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?
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.
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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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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
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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 did it
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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.
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.
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.
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OK so wait until the inevitable hours after opening peak and buy puts?
Sorry, what is a "put"?
"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.
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.
Sincerely hope it crashes and burns, even though I find it unlikely.
Fuck spez for ruining my favorite social media ever.
"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.
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.
go fuck yourself...in a nice way
Honestly, Lemmy is a lot nicer.
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
And I sincerely hope anyone that invests in Reddit loses everything they put into it. The company deserves to die for the bullshit they did last year. It’s past time to move on.
Every big IPO like this goes up like crazy at first... In this case I predict it will fall quickly afterwards.
There's money to be made though
Honestly the most surprising part of this news is that it took so long
A few years ago I would have bought some stocks to support them ... Now, I'd counsel anybody to stay away from that stock because the company could further alienate and lose most of their active users at any time.
more like IPOO
Well I checked back. I also went to wipe the last bits of posts from a couple accounts. Soon as the scripts got done running...
Uh oh! We have suspended your account due to suspicious activity.
Have we tried pulling a Twitter on this shit and seeing how many ads come up next to controversial Concepts yet?
I don't think it would take many of them to take this motherfucker
What a little shitbaby, that IPO is going to be worse than Robinhood’s
They filed for IPO in December 2021. Its taken them THIS long. The competent management didn't leave the building, they were never there.
What is IPO?
initial public offering aka the company goes on the stock market
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