standard messager, yes a large userbase, but $1,000,000,000? Rocket Internet and Alibaba also had recently extremely successful IPOs.

It's understandable, that a user is a lot more worth than before (developing a better WhatsApp clone is easy, getting a large userbase is hard, see Hubski (way better than Reddit, but still a small community)) and that the potential to use this data for better (and more expensive) ads, is understandable, but throwing money out like this (here Reddit) feels stupid and shortsighted.

Just an Example: So far the space of altcoins prooved to be an extreme, and way more fast paced version, of the free market. A small group of coin mills are pumping/pumped hundreds of shitcoins/clonecoins out per month to make fast money. Earlyer this year, that were mostly coins with one small feature and a fair launch. The devs tried, when they actually were in for profit, to gain money, by being an early adopter or having a small premine, then the "flashcoins" came, where they selled a unfair launch as good, so they could acquire a bigger stack. Then the IPOs/ICOs came and some eople even selled their cars to invets in coins offering nothing, but what other coins did for free. These coins gained some substantial amounts of BTC, but now, a few months later, the altcoin sector is delining rapidly.

See this example: A lot of money got invested in pretty average products, but then money wasmissing to actually finance real projects or more generally, the whole sector. Before only the big players could gain substantial amounts and even these were waaay less than today's, while latter are worse (Alibaba mrktcap = Ebay + Amazon)