What’s a reddit?
It’s just hilarious to me how they have moderators on their platform doing all the work for them FOR FREE and they just sit there and try to get money for it.
There needs to be more of a movement away from Reddit towards things like Lemmy.
Access to.
But I don’t think I know a single redditor who got the offer who is buying. I’m not.
It seems like these tech IPOs happen when they are at their peak. Get a huge influx of extra cash once user growth starts to slow, pay off your early investors and then self-implode.
Are we at the huge influx of cash once growth slows stage?
Well you definitely don’t want to have an IPO after it’s clear that you’ve already peaked and there is no way to gain more users or squeeze value out of the existing ones.
Somewhere, Spez is facepalming for exactly this reason.
lol I kinda hope it crashes and burns
I truly hope this.
I was for many years a heavy user and while I liked my niche communities, I abhorred the platform and how it was manipulating us through multiple schemes.
Oddly enough, while the communities here are smaller or nonexistent, the experience seems better and healthier.
Maybe in time this will change too.You need strict rules and strong moderation once any community gets to a certain size and starts attracting people outside of the enthusiasts.
The platform doesn’t matter, it’s just that lots of people suck and ruin the experience for others if there are enough of them.
Looking at what reddit was and what Reddit is now, I genuinely can’t imagine why anybody goes there anymore. The odd time I do some nice doomscrolling, I find that >99% of the content is re-heated and re-served. Nothing there informs me anymore. Nothing there inspires me. Nothing makes me think in a new way.
Every day the same thing ad nausea. Fascism bad. Sexism bad. Phobia bad. Musk bad. Orange man bad. Inflation bad. Boomers bad. Cats good. Name my rescue dog. Celebrity good. Celebrity dead.
That site should be renamed Reggurgitatit.
Honestly not much different on largerv lemmy communities either.
This is more of a symptom of our society than of a specific platform.
I’ve never seen the view of an IPO so heavily affected by bias. Superusers hate Reddit but so what - what matters is whether soccer moms are scrolling and being shown ads. No one cares that the most costly users are unsatisfied. You and me both are nothing to investors.
Is there some objective analysis of this IPO? All I’m seeing is “I’m a superuser who spent a lot of time on Reddit in 2007 and it was far superior back then. The stock will tank.”
Every day the same thing ad nausea. Fascism bad. Sexism bad. Phobia bad. Musk bad. Orange man bad. Inflation bad. Boomers bad. Cats good. Name my rescue dog. Celebrity good. Celebrity dead.
That’s not just Reddit. That’s the entire Internet right now. Reddit or Lemmy, X or Mastodon, Facebook or anything else on the Fediverse. It’s all the same. We are living in a time of mass fear because of several different reasons. War, climate, economy, personal rights… pick whatever topic you want. There’s a reason to be angry about it.
We need to go back to the days of happy people sharing their passions, rather than angry people attacking each other. But that won’t happen anytime soon.
The big problem is algorithmically driven content feeds. They don’t feed you content that makes you happy, they feed you content that makes you mad. I think Lemmy is different in that your feeds are based on what is popular in the communities that you’ve subscribed to. Reddit used to work like that, but now it’s all algorithmic content too.
I go there still when I want product recommendations that aren’t full of marketing/ads. If I use a search engine to search for example, “dashcam recommendations,” I get a million results that are sponsored, SEO-optimized, or otherwise garbage. If I go on Reddit, I’ll find an entire community devoted to the topic with seemingly real people discussing the pros/cons of all different models.
I’ve tried searching with Lemmy but most of the time I can’t find the answers I’m looking for so end up crawling back to Reddit.
I absolutely don’t go there to doomscroll like I used to, I’ve thankfully moved on from that life.
I go there still when I want product recommendations that aren’t full of marketing/ads.
I need you to understand that Reddit Astroturfing is a gigantic market. You’re no more getting authentic experiences than you are with random (I got it for free with a check for $5000) YouTube review.
Your experience is very different from mine. Yoy make it sound rosy over there. In my experience all but a few subs have slipped to the right. I’ve seen blatantly racist top comments on racist-bait posts on multiple mainstream subs.
It’s still insanely popular.
I don’t know about “insanely”.
It’s not in the top 10 globally. It gets less traffic than Yahoo or Yandex.
https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
Compared to other social media it’s below Facebook, Instagram and even the dying Twitter. It might get more traffic than TikTok (which seems off to me) but unlike Reddit and Twitter, TikTok knows how to make money. Reddit has never made money, but the pitch to investors is apparently “as soon as we go public, we’ll be in the black, trust me bro”.
Yandex is not that popular in the United States, their data collection seems wrong. Semrush ranks reddit #3 in the US.
