Summary

Reddit shares have dropped 50% from their February peak, when the stock had soared over 500% from its $34 IPO price last March.

Much of the early enthusiasm came from AI-related deals allowing Reddit’s content to be used for training models, but recent doubts about long-term growth in the AI sector have dimmed that optimism.

Analysts remain skeptical and some call the stock “super overvalued,” noting Reddit still is not making any money.

Market uncertainty and early investor sell-offs continue to weigh on Reddit and the broader tech sector.

Non-paywall link

  • MuskyMelon@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Lets take a platform driven by community participation and ostracize community users. Yeah that’ll work out well.

    Reddit getting Digged and me likey.

    • RestrictedAccount@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      That is a deep cut reference. They are relaunching as an AI play.

      That will bring back the people who were providing the free content.

      (/s on the last part)

      • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        Seriously. I remember Digg. My life’s social media path has been slashdot->digg->reddit->lemmy.

        I was there! I saw it all! <shakes cane>

      • rice@lemmy.org
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        3 months ago

        yep they will, it’ll be grok running 99% of twitter and 95% of reddit in the next 5 years. (and those numbers are probably already near there)

    • arrow74@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Yep the train from being offered early access to their IPO as a “power user” to a permanent account ban did not take long.

      So here I am

    • humorlessrepost@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      There are plenty of well-funded organizations willing to pay good money to shift various Overton windows. Especially now that Google is so enshitified that people append “Reddit” to the end of searches.

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Yeah I mean there’s that but the reddit demo uses ad blockers frequently and ad-based content on reddit is already probably not that profitable. There’s a lot of people running astroturf campaigns for various things, but how are you seeing revenue out of that? Some schmuck buying the wrong type of portable speaker because of a crappy recommendation won’t add to reddit’s bottom line when it’s the speaker maker’s internal marketing intern. If anything, it’ll just further cause people to lose confidence in them.

        The only path they had toward profitability was feeding all of their user data into AIs for revenue from AI companies, but chatbots are also unprofitable and that revenue probably won’t even cover the costs to run the servers, and besides how many companies are going to be dumb enough to pay for that privilege? We’re talking about folks that already stole every piece of artwork, literature, and news article they could get their grubby little mitts on. Why would they continue to pay reddit?

        Ultimately the biggest conceit of the “attention economy” is the idea that attention automatically translates into dollars.

        (And they’re bleeding attention too.)

  • aramis87@fedia.io
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    3 months ago

    It’s not just the AI bubble, it’s a distinct lack of faith in Huffman and as a CEO. He’s not forward-thinking enough, he hasn’t understood where the company’s value lies, and he’s ridiculously distracted by the latest shiny tech things (reddit NFT avatars, reddit crypto, reddit AI).

    I fully expect Google to buy reddit at some point, exclusively harvesting all the info for their search engine, all the content for their AI models, and all the submission/view/voting data for their user profiles (what are you interested in, what do you think of these concepts, where are you connecting from, here are more ads we can send you, and these are arguments that might sway you in purchasing or other decisions).

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      3 months ago

      If Google weren’t under antitrust pressure, I think that would have already happened.

      In many ways, a Google owner would probably make Reddit better for a while. Google cares a lot more about the data people are generating than making the site itself profitable. They could afford to run it at a loss for years, whereas Reddit investors want to ensure they make money soon.

      But, I’m glad it might not happen. Then again, who knows what will happen to Google and antitrust in the Trump admin, where bribery is now perfectly legal.

  • formulaBonk@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Well the ipo brought enshitification at max speed so that’s not surprising. They ostracize and remove users who contributed to communities for a decade+ and then replace the long standing communities with a generic, Reddit controlled alternative that only reposts all time top posts to gain traction. The only thing Reddit has going for it is the user content which is rapidly getting buried under AI slop. Worst of all (for the investor class) you can’t really see Reddit being turned into another right wing cesspool to bait young men into violence with … so there really seems to be less and less reason for Reddit to exist. Let’s hope by 2030 it’s like one of those websites people say “remember when we had Reddit …”

  • Sibshops@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Reddit has it’s problems, sure, but I just feel like the fediverse is a fresh of breath air.

  • MithranArkanere@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Everyone with half a brain knows that enshitification and pandering to CEObro echo chambers result in the platform losing large amounts of users or even dying.

  • Poayjay@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Talk about failing to pivot. Reddit was in such a good position to ride the AI bubble. Too bad all of their content had already been scraped. They then alienated their power users and casual users got a peak behind the curtain. New, interesting things don’t start on Reddit anymore. The entire front page is just trump articles and reposts. You can predict all of the top comments because it is the same shit over and over.

    • LandedGentry@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      Not to mention they made that deal with Google for a fraction of what it was worth. I don’t know what the fuck Huffman is doing. Just a greedy little piggy who doesn’t even know how to make money.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      more or less its going to be like facebook and youtube, a propaganda and rage bait farm.

