Now the social media platform is aiming for an IPO in the first quarter of 2024 with a valuation of $15 billion, and has been in talks with potential investors like Goldman Sachs and and Morgan Stanley, per Bloomberg.
As of 7 months ago, spez claimed that the company still wasn’t profitable. If, after 18 years, a social media link aggregator still isn’t profitable, then what are they going to do with the IPO capital other than burn through it as well?
And what could they use the money to do? How much innovation has there been on Reddit since it was written? Fancier Reddit gold? A shitty redesign? Video hosting that doesn’t work? Image hosting so bad someone had to make totally separate website for it?
None. No innovation. Every update to the site has made it worse and less reliable. I could single-handedly code a better Reddit in a few months than that entire team has done in ten years. But they’re not focusing their efforts on UI/UX improvements. They focus all their efforts on tracking, data harvesting, and circumventing the user safety protocols built into web browsers. We view the project as a cool public forum. They view it as a means to riches, and they don’t give a shit if it’s a pleasant experience for the users.
This is true for almost every social media. They get popular for one thing and one things only and it’s mostly just content formatting. The rest is ads that make very little and they can’t diversify.
Well they control the mobile apps now, which is most of the userbase. The redesign is still terrible but nobody has much of a choice about image hosting since it’s built-in.
The only thing I can really think they “improved” is that the new gold system allows to be paid for your content:
If you’re eligible for the Contributor Program and your content meets the requirements for monetization, you can receive cash from Reddit for the gold and karma you earn on qualifying contributions.
But that’s definitely not going to help them be profitable lol
if your content meets requirements for monetization
“Requirements” being key there. The vast majority of even power users won’t end up getting paid with the system as it stands. If anything, it’s just there for people to give them credit for making it “possible”.
Which requirements are difficult to meet? The highest hurdles I see is receiving 10 gold in a 12-month period and making sure your content isn’t porn/gore/drugs. I think reddit blows, but this doesn’t seem like difficult-to-obtain goals for somebody trying to make some extra scratch.
Yeah, I went through a few pages and they don’t seem unattainable. The hardest would probably be living in a country that isn’t included
Yeah, and while the country thing sucks, it’s at least a quick “yes/no” answer before you even start trying. This isn’t a deceptive lure like roblox, where they entice millions of kids to try to monetize their content, but make it exceptionally hard to actually make a profit or to even cash out (and even if you meet their ridiculous requirements, there is a huge imbalance of exchange rates when converting to and from a real currency to robux).
“What’s your business model?”
“We pay people to post on our site.”
Look at a the way everything in tech is moving.
We are in the age of of surveillance capitalism. It will make itself profitable with our data. Maybe identifying people, creating profiles about beliefs and personality, etc.
What else could they possibly do? It’s proven profitable and that’s what they want.
Well recently more people have been using the official reddit app. No relation to anything going on, by the way, just the app getting better, obviously.
Rexxit had over $500,000,000 in revenue in 2022. It wasn’t profitable because spez spent money paying for all the infrastructure and bandwidth for multiple AI companies to harvest all of rexxit’s data, and because he’s constantly distracted by trying to incorporate the latest tech-bro trends into rexxit - rexxit crypto, rexxit NFTs, now he’s trying to figure out rexxit AI. He’s a breathtakingly incompetent CEO.
It’s amazing to me that these internet billionaires have really cool, popular, useful websites that are unique, and used for their uniqueness. Then they spend all their time and money trying to make the site into a clone of some other popular site because they view them as competitors. What they actually end up doing is destroying what made their website special to begin with, and then we the users end up with a few sites that are desperately trying to clone each other, that don’t actually work well for anything anymore.
CW that next time, sheesh.
I think there are a lot of extreme measures that would theoretically increase its profitability that they have not yet taken, most of which I have to assume are in the cards in the foreseeable future.
Most of them are, of course, measures that would severely impact user experience in a very negative way, but it’s clear at this point that they are drunk on hubris and believe users will stay no matter what.
They only have to be profitable long enough to sell their bags.
That’s true, I have to imagine a significant amount of the people driving the push for the IPO are only doing so to drive value up, cash out and vanish
Users will stay no matter what. When was the last time you saw meaningful exodus off a major platform? The Reddit to Lemmy, or Twitter to Mastodon migrations were the largest in decades and they had almost zero impact on the number of visitors to the origin sites. The days of Digg to Reddit are gone. Average users don’t have the patience or attention span to build communities anymore, especially not when whatever they build will eventually be heavily monetized, changed beyond recognition, and generally enshitified.