I recently started using it because it’s actually a search engine like Google used to be. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it’s gaining traction. Google.com is just a website. I don’t think they realize just how quickly we can switch to other providers.
More traffic than Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Amazon, etc? That seems unlikely. Maybe they’re not counting any traffic from apps? If so, that isn’t all that useful.
Yes, but why?
For the same reasons that fast food is popular. It’s basically dumbed down mindless consumption. I used to be on reddit because I could talk to like-minded people about interesting topics, but the vast majority of people on the internet just want to be entertained and with the support of the admins, they ended up taking over the site. Sure, there are some niche communities where you can have valuable discussions but their time is limited. It’s essentially an artificially accelerated Eternal September.
I’m on board with your main point. I supposed I’m still left wondering why people go to a place that gives them the exact same thing every day without variation. Wait… yeah… that’s actually the appeal. It is just like fast food: sweet, salty, fatty, devoid of nutrition, and always predictable.
There are still a lot of smaller subreddits of rather niche communities that you just don’t have here on Lemmy for example
That whole “niche communities” thing never rang true for me. I mean sure, if you like cast iron you can go to the cast iron community. And see 9000 pictures of cast iron pans and people freaking out about cast iron. Or cooking… and you have to listen to THOUSANDS of recommendations for air fryers but not cooking.
The “communities” system never worked from the word go. The site content should have been organized with weighted tags. As I find few things more nauseating than “collective intelligence” which is mostly wrong, ill-conceived, closed-minded and half-baked at best.
Disagree, there were, possibly still are, good ones. A handful around mushrooms cultivation, food preserving, food fermentation and personal finance specific to my country come to mind, lots of high quality content.
But I know what you mean. I think it mainly happens once specific subreddits started going mainstream, often with an influxnl from facebook people. Out of all the fermented stuff, the kombucha one made my eyes bleed due to its popularity. Half the posts where new people asking if they had a mold problem, the other half was existing members posting “read this before posting, this is what mold looks like”, but they were obviously ignored lol
I mean at least for video games especially ones that are live service games having a place to go to talk about the game and new changes is really nice and still a thing I miss a lot about Reddit.
In principle, I agree with you. But you are judging Reddit’s value by the looking at the home page and taking a snapshot. Instead of looking at it as a lake of mostly crap, think of it as Instead of a river that filters things out and holds the not-crap that come from the flood.
It’s because LLMs don’t have imagination
Twelve dollars and a bitten sandwich. That’s my final offer, and already more than generous.
Throwing away a perfectly good bitten sandwich like that? smh
Yeah that’s a waste of a good sandwich tbh
Now why, (me doing a Jack Benny impression): why, ya see - why would I go and buy stock in a company that hated everything I ever posted, and then banned me for saying that progessive thought is a good thing. I ask you.
B/c Reddit has decided that you needed moar Reddit, so that you can haz Reddits while you are also Redditing.
That, or they are counting on someone, somewhere, to be dumb enough to fall for it.
Watch as people absolutely do. :-(
Ahh well in that case, it makes perfect sense. I’ll take 4000 shares.
I feel the power surging through me, TOTAL CONTROL OF THE UNIVERSE IS WITHIN MY GRASP!
NO - you would need a power level to be over 9000 for that.
This is half that. So you have only half control of the Universe. Like, you have to submit a request to your boss to use your power to do anything, but then he/she gets to either accept or deny your request. Requests must be submitted in triplicate and accompanied by a notary public cosignee signature. Other terms & conditions apply. Also, Huffman has veto power, and your requests may be lost or ignored at any time - but if YOU ever lose or ignore a reply in turn, then you are banned.
Yet one more reason to say: Viva la revolución!
Hmmm, only half control of the Universe would be only half realizing my ambitions. It would be going at it half-assed - and I wanted to use my WHOLE ass this time!!
Guess I’ll have to buy more shares since I must control not just Earth and Neptune and Jupiter, I want Uranus as well. (!).
Why buy a company that can’t make money and intentionally kills decent revenue streams?
the way they took away awards, even old awards, was so fucking stupid and demeaning to the site as a whole. i don’t see anyone using awards at all anymore
I mean I want a stripper girlfriend and a gold-top les Paul but we don’t always get what we want do we, Steve you prick
A gold topless Paul? Whatever floats your boat
No no a gold top-less pool
Pools usually don’t come with tops, they’re holes in the ground you fill with water.
Actually all the pools I’ve come across come complete with a top and a bottom - that’s just like a car for example, usually they come equipped with an inside and an outside (but not always)
As someone who dated a stripper in college and got to know a lot of those folks outside of work, trust me, you don’t actually want a stripper girlfriend.
