Reddit seeks to launch IPO in March
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/reddit-seeks-launch-ipo-march-sources-2024-01-18/
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/reddit-seeks-launch-ipo-march-sources-2024-01-18/
RIP Aaron indeed. May his fighting spirit be the anchor point for any community that's succeeding Reddit.
If you really want to sabotage, just upload lots of videos to subreddits that you can't advertise on.
Im betting porn only has a year or 2 left on reddit. They already been slowly purging for years. Got to keep the advertisers happy.
There was some other social media site that banned porn a few years ago, I think it was Tumblr? I wonder how that worked out for them.
It's been pretty active all this time tbh. I didn't notice getting worse, but then I was never there for the porn.
Maybe not active in the right way from an advertising perspective idk, but it's never been lacking good content.
OnlyFans tried a while back. There was probably some internal political maneuvering going on with that one.
They reversed the ban and in any case, there was still a shit ton of porn on the site, it was just written rather than drawn.
2 years left till the inevitable porn ban on reddit and 3 years till that decision kills them
You can technically just make yourself a mod of your own private subreddit, then NSFW works fine with the API. It works with RedReader. I still use Reddit a bit for very niche subreddits.
Although this is to be expected, and at least this means we have content, it is also a bit unfortunate.
The Bot content is utter garbage. A good chunk of it is reddit links to old stuff. I'm sick of seeing Bot posts from reddit where someone posted a question 3 years ago.
Hmmm, let's see.
Failing company rooted in a more traditional framework they're trying to break out of
Said company has no idea what they're doing and keep doing ridiculous things to "break out of" traditional framework
Keeps doing things no user/customer asked for
Said company has no real effective long-term game-plan and keeps changing tack because of bad previous choices
There's a good chance the company could go completely bust because of lack of good business plan and solid leadership
Redditors: Reddit is the new GameStop!! DRS!! MOASS!!!
Keeps doing things no user/customer asked for
I'm pretty sure the advertisers - their real customers - asked them to show more ads.
Huffman is ostensibly following Elon Musk's lead, and last I checked, Musk had pretty effectively chased away a massive amount of what one might call "rational" advertisers. Reddit is absolutely following a similar path, and soon enough there will be advertisers who no longer want to be associated with a toxic brand.
Ostensibly? I think you mean obviously/openly.
It's not just similarities; Steve Huffman is openly and directly copying Musk. Honestly, given Ex-Twitter's performance, I have no idea why any investors are allowing that.
spez doesn't care. He's realized that, despite his best befuddled efforts, reddit is failing and that no one else will hire him for a cushy CEO job. He wants to take his bag and leave while the getting is still (relatively) good.
Dont forget the booooots sooo mannny boooots how the hell are there such low effort bots everywhere on that site
I fucking love dumbshit comments like these!
"I'm going to say this comment is totally wrong, but I don't actually care enough about the issue to explain it or use more than *checks notes... two words to justify my position."
Fucking hilarious, every time.
It's unlikely I'll write a longer answer on my phone. But if all you have is ridicule again, and insults, I'll leave you with some short thoughts.
Gamestop has been doing fairly well, looking at financials. And people complain about not owning their virtual stuff, which NFT smart contracts could be a solution for. I don't necessarily agree on the the specifics for blockchain based solution though, nor did I like the picturefest which only obfuscated good use cases.
Edit: unlike of course vague half truths
It's a technology, simple as. But since we're back at the start, who profits the most from not moving status quo?
What other viable and available technology options are there for a system where the consumer can somewhat freely do what they want with digital assets?
And wtf simping? Wat
What other viable and available technology options are there for a system where the consumer can somewhat freely do what they want with digital assets?
NFTs do nothing to help this.
It takes a few weeks for options to become available, but they will.
If you have a shit ton of money you can buy shorts directly.
Why do ya need tons of money for shorts? I can buy some $15 shorts at Walmart just easily.
Why should the IPO change anything at this point? It's not like it'll have any immediate effects on the website.
It's not the IPO that will cause the exodus. Its the first actions that Reddit takes to appease shareholders that will cause people to leave
The Lemmy Piracy communities are about to receive the last of the dedicated reddit holdouts.
With the latest decisions related to discussions of piracy on Reddit I wouldn't be surprised if piracy specifically gets added to a list of banned topics.
Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting "up" or "down" on the content posted by other members.
I appreciate this extremely sly shade at Steve Huffman.
He's not an entreprenuer because he didn't do dick between leaving Reddit and coming back to Reddit whereas Ohanian had a few other companies in his back pocket.
I mean, Ohanian sucks, too, but this sentence is just Reuters kicking dirt in Steve Huffman's smarmy little bitch face and I'm fucking here for it.
