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.
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 🤷
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.
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
“What’s your business model?”
“We pay people to post on our site.”
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).
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.
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.
CW that next time, sheesh.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 did that back when the API thing was happening.
I did it
People did that, and they restored the posts…
All other social media platforms are free.
It is just there will be difference between users and customers (those who pays money to promote something or get data on users). And users are not customers.
I mean, ignoring the balding neonazi dipshit for a moment:
Twitter is more or less showing the path forward. They fucked up on the advertisement side, but it has clearly been demonstrated that there is a strong desire for users to be “power users”. Which is more or less what twitter ran on before. The idea that, because you have ten followers, you are just as important as Barack Obama.
Reddit, coupled with Google fucking up their own shit, is rapidly losing the “best place on the internet to find user sourced information” badge. But there is definitely room for a subscription that either boosts user engagement (not sure how that would work) or provides corporate moderators so that individual people can have their own board about their Sonic OC or whatever.
And then it becomes about converting those users into customers.
I remember Reddit being the only place to find out which VLAN I needed to put my PVRs through to work with my personal router. Now it’s a struggle to find anything that specific or useful, and it’s getting worse.
But there is definitely room for a subscription that either boosts user engagement (not sure how that would work)
Swap “subscription” for “multiple small transactions” and you have the new gold system. So Reddit is already doing what you (and me, and everyone else) was predicting them to, we just didn’t know “how”.
It’ll likely fail hard though, at least in the long run. For similar reasons as Digg failed.
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!!
go fuck yourself…in a nice way
Honestly, Lemmy is a lot nicer.
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.
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 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.
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
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
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.
“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.
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.
Well, I guess we may get a surge of anticapitalist users soon.
I mean, they’d be coming to the right place.
I’d say so to some extent, but some users are so anti-capitalist it’s actually a problem
This is literally the anti-Capitalist reddit. It was made precisely to answer Reddit with better, decentralized structure so as to avoid the problems Reddit has.
Is being radical itself bad? If the only solution for a given problem is drastic, immediate change, such as Climate Change requiring a major Overhaul of infrastructure, agriculture, and consumption as quickly as physically possible, is this solution bad simply because it’s radical?
Personally, I think worker ownership is a necessary solution to the constant deterioration of Capitalism. I am, therefore, a radical. I don’t believe Capitalism can be salvaged, only band-aids applied as temporary measures. What’s wrong with this POV?
That’s just like, your opinion, man.
If you mean hexbears, they’re edgy teenagers
To be fair, those users were here first, we’re the invaders
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.
more like IPOO
fuck spez
Genuine question: how can a website that’s never turned a profit be worth $15 billion dollars?
Because now it’s sanitized for capitalism’s protection.
Does that mean now it will start generating profit?
Most people still aren’t paying for it though.
Advertisers do.
Uber has also never turned a profit. Share prices aren’t based on the value of the company, they’re based on how much people think the company will be worth in the future
