this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration

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### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/

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[–] Pandantic@kbin.social 148 points 1 year ago

(Worth noting that the vast majority of markdown in the value of Reddit and Discord holdings by Fidelity predominantly occurred last year.)

Oh, that means there’s more room to move down.

[–] BedSharkPal@kbin.social 77 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] RandomStickman@kbin.social 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Gotta pump those numbers --up-- down

[–] BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We need to bring WSB in this. If anyone can crash those numbers it's them.

[–] hiyaaaaa23@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago
[–] Rhaedas@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Two tildes (~~) on each side does a strikethrough.

[–] BertitoMio@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

~~test comment please ignore~~

[–] Cube6392 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

~~I refuse to do any such thing~~

[–] beard__hunter@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

~~Yes the tildes are working~~

[–] LynnTheChaoticWitch@feddit.nl 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Afaik the strike through syntax is tildes ~~like this~~ or ~~using escape charecters~~

[–] Skyhighatrist 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You might be able to get away with just escaping the first tilde ~~testing to see if I'm right, or speaking out my ass~~

Edit, yep, only need to escape the first one.

[–] kurgal@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago

Yes! Just like how Tumblr went from $1 billion to $1 million. Let’s do it for Reddit! ⬇️

[–] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 59 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Sordid@kbin.social 30 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Right? How the hell is a company that has never managed to turn a profit worth more than $0?

[–] smokinjoe@kbin.social 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

because none of these numbers are tethered to reality

[–] Grimlo9ic@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Mark Hanna: Number one rule of Wall Street. Nobody - and I don't care if you're Warren Buffet or if you're Jimmy Buffet - nobody knows if a stock is going to go up, down, sideways or in circles. You know what a fugazi is?

Jordan Belfort: Fugayzi, it's a fake.

Mark Hanna: Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not fucking real.

https://youtu.be/wM6exo00T5I?t=108

[–] JohnEdwa@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If you buy a house with a loan and pay it back, you haven't turned a profit either - but you do now own a house that has a theoretical value. That's basically how these things work, investing everything on growing the company in the hopes that some day what they have built can start creating profit, or be sold to someone who thinks they can.

[–] Sordid@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I get that, but who would want to buy a company that's never been profitable? It smacks of a scam. "Hey, bro! Buy my company! It never managed to make any money for me, but it'll be highly profitable for you!" Sounds like the company founder is looking to pull a fast one and laugh all the way to the bank while their investor is left holding the bag.

The only way I can see this working is if the idea is to build a large user base by offering a good user experience, i.e. not monetizing the platform very much, just enough so that it barely pays for its own operating costs. Then you sell that user base to someone else for the express purpose of shoving tons of ads down everyone's throat. In that case it's still a fast one, only in this scenario the users are the victims. But even then I'm skeptical. If that's the plan, why sell the company instead of enshittifying your platform yourself?

[–] DreamerofDays@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

only in this scenario the users are the victims

Have you heard of ~~our lord and savior~~ enshittification?

[–] JohnEdwa@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

why sell the company instead of enshittifying your platform yourself?

Because it's a lot easier to find someone who thinks they can do it than it is to actually successfully do it yourself - as we are currently seeing with how wonderfully incompetent Spez is with Reddit.
When Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013 - only to sell it for $3 million in 2019 - was Tumblr bringing in millions and millions of profit? No. But Yahoo thought that they would be able to make it.
Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, it hasn't turned any profit either (and never will enough for him to get his moneys worth, but that's just because Musk is an idiot).

But yeah, quite often it does feel like a scam. Or kinda like... gambling? You hope someone will pay a lot for your company, while they hope they can make it turn wildly profitable, both may or may not come true.

[–] Sordid@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

it's a lot easier to find someone who thinks they can do it than it is to actually successfully do it yourself

That's pretty much what I said, though. That's the core of the scam. You sell something you know to be worthless to someone too ignorant to understand that. Maybe I'm just extremely ignorant and naive in matters of business, but selling a fake company like that seems no different than selling pyrite to someone who can't tell it apart from gold.

[–] luna@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Profits don't matter under capitalism, it's only stock money. Trying to profit is a death sentence in the tech space, as we're all seeing right now. This system doesn't work for the 21st century

[–] Cryst@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A houses value is not theoretical though. You own land and a roof to live under. It's not about making profit. Companies don't have value outside of making a profit. Now that I type that I see they actually can have value. Such as political sway or if it's a company that has some value beyond money, like education or taking care of the needy. But you'd have to find someone willing to sink money into them simply because they find value beyond money.

[–] JohnEdwa@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

A houses value is not theoretical though. You own land and a roof to live under

But that doesn't mean you can turn a profit from it, or even break even. If you want to do that you have to sell it to someone, and there are multiple reasons why you might not be able to - maybe you spent too much money renovating it and now nobody wants to pay that much. Maybe a bunch of new housing was built and the value crashed. Maybe Detroit happened and the location and land it sits in is literally worthless and nobody wants to live there. - until you actually find a buyer for it all houses have only a theoretical value, as do all companies.

[–] cowvin@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Well it depends on why the company has never managed to turn a profit. A great example is Amazon. I think it existed for like 15 years before it first turned a profit because it was aggressively growing and spending all of their income to try to grow more.