Edit: That said, the guitar is a fine choice.
Well this is just begging the question for the rest of us: why not?
If you want a stripper girlfriend you must be cool with her doing stripper things, but it turns out a lot of guys aren’t.
Yeah that part makes sense haha. Wasn’t sure if that was still her occupation or not at the time.
Well, let’s just say that the likelihood to encounter people with a history of trauma, or atypical perspectives on intimacy, goes up.
In my case, I was dating someone that never really learned what normal displays of public affection looked like. Which created some very awkward moments for me and the people around me.
I’m sure Jesus will answer you on the subject of stripper girlfriends
If I held any value in what a made up man had to say about the subject I guess.
“Website that never made a profit thinks it’s worth over 6 billion dollars. Yes US dollars.”
I’d laugh about this but then I remember that someone recently bought Yahoo for $5B
Who’s the moron that bought Yahoo for that much? Anybody using yahoo mail is going to be dead or not need email in 10 years and yahoo answers doesn’t exist anymore.
So what value could that company possibly have?
Hey I still have an active yahoo email address and I’m gonna have to ask you to get the fuck off my lawn.
I still use Yahoo weather and Finance
I don’t know the current trends, but yahoo was a powerhouse in Asia for a very long time. The primary search engine, news, Email provider.
I think it’s still big in Japan
Big in Japan
More like $599 US dollars. Riiiiidge Racer!
So they’re only trying to sell 11.7% of their total stock? Is that normal?
☠️Reddit has NEVER been profitable ☠️
This has never been necessary for an IPO.
Typically, IPO’s are nothing more than exit liquidity
Basically yeah. Cash-out time for the VCs.
You don’t have to be profitable to have a desirable stock, but usually there is some promise of future profitability (like Tesla for most of its history.)
Not sure what reddit has going for it, though.
I think Reddit will be Robinhood 2.0
It’s a bag pass/exit liquidity
It’s a ruse
Because profit requires you to pay taxes. It’s not uncommon at all for growing companies to invest and otherwise use up any profit they generate so the balance sheet stays negative while the company keeps growing in value.
Also allows you to cry how those dirty 3rd party app developers are stealing all your profit boo hoo.When you look at the revenue growth of reddit, it’s not hard to see that if they were able to function at all when they had a revenue 1/10th of what it’s now, they could turn profit if they wanted to.
It’s not uncommon at all for growing companies to invest and otherwise use up any profit they generate so the balance sheet stays negative while the company keeps growing in value.
That’s absolutely true. But what exactly has Reddit been expanding into? Its not like they’ve got AWS like Amazon or they’re rapidly expanding their infrastructure footprint like NextEra or some novel product like OpenAI.
As far as I can tell, the company’s biggest primary expense is administrative overhead. Not exactly value-add.
Not a clue, but they did go from having 230 employees back in 2017 to 400 in 2018, 700 in 2021 to finally over 2000 in 2023.
So they have to be doing something. …right?(super smash bros announcer voice)
IMMINENT LAYOFFS!
Given that CEO pay was like 30% of their expenditures last year, administrative overhead seems like a good guess
You mean Steve Huffman has said something that isn’t true? This is totally unprecedented! 🤡🤣
Who cares, we’re leaving an economy where no one cared about profitability. Just growth. It’s all about whether they can capitalize on that growth now.
Spotify was the same. Turned a profit the first quarter after shifting the focus towards profitability.
ended up clicking a reddit link the other day and saw DMs about reddit stock. Reported them for scamming and blocked the admins that sent it.
literally pointless but it felt good anyway.
I will be shorting once it plateaus a few days after launch. I’ll at least finally get paid for them selling my data for a quick buck.
Best of luck (mean that sincerely)
6 billion seems REAL high
But reddit, like twitter, has demonstrated it is a brand/service (just service in the case of xitter) that people are addicted to and will not quit. And stuff like AMAs and astroturfing demonstrate it has a lot of marketability.
Combine that with it being a treasure trove for LLM training and I could easily see it pulling 2-4 billion. More if the FOMO model works out for them and they have /r/wallstreetbets do another “the greatest act of democracy in all of human history” or whatever the tagline for rich people to convince idiots to help them manipulate stock prices.
So it would be less about buying a product to keep for a long time and more about something to exploit for a few years and throw it away.
But hopefully this will provide us with another folded ideas video.
But reddit, like twitter, has demonstrated it is a brand/service (just service in the case of xitter) that people are addicted to and will not quit. And stuff like AMAs and astroturfing demonstrate it has a lot of marketability.
The issue is every mintue Spez has been at the helm, they’ve actively crashed any positive value the brand has had. It’s been dead man walking before the IPO, which is not how you want your exit to go.
