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?
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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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.
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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
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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.
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Let the enshittification ~~begin~~ continue. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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 :)
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15 billion? Lol, wow. That's about 14.5 billion more than I'd say they're worth.
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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.
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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.
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$15 billion, jesus fuck. Lots of idiots gonna be sellin ass behind Wendy’s.
Please, Reddit, finish dying, I'm banned for a bullshit reason and wanna talk abotu Jojo Memes with people again
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Is it possible to short an IPO? I would like to say that this is going to lose value almost immediately.
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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.
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15 billion lol
more like IPOO
fuck spez
And the super majority of investors will not understand one bit what Reddit is and why it use to be so popular. The pyramid scheme continues.
Genuine question: how can a website that's never turned a profit be worth $15 billion dollars?
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Honestly the most surprising part of this news is that it took so long
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