I've tried to go back to Reddit occasionally and it's garbage, vastly more garbage than I remember last year, from the web design down to the userbase. Whereas I can't recall a single time I've been on lemmy and encountered an [undeclared] bot
Just today I noticed how low skilled the reddit base seems to be in my general meme/tech/piracy thrmed feed.
So many basic questions that could literally be answered by or get a start on from ChatGPT etc.
Instead they pollute the subs with their low effort requests for help or guidance.
Example: How to get started on pirating anime.
That was a legit title...
The younger generation is less tech savvy than the millenial generation who were forced to figure stuff out themselves and didn't have smartphones.
I get the idea that a lot of people who emigrated to the fediverse are older and also more tech literate given all the linux memes.
I don't want to bash those folks that want to liberate themselve but this is either a designed request to engage discussions (state a correct fact, nobody responds vs. state a purposefully wrong fact and everyone and their dogs will come to correct them) or they are literally unable to search google on how to pirate.
This is like being unable to look up porn by themselve searching "Woman tits naked".
You have a point. Helps increase engagement, like making a spelling mistake or rage bait.
Tiresome, but common.
There are a few bots, mostly spammers. If you mod a community, you can see them. They're typically caught by the spam filters before I even notice they're there.
And Huffman’s programming skills weren’t even that great because they quickly brought in Aaron Schwartz to make it all work, yet they always conveniently leave him off of the founders’ list.
This is literally the story of almost every successful tech venture. Even in the company I work for, the CEO was a former salesperson while the dev who started it all was still a dev after 20 years. He singlehandedly created the entire product catalog but no one outside of the company knows his name. The CEO's name is all over everything, including a "book" he "wrote".
There's always a low profile nerd somewhere in the background who is absolutely key to the whole operation but they rarely get cred.
Man I wish you were wrong but I have seen this exact thing 95% of the times I had a look behind closed doors of companies.
And even more dumb: this nerd usually gets undervalued, and as soon as they leave, it takes about half a year for ppl to realize how fucked they are and frantic recruitment noises to fill the offices in the hopes to pick up the pieces.
There is a certain satisfaction in leaving a job and then hearing they had to hire three new people to do what you did.
Huffman was fucking pissed about how good Alien Blue and Apollo were. He bought and absolutely fucking ruined AB and when he couldn’t buy Apollo (he tried) he crushed it under his boot heel.
I do wish they tried to push people to smaller servers instead of cramming everyone in the same top 3. Send people to the server which matches their interests
I’m on voyager now. Thank you. :)
My shortcut is still called wefwef but I know what I’m using haha, I’m just lazy.
I love the app and you made my transition from Apollo so easy. I would probably be wandering around in the dark with no content if you hadn’t pulled this off. So again, thank you.
I'm using it right now, it's so much more usable than Lemmy. But that's whats great about opensource. You can come up with your own changes or a big group can polish an ugly turd into something awesome.
Also one of two shuttles that have been exploring the universe outside of our solar system. Think one is dead now though.
Time to buy shorts. Or puts. Or kangaroos. Whatever.
I don't know a fucking thing about stonks.
It will launch, spike up a little that day, then drop pretty hard for a month or so, getting down to about 60% of its launch price, before slowly gaining back up to around 80% of its launch price after several months.
Also, my prediction is that big puts will be selling for way higher than their likelihood, because so many retail investors want to to fail. So even though the stock will go down, tons of people will lose money betting that.
For sure. Calls and puts both will go overpriced. Be a lot of "enthusiasts" buying options for funsies thinking they'll totally be right.
I had to go and check wsb to see what the chatter was on this. Looks like they share the same sentiments tbh
Edit: Looks like they could use some Lemmy enlightenment tbh
Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting "up" or "down" on the content posted by other members.
Disgraceful, disgusting, lying scum. Say his name: Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz actually didn’t found Reddit. He built a similar company that wasn’t gaining traction, and as both of them were under y-comb and Reddit secretly seeded fake accounts, Swartz and y-comb decided to merge into Reddit. Swartz was sort of their first and hardworking employee instead of a co-founder.
Seems like a terrible investment, I can’t see what they can possibly do to add value. Everybody who wants to use Reddit is already on it and anything they do to try and milk it will just lose them users.
I've had the impression for a long time that Reddit could stand to lose a large part of its users in order to be more profitiable. The nerds getting into long winded "ackchually" "debates" are making the site worse for the meme scrollers and they are also not the type to click on ads. They're not trying to attract more users, they want to maximise revenue from the existing pool. I don't think it's a coincidence Reddit has been slowly moving away from "discussion board" and towards image and short video (like the other three big platforms) because that's where the money's at.
My prediction is that shortly after the IPO we'll see .old go away, and a further sterilizing of subreddits ability to forge unique identities. The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators, buuuut they haven't had trouble after the API debacle so maybe there are more people willing to provide free labor than I assume!