As for Reddit, they are not growing like Amazon did. However, capturing a large user base is worth something because they may be able to monetize those users eventually. Investors view simply having a large user base as pretty valuable.

[–] Perry@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So imagine that you have a lemon tree that grows the finest lemons in the neighbourhood. You know that with those lemons you could make the meanest lemonade and make a ton of money selling that. The problem is that in order to do that, you need to buy a juice press, a bunch of sugar and maybe throw together a dashing lemonade stand that will draw attention to your business.

The issue is that you don't have any money to buy those things and even if you know you will get rich down the line, the whole project is a dud if you can't even build your lemonade stand.

Enter Mr. Money Bag. I have a whole €1,000 just sitting there in my wallet not doing anything. I would really like that many to become bigger so I look for a way to do that. I have however seen your lemon tree and the awesome lemons it produces. With those lemons I absolutely believe that you can make the greatest lemonade the world have ever seen and I believe the only thing you need to do that is more money.

So I agree to give you those €1,000 in order to build your lemonade stand and in return I will take some of the money that you make from selling the lemonade. It will however take a few weeks for you to do that and until that is done the materials will probably cost more than what you're making from the lemonade.

That's OK for me, though. I wasn't doing anything with that money anyway and as long as I trust that you can still make a bunch of money when it's finished, I'm fine with it. In fact, I decide to give you another €100 to put up a sign in order for more people to find your business quicker.

So everything is tugging along and now you're actually making more money than you spend, so you give me an amazing €1.200; €100 more than I spent! You also get some money, which is awesome because now you can buy yourself that rocking NiN T-shirt you've always wanted. Now this is great, except I still don't actually need that money, not right now at least. So I tell you to keep that money in the company and build an additional even better lemonade stand which will make us twice the amount of money in a few weeks.

Currently, your company haven't made a single cent, but that's fine because your business is sound and everything is tugging along exactly as planned.

Eventually, I decide that I actually want to buy a new high end TV so I actually need some money that I can spend right now. I know that in about ten weeks this company will have made at least €20,000 that it can either invest in further expansion or give back to the owners. So I go to my buddies Greg and Lisa who definitely have that amount of money and tell them that they can buy this company for €20,000. Greg also owns a carpentry which he can use for building even more lemonade stands and Lisa is really good at making signs so with them the company might even make €40,000 in the same time.

So Greg and Lisa together buy my part of the company for €20,000. I get to watch Eurovision on my new 70 inch TV, and Greg and Lisa will together make €40,000 in a few weeks so everyone is happy.

Then after a few months, someone realises that your lemon tree can really only grow a basket of lemons a year and you can't actually grow enough to make the money you hoped for. Everybody panics, the company's value plummets and eventually closes down.

Greg and Lisa are mad because they didn't make the money they hoped for (they did however get back €5,000 from selling the lemonade stands to a neighbor who was about to start an apple juice business). You're also disappointed, but at least you still have your NiN t-shirt. Your gardener goes to jail for some reason, though.

[–] cavemeat 1 points 1 year ago

Wall street magic, I guess.

[–] milkytoast@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

it's almost like not listening to your users doesn't end well

[–] ANuStart@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

4.5 billion still sounds well to me...

[–] milkytoast@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Poppamunz@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

not if that's the amount you lost

[–] LynnTheChaoticWitch@feddit.nl 4 points 1 year ago

A fifty percent drop isn’t a good sign

[–] Jaysyn@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

This happened before the current kerfluffle.

[–] Ertebolle@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago

I still have 14,000 free coins in my account - maybe soon the valuation will drop low enough that I can buy the company with them, like in that Star Trek TNG episode where Data wins so much money that he buys the casino.

[–] gillrmn@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I doubt it is related to migration. It is too soon to have any data on that affect and by numbers it is not much of affect either. The only cost factor of migration that can be done before next quarter release would be increased costs in future dur to moderation, but even that would be very subjective. This is probably due to increased interest rate scenario as feds have said they will bring inflation to 2% so there will be more increase. Hence lowering of cost and spend by companies on advertising and marketing.

[–] shoelace@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago

It's not related to the migration. The article said the lower valuation is as of May 31, before all the backlash on reddit began.

[–] latte 1 points 1 year ago

yeah it's less of a valuation drop than discord which hasn't had any similar drama, it just looks like more trend of tech valuations dropping as a whole recently.

[–] arcrust@lemmy.fmhy.ml 12 points 1 year ago

Oh no. I wonder what happened /s

[–] Briguy24@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

Thoughts and prayers

[–] Holos620@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

Reddit has very little intrinsic value. Its value comes from its userbase and isn't Reddit's to own.

[–] copium@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Let’s be honest, 10 billion valuation was from august 2021 when cash was floating around everywhere.

Of course it’s not worth it anymore, I’m not sure at all it’s related to the protest but more too the current economic state

[–] SustainedChaos@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

We did it, exxitors!

[–] FIST_FILLET@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

good :) a very sincere "get fucked" goes out to every single person intentionally responsible for the investor-pandering at r*ddit! thinking of you during these troubled times. reaper, meet what has been sowed

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

It's almost like loudly announcing contempt for your userbase is not good for a website where virtually 100% of their value is derived from the loyalty of their users

[–] ruk_n_rul@monyet.cc 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

stanks 📉

[–] debounced@kbin.run 1 points 1 year ago

imma need about tree fiddy

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