Also less tech savvy, people in the internet in the 2000s I think still had more of a hacker mentality compared to 2010 where everything moved towards apps with simplified UIs and can’t look under the hood.
It’s mind boggling to me that Gen Z doesn’t know anything about computers or the Internet, despite growing up using both their entire lives. All they know how to do is use simplified apps to browse social media, send text messages, and take pictures. Apparently Gen X is the only generation that had a large portion of the generation that understands the inter-workings of the internet and computers. We’ve had to constantly help both our parents and our kids with computer problems.
There will be a nice and seemingly articulate PowerPoint presentation that explains the monetization strategy.
The user data on hand, the rise of reddit data in search engines, all factor prominently.
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I don’t want to sound stupid but every time I hear this I don’t understand what they mean. If I don’t make enough money then I lose my possessions and house and certainly wouldn’t be able to afford servers. If it’s not profitable then why keep doing it? Does he just mean he doesn’t get massive bonuses? Clearly this word means something different to me.
Let the enshittification
begincontinue. Now that stockholders will be expecting increasing profits, I don’t see how Reddit can remain free to use.I feel like Greedy Pigboy and Reddit Inc. as a whole deserve to be punished, for all that “my precious data! No, it is not the users’, IT IS MINE! MY PRECIOUS!” fiasco. Enshittification will happen either way.
Exactly. Reddit has been building this huge knowledge base for well over a decade. Built by the users themselves. He knows what he’s got.
I think I’ll go ahead and log back in and delete all my old posts and comments. Fuck him.
I deleted all my comments barring one which was a reply to Spez himself calling him a spineless coward after lying about the Apollo dev.
I editted all my comments, replacing whatever the text was for a message telling that greedy little pigboy to go fuck himself, and to train his AI on that. Every single one that I could find, because Reddit history sucks as much as its search.
I did that back when the API thing was happening.
I did it
People did that, and they restored the posts…
The only way reddit is worth $15 billion is if they have plans to sell user data to AI companies.
Nah, they don’t need to do that when they can already influence user decisions by faking a consensus.
They “fuzz” votes. They give themselves “gold” and promote articles. Then they have the first few comments all say the same opinion in a few different ways, and suddenly people start agreeing for fear of being “in the out-group”. It takes so much effort to flip the tone of the components section once it’s got a vibe.
If not, delete and restart until it works.
As a public company, not disclosing that they manufacuter conversation and opinion with fake data and instead saying it’s all natural would be fraud and they would face fines or go to jail if discovered.
Edit: reddit could turn a blind eye to others doing it, but they cant do it themselves and say otherwise.
When was the last time you saw anyone in charge of a 15 billion dollar company go to jail for fraud?
Theranos had a 10b valuation at one point?
Oh, and FTX
As a public company, not disclosing that they manufacuter conversation and opinion with fake data
You gave it backwards. As a public company, if they can make money doing that but choose not to, they can be sued by the shareholders.
I don’t think there’s any problems with doing it, as long as they aren’t claiming otherwise.
If they lie about it it becomes fraud.
Edit: And what are they going to do once asked on a public earnings call? Lie?
Edit: Falsely posting stuff might also open up a can of worms around the site no longer being protected by being user generated content?
Yea imagine for a small country like slovakia 🇸🇰 or some crap a few thousand dollars can go a long long way for a local election or whatever through reddit xitter facebook
It’s scary how easy it is to just completely control the conversation with a few astroturf comments near yours. Suddenly people reading the astroturf start coming at you with the same talking points because every single individual on reddit is a free thinker.
I bet it’ll be like the old days where they use bots to post fake comments to appear more populated.
My conspiracy theory is that this is half the reason they disabled the API. They want it to happen, but don’t want to be on the hook for overtly deceiving investors, so as a workaround with plausible deniability they hobble the ability of users to do anything about third party spam.
I don’t think that’s ever actually stopped.
Plans? I’d almost be surprised if they weren’t already.
I don’t know how far along they are but I know it’s why they restricted API access for mobile web apps.
Too late, the AI companies already got that data for free
Yes, that is literally the plan.
Reddit executives reasoned that the changes were needed to prevent companies, especially artificial intelligence startups creating large language models, from using Reddit’s data for free. With rumors of an imminent IPO swirling, the company is under pressure to make money – and CEO Huffman has acknowledged as much, stating at the time of the change: “Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/30/reddit-moderator-protest-communities-social-media?