  • antisocialite@lemmy.today
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    3 months ago

    The censorship going on there is crazy. I understand a site needs to tamp down on violent rhetoric but they crossed the line into absurdity. They banned me for calling out the racism in the GOP platform.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      they are tamping down on the wrong kind of content, anything that disagree with israel, luigis incarceration, or elon and trump is an auto ban.

        • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          I want to see the comedy-of-errors timeline where Luigi beats the rap based on a technicality or jury nullification…He finally gets out of jail…Then he immediately does it again.

        • imvii@lemmy.ca
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          3 months ago

          Same. 11 year old account got banned for saying something. I’m not even entirely sure what it was. They deleted it and gave me the finger.

          Fine with me.

            • antisocialite@lemmy.today
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              3 months ago

              They’ll sweep ban entire comment sections of a submission they don’t approve of and they’re using AI to do it, so there are lots of false positives and dubious reasoning. They’ll send you a message lecturing you on your behavior but delete your comment so you’re left with only a vague idea of what they’re referring to.

          • rice@lemmy.org
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            3 months ago

            I got a 15 year old account banned for logging in via tor… they run a tor website for tor access on the tor network lmfao.

      • lythium@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Thanks! I came from Reddit too. Looking for a safer place to stay in touch with the community. Are we allowed to say the name of Mario’s brother here?

        • cynar@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          The basic rule is that you can say what you want (and people can call you what they want for it!).

          It would be polite to self moderate to an extent. No point getting the instance owners in to legal hot water. That’s a massively higher bar than Reddit has set however. Chatting about and admiring Luigi is completely fine.

        • exixx@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          You can not only say Luigi, but you can also say that you wished it had started a trend.

          • Monstrosity@lemm.ee
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            3 months ago

            Just keep in mind, “it’s called the Fediverse because it’s crawling with Feds.”

            Don’t get stupid.

    • samus12345@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      I have to admit I never thought they would punish users for simply upvoting content that went against their corporate overlords’ interests. True thought policing.

  • 52fighters@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 months ago

    I remember the early days of Reddit when it really felt like a community project. Back then, they had the goodwill necessary that Redditors would have personally financed a chunk of the costs of running particular Subreddits. Not anymore. That goodwill is gone.

  • catloaf@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    If you deleted your content, reminder to go back and check it again. Despite running a deletion from my GDPR export data, yesterday I noticed a bunch of comments suddenly showing up on my account that weren’t there before so I i had to rerun the deletion.

    • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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      3 months ago

      There’s a non-malicious reason for this - if you used a script based on interacting with the website, when subreddits went hidden, it actually hidden your own comments from you. So they aren’t visible to automated scripts and then when subreddits go visible again, suddenly it looks like comments “came back”.

      • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        And this is compliant with GDPR?

        “Your stuff was hidden when you made the delete request. But then later we made it un-hidden so oh well 🤷”

        • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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          3 months ago

          No, because what he’s describing is a self-run comment editing and deleting script.

          GDPR account deletion works very differently.

          Note I’m not defending Reddit here, as much as anything it’s advice for anyone (like me) who has to go back and re-run the script every few months because of those brave people whose form of protest is very temporarily inconveniencing themselves.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      Should also go back and check to see if you were unbanned. I was banned during the API purge, for mass editing+deleting my comments. First automod banned me from various pro-Spez subs when I started editing my old comments. Then when I repeated the edit+delete with my second/third/etc accounts, it banned them site wide for ban evasion.

      Went back a little while later, and all of my accounts were magically unbanned and all of the edits+deletes were undone. The benign explanation is likely that the ban(s) prevented any of the edits from actually committing. But the more tinfoil-hat explanation is that the admins want the site to look more active, so they rolled back bans so old content was still available and their user count appeared higher than reality.

      • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        it does explain why you could comment in subs you were banned years ago. i heard at least from the modhelp sub that permabans were supposodely to be 1-year before it gets unbanned, obvious repeat offendors get a lifetime ban(the spammers excessive account bottings). but thing is some subs dont update thier filters so they can ban you again, and trigger a sitewide ban.

    • muusemuuse@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Is there a way I as an american can delete all my posts from my banned accounts?

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        I’m not sure. If you can log in, probably. You can try a GDPR request, but reddit has refused to delete data under GDPR, saying deleting your name off posts and comments is sufficient.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      i noticed when i deleted my primary comments, it was ommiting other posts, like controversial.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Honestly reddit is still underrated in terms of social media value but it’s a doomed platform from management pov. Its just so leaderless and spineless rn.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      they already made thier bank by selling thier shares a while ago, they dont care anymore.

  • j0ester@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    When do we think Musk or Zucker going to buy Reddit, and call it something stupid? Redbook? xIt?

    • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      FaceIt? lol

      Reddx? Sounds like a porn site.

      A community is called a subx. So you might have /x/The_Elon, you can buy premium or coins or whatever using $Trump crypto. Russian bots are moderators. Truly a magical future to behold.