The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators
I mean YouTube comment sections were known for years to be an unmoderated nightmare of just people saying the absolute dumbest shit.
YouTube was and still is the most popular video site.
I think reddit has just stopped caring about the real content of the comments since, like you said, they've pretty much pivoted to images and video. Expect the comments section to be further eroded as well, in the name of needing less moderation. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit do an "AI" push where the "AI" is mostly just replacing moderators with what amounts to a more advanced automod.
Contrary to many in here, I don't think this will cause another exodus from reddit. those who might be concerned by this have already left or reduced their time on the platform
If Facebook hasn't had a mas exodus, neither will Reddit.
Facebooks death is slow and ongoing, and I'm pretty sure Reddit's will be too.
I don't know where you are getting your numbers. maybe it's your selection bias, but facebook's userbase keeps groing, and even if its getting less teenager engagement, those teenagers are flocking to Meta's other platform Instagram.
Yes. Best thing we can do is be ready (from a tech perspective) and welcoming (from a human perspective). They'll come or they won't.
Compared to summer, Lemmy now has thousands more users, hundreds of active communities (no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects), actual made-on-lemmy content in a bunch of places, and a bunch of apps that mostly have the bugs worked out. It's probably fair more appealing now to join than it was in summer.
We still have roadblocks: general confusion about federation (the email analogy seems to be working best), difficulty properly explaining how to sign up, a harder time finding communities, and it's impossible to migrate between instances without starting fresh.
no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects
I'm always saddened by how not-active some of those subjects are. For example: Even many large games struggle to have dedicated, active communities on Lemmy (assuming I'm not terrible at finding them, which is sadly also possible). Even some of the largest games have only completely dead communities here. A huge draw of Reddit for me was to be able to talk about the games I play with other people who do too. And mostly, the games I'd love to talk about aren't in the top 10 most played games list.
Now I could try to (re)vitalize those communities I would love to see around, and I have done so shortly after the exodus (on my previous account that died with the instance it was on). However, there's only so much talking into the void I can do until it gets boring.
I also feel like that might be a big issue for people coming over. After I manage to explain to my friends how federation works, they ask me to help them find the [topic of their interest] community, and all I can show them is a community with 10 threads, all over 3 months old and with 0 comments. Sadly it shouldn't surprise anyone they're not sticking around after that.
I think part of the problem is that we migrants decided that each reddit community also needed a corresponding lemmy community right out of the gate. For example, on reddit, there is r/hockey, then there's a sub for each individual team. However on lemmy, the team subs are dead due to insufficient traffic, and stay dead due to the exact chicken-and-egg problem you describe. The solution is to congregate in a larger community instead, where traffic is higher, even if you're posting about your relatively popular game. So as a Winnipeg Jets fan, I should post in the lemmy hockey community and not the Jets community. Likewise, if you want more chatter about Cyberpunk2077, post in the general gaming community. It works reasonably well for now, and if the signal to noise ratio ever gets bad in the larger community, then you can split off into specialty topics.
Ironically, reddit also went through this exact process 10-12 years ago. r/science became too noisy, so people ended up in r/physics and r/chemistry, and r/askscience and such. We need to start with communities with larger scope until they're active enough to split.
At this very moment I'm looking for a discussion on sci fi oriented table top rpgs. On reddit, there is dedicated discussion forums for a few of them. Here, I'll post to !rpg@ttrpg.network because there's more people there. Off I go!
Exactly.
Communities need to be more generic until a specialisation becomes too much of the content, then a specific community should be started.
Basically this is similar to my "organicness" argument. Reddit grew over many years and these niche subs got created as they were needed, not all at once. On Lemmy and the Fediverse in general, there will be another layer of organic growth and organisation with regards to federation, where instances will clump into "neighbourhoods" that users can choose.
I feel like in some big game communities (like BG3) it looks deader than it should but if you post something you actually get quite a few replies. People are there it’s just that not everyone feels like making a new post.
Though I agree that concentrating on more generic communities for now is a good solution
User migration is now possible in Lemmy 0.19:
Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.
Oh hey, I guess I learned something today :)
0.19 has been a real improvement in many ways. I'm a huge fan of the Scaled sort -- it helps the niche community content to surface.
All those toxic Redditors coming here... I hope we can manage to significantly beef up the mod tools before then.
I find Kbin's Collections feature a good fix for federation confusion. Honestly I think it should be the default type of view when browsing communities, you need to abstract the average user from federation as much as possible and leave browsing by instance as an advance option for those that want to engage with federation in detail
I still feel like if we want to grow faster organically we need to natively support more "discovery functions". Just things that you can toggle off like for example a recommendation screen and stuff. The algorithm for it we can make and adapt open source so no one is scared we collect data.