If reddit user data is worth 15 billion i’ll eat my goddamn shoes.
I think they basically blocked their API for third-party apps and push everyone to use their app for this reason.
These valuations on companies that use cloud hosting for delivering video like reddit does is fucking imaginary. Reddit does not have enough of it’s own infrastructure to justify a $15 billion valuation. It’s ephemeral in the end.
The value is in IP and eyeballs, not physical assets.
I get it, but like I said, that’s ephemeral. Compare that to say Meta or alphabet with YouTube. They have distinct advantages in serving their content that prevents them from completely losing out. Then you’ve got Reddit, who pays hosts that could decide themselves to spin up a competing service pretty quickly and already isn’t profitable due to those harsh hosting costs and isn’t particularly stand out in its advertising business compared to those two.
Well YouTube is worth far more than even this valuation, so that tracks. There have been many competing services (like the one we’re on, and Voat) but none of them have put a dent in Reddit’s ability to serve ads to a huge number of eyeballs. I wouldn’t invest in it but to suggest it’s valueless because they don’t own their servers is a stretch.
Also, its now a dogs breakfast too. Whenever I drop by there, a lot of the subreddits have become ultra right wing and weird or bot infested, where even the aussie subs are pro-gun zones now (despite very few people in AU actually giving a toss about guns).
It went from being somewhat toxic to toxic all over. And the only people who will want to buy it, will be asking for more ads, more posts which are actually adverts, and more BS.
There are so many alternatives to Reddit now too (like lemmy) which are likely to slowly eat into it’s market share
The dollars are ephemeral too 😁
That is not important. They sell attention from millions of users to advertisers, just like Facebook, google, YouTube, TikTok, …
Every single group you listed selfhosts and uses local data centers to reduce transit fees. It’s very important because it’s how you handle the costs on your business model. Ad revenue generally forces you to operate on tight operating margins. Compare that to another cloud hosting utilizing video provider that nearly sunk despite being quite popular: Vimeo. If you think this stuff is not important, see Twitch’s exit from Korea over transit fees.
Sincerely hope it crashes and burns, even though I find it unlikely.
Fuck spez for ruining my favorite social media ever.Amen. 9 years on reddit. I spent countless hours per week browsing and posting. I don’t have Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or any of that shit… Literally was just reddit. And he destroyed it.
If I being honest… I know that all those hours I was wasting was literally just that… Wasted time. But… I enjoyed it, so I don’t care. I miss the good ol reddit days.
Fuck Spez should be a t-shirt.
Edit: I should clarify that I DO appreciate what has gone into the fediverse and it provided me a place to go for a similar experience. To any of the devs and people growing it… Props to you all! The dev who made sync work for lemmy… My dude… Thumbs up! Sync was hands down my all time favorite reddit app, and now I have it here!
Reddit could have retained the public goodwill just by communicating things in a transparent manner… well 🤷
OK so wait until the inevitable hours after opening peak and buy puts?
Sorry, what is a “put”?
It’s a bet that a stock will go down. If you’ve heard people say a hedge fund is “shorting” a stock it means they’re making a bet, a short put, that the stock they are shorting will go down in value in the near term.
For pedantry, because everyone loves it, there’s actually a difference between a short sale and a put.
A short sale is when you “borrow” the stock, and sell it at the current price, and then later you buy them back. Instead of “buy low sell high”, you “sell high buy low”.
A put is when you buy the right to sell something at a given price at a given date.Both are ways of predicting that the price will go down, along with selling a call, which means you might be obligated to sell at a certain price later.
Shorting gives you cash today, and then you pay interest on the borrowed stock.
Buying a put costs a fixed amount today, and might be profitable later if the cost decreased.
Selling a call yields a fixed amount of money today, and might cost money later.
“Calls” and “puts” are types of contracts about buying/selling stocks (they aren’t the stock themselves but are centered around a given stock and its trading price, so they are called “derivatives” as they are “derived” from the stock).
A put is a contract that allows the buyer of the contract to sell stock at an agreed upon price to the seller of the contract, regardless of the current trading price. They are used for a variety of reasons. In one usage, someone who is buying some of the stock at the current trading price may also buy a “put” on the stock at a slightly lower price. This way, they spend a little more money at the time of buying the stock, but if the trading price plummets, they can still sell it at that slightly lower “put” price and not lose too much money.
In this case, the idea would be to buy a “put” (without buying the stock at the same time) when the buyer thinks the stock’s trading price is overvalued. Then when the price falls below the “puts” agreed upon value, buy the stock at the lower price and immediately invoke the contract to sell at the "put"s higher price.
Short selling is when you borrow a stock, then sell that stock, then buy it back in time to return it. The idea is that you think it will go down, so you can buy it back at a discount and make a profit.
A put is when you have the option of doing that – i.e. if it doesn’t go down you don’t have to do anything with the stock, and you’ve only lost the fee you paid for the put contract. It’s a way of hedging your bets.
A publicly traded stock option contract. Buying a Put allows you to bet on the share price dropping.
You get fronted 10 shares of X, based on the value it is today.
In Y amount of time, you need to pay back those X shares.
So if you think price will go down, you sell the shares immediately, and when you think the price is the lowest, you buy X shares again, and give them to who loaned them to you.
If you don’t buy enough shares, the person you borrowed them from buys them at whatever the price is when the clock runs out. And gives you the bill.
It’s also a way to lose insane amounts of money.
Like do it to 10 shares at $100/share. That’s a grand.
If the price goes up to $200/share, you owe twice as much.
With GameStop, people paid crazy prices a share, because they knew the big investors were all shorting.
No matter how high the price was, they were going to have to pay it. But the only people that really made my net, were the ones who sold. A couple people convinced thousand (millions?) Of idiots to drive the price up and then they cashed out.
Where people fuck up is shorting “penny stocks”. If it’s $0.10/share and you think it’ll go to $0.05/share, there’s a chance it goes up to $1.10/share or even more.
A couple dollars increases in price, and people could owe millions.
To add a little to the risk factor of shorting, your possibilities for losing money are endless. When you buy stock, the most you can lose is the price of the purchase. When you short sell you can lose everything you own and then some. If the price keeps going up, then you keep losing money until you close your position (buying the stock).
How does that work? You buy at $100 a share but if it increases to $200 a share you somehow lose money? That’s a strange layer to the stock market. Please explain.
Honestly, I don’t know on this one. It’s tough to guess on internet companies, especially social media.
I think they’re facing pretty strong headwinds that have nothing to do with how we may personally feel about the company. Going off of memory, their valuation was slashed between their first talking about an IPO in 2022 and April-ish of 2023, which is when they started with the push towards monetization and which eventually led to shutting down the API to third party apps. I’m not sure where the $18B falls on that spectrum. I’m also not sure about the underlying metrics, like revenue per user, costs of acquiring new users, and so on. I don’t know if their growth has slowed or accelerated since the API change, but I also don’t think there’s a real competitor at this point (lemmy hasn’t reached critical mass and community fragmentation will probably mean it never will).
On the other hand, I’ve felt since last April or so that the stakeholders are looking to exit. It really feels like spez mismanages the company and is just looking to cash out, take the billion or two and move on to his next thing, after which it will be run by a b-school type who will run it into the ground.
All of which is to say I wouldn’t buy it for my retirement portfolio, but I also wouldn’t short it on opening day. I do suspect they’re underinvested in trust and safety and will run afoul of regulatory bodies, and Reddit is not the household name that Twitter is, so they’ll be easier to ban from markets.
“I submitted most of the content for the first couple of months myself — I had all these different accounts… and sometime in August was the first day that I didn’t submit any content. Real users did. And literally every day since then, Reddit has been bigger than I ever thought it would be.” -Steve Huffman
So there you have it, all of you single instance users, don’t fret! Reddit didn’t become popular in a day, it was mostly Spez posting to himself.
As far as the IPO goes, I’ve left Reddit so it can succeed or crash and burn, I care little at this point.
Elon Musk should buy it :) i hear he’s doing wonders with the xitter :)
xittertwixFar-right twix.
Or x twitter. Get it, cause it used to be twitter.
If he’s looking to control communication infrastructure as I suspect, he might actually try, and succeed. Even if it’s not him, it’s going to be a similar scenario involving someone very much like him.
Can you short an IPO?
You can short it at open and hope you have enough collateral to withstand a lot of volatility through the hype cycle. Long term I expect you’d win but it wouldn’t be comfy getting there.