We're running into the Linux Vs Windows problem, where you can technically do more stuff and have more control over you account on Lemmy, but you need to be familiar with the fediverse before joining, just to Unterstand how to use Lemmy. That's a big problem for any potential new user.
Confusion about federation is not helped by federation not working recently due to a few notable Lemmy bugs (which are now fixed). Hopefully anyone new coming over doesn't encounter any new major bugs.
If a user didn’t exodus for the popular subs last time, I don’t see why they would this time.
Some of those popular subs were reopened with a new mod team that falls in line. Spez was too busy stuffing his ears with ad money instead of listening to his stakeholders
Point being casual users didn't see much interruption in the popular subs. So they did not have much incentive to switch to another platform.
“Didn’t see much interruption”? It was all over r/all and they simply decided to not switch. How will less people remaining to protest make more of a difference?
If you're serious, just remember the old saying "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you or I can remain solvent"
Usually they don't allow options on new stocks until after the cutoff period. Unless your broker allows naked shorting.
Do we really though? Don't get me wrong it's some of the most entertaining content I've seen on the Internet but I think it brings more harm than good on the whole, especially with the fervor around GME that spun off into being downright delusional. I'd prefer if we don't end up bringing that over here tbh.
I think the 'old' wsb even would be sort of borderline with the egging on and memefication of gambling one's life savings on weeklies
I think what may buoy them is the fact that you must append “Reddit” to searches, however, ChatGPT, DuckDuckGo, and Kagi are giving them a run for their money
Short version: don't
Long version: doooooooooont fuck with options. Knowing that reddit is going to tank is not enough of an edge for you to be able to make winning trades
Not financial advice, but there's been a few times I wanted to short something (I didn't in the end) but one thing to watch out for after an IPO is the date insiders are allowed to start selling stock. It's often 6 months or so after the IPO and can cause share price to drop.
So if a company jumps in value post IPO, there might be an opportunity to short it at some point, with the options expiring a period of time after the insider sell off date.
I imagine I'm going to do some paper trades on reddit on this and see what happens. I'm rooting for them to do poorly. Fuck u/Spez
Edit: And to clarify, I mean buy puts on something. I'd never short something directly.
Wouldn't be surprised to see lemmy activity spike in March. Probably not as big as during the API debacle, but still.
Is it even worth anything to investors anymore at this point? Huffman kind of destroyed any faith anyone had in Reddit, seems like it's just going to slowly turn into an ad distribution service to scam people who don't know any better lol
I've said myself that reddit's biggest assets were it's passionate userbase and it's trove of commentary. But I remember reading a comment, years ago now, that reddit's biggest asset was it's profile data. They know what communities you visited, and which you were most passionate about. They know what specific topics and keywords got you involved in a conversation. They know the content that you upvote and that you downvote. They know roughly where you live, what times you're online. They probably have a decent idea of your job and how much you earn. They data is worth something to data brokers, and it wouldn't surprise me if they start selling it after the IPO.
There's always some value to vultures (and vulture capital) that want to pick over the pieces. It might even still have meaningful value as an ongoing social media platform. But the expected IPO value has dropped heavily in the past few years, and is likely to keep dropping. This really isn't because of anything at Reddit, but of the financial markets in general.
The big question is how will investors feel about the potential for returns, i.e. revenues. I expect to see (well, read about) a whole lot of enshittification over there. Much more data mining, ads, freemium features, etc.
They will short the fuck out of it. There is literally no way this company can make money without making the product so much worse they will really start bleeding the users they need for revenue. It will explode on launch week and crash two or three weeks later.
Long short, long volatility until it flatlines. Basically free money. Their product is users and their data. If they upset the ecosystem users leave and decrease valuations... leads to layoffs and cost saving measures. Rinse and repeat until sufficiently dead.
The second they're publicly traded layoffs will simply be part of the cycle regardless of stock performance. C-Level must be seen to do SOMETHING to generate profits, or at least try. Regulators suck hard at following up on anything, but you gotta play by the book to keep them from sniffing around.
I'm also fully expecting this to be a case of butchering the pig. Huffman and the other cunts in charge will sell of their shares, make millions and run it into the ground. Much less scrutiny if a publicly traded company evaporates due to bad stock performance than when a private company suddenly disintegrates and the C-Level runs away with all the cash. Blame it on the STONK crowd and you're literally golden.
I'm sure they'll try and make as much money on the way out as possible, but tinfoil: This is the start of the end with a certain degree of intent by those in charge of that fucking company.
Without a doubt. They can't reasonably increase revenue so they need to pad* the books with layoffs. Those will result in the platform rotting out (further) from the inside. That's the long short position. Long volatility while the price bounces around like a coked up jack russel terrier.