Yeah, rather certain they’ll come out of the gate at least lukewarm if not hot. There will be reports on how much money they can make in advertisement and how many millions of paid views they have and how much money that’s worth on paper. They’ll hide the bot numbers in the fake account numbers as long as they need to to get out of the gate. Then their investors will be in charge. Every bad decision is an opening for a lawsuit. Investors will kick out the scumbags the c-staff will deploy their golden parachutes.
Communities will still struggle to work around the advertisers and trolls.
Same bull, just another brick in the wall
This stuff always feels like rich people scamming other rich people. Both sides know reddit isn’t worth nearly as much as they claim, but they play this song and dance with it and the one who actually ends up with the company at the end (usually) loses out while everyone else manages to make billions.
You know, it could be. Most of Wall Street is a needlessly complex game of making money out of nothing.
But imagine if you took reddit and gave it over to someone trustworthy. Some kind of actual business genius that could navigate the investors and the communities and make them benefit each other in symbiosis. That many eyes is worth a hell of a lot of money. Get that marketing data out of there quietly, get those ads in there tucked in the streams in a way that they could be teased out of the stream and open the API back up to everyone. (even google? especially google) Push the advertisers to make relevant shill posts instead of ads.
There’s little damage there that couldn’t be undone, but the bar to finding a person that investors would allow them to fix it is damn high.
15 billion? Lol, wow. That’s about 14.5 billion more than I’d say they’re worth.
You think they’re even worth half a billion?
Good point, it’ll be good to see their public revenue sheets when they reach that point, 500 mil seems like a lot for the site but it is global so maybe there’s more cash flow outside the US.
In Brazil they are very small, but they have some impact. Most because of the mods though.
Not the company, the data. For training ML
Ok there. I finally deleted my account for realsies.
I keep going back to check out their Marvel discussions, but tell myself not to log in and engage. The community around that is bigger, definitely, but man… so full of dickheads. Thanks for being nicer, Lemmy users.
O SO YOU THINK WERE NICE HUH! WELL YOU HAVE A NICE DAY!!
YEAH THATS RIGHT I JUST WISHED YOU A NICE DAY, WHAT YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT >:D
Don’t get me wrong, fuckface, I can be a dick too. I’d just rather not, so have a pleasant fucking evening your foul smelling philanthropist.
Reported!
THANK YOU FOR WRITING IN ALL CAPS, I ALWAYS FELT THE UPPERCASE LETTERS DESERVE MORE TIME IN THE SPOTLIGHT SINCE THEY ARE VASTLY UNDERREPRESENTED IN REGULAR FORMS OF TEXT. LET’S KEEP TALKING LIKE THIS!!
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Same here. I was holding off on properly deleting my account for some of the more niche stuff on Reddit, but at this point… fuck it I’ll still lurk occasionally but I ain’t logging in.
I’m not deleting mine because all that does is remove your name from comments and lock you out of having any control over them in the future. I did a mass delete, which missed a lot of them, so I just manually delete any others I come across.
I’ve read that some of that problem with the mass delete was that some tools for that were sending requests too fast and reddit supposedly sent back an error message within a “succes” HTML code. Someone did some tweaking of such a tool to make it react correctly to those messages and the mass deletion took 2-3 days when it was rate limited to what reddit would allow. Don’t know if that can help you now.
I got locked out when my 2fa couldn’t be transferred off my phone that died unexpectedly. Oh well
My experience with reddit is checking my inbox every now and then and seeing some random nazi posting harassing shit on a 2-month post.
Please, Reddit, finish dying, I’m banned for a bullshit reason and wanna talk abotu Jojo Memes with people again
The Jojo memes were the friends we made along the way.
$15 billion, jesus fuck. Lots of idiots gonna be sellin ass behind Wendy’s.
Hope it fails and Steve Huffman gets fired
He has zero interest in Reddit past the IPO. Even if it bombs, he’s gonna make a fortune. If it sells for 1% of that 15 billion valuation it’ll have grown 15x in value since it was sold in the 2000s.
He’s no longer a 50 percent owner, but he’s going to do well in this no matter what, and will never need to work another day in his life.
Does he even need to work now?
If the IPO succeeds reddit will turn into a trash can even faster.
I would probably get way richer after so I don’t think he would care too much.
Is it possible to short an IPO? I would like to say that this is going to lose value almost immediately.
You can’t borrow shares from ipo underwriters for 30 days so you can’t short before that
You might be able to do a naked short, though.
I might be on a list now for googing it but, here’s a wiki article for non-finance people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling?wprov=sfla1
Yes
