https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/11/reddit_wants_to_raise_748m/
Time to start spamming those reposts: Top users are getting early access to 1.76 million shares
Great marketing for an IPO ...... we need enough money to equal three times what our CEO gets
Watch as he burns through it in one:-).
Also, bold of us to assume that he has not already spent it:-P.
It's in the form of stock options, which won't be worth any particularly noteworthy amount unless the IPO goes really well.
Are you talking about writing them off?
Options come with the obligation to pay for the underlying asset, so unless they are valued above the strike price, they are effectively worse than worthless.
No, I'm talking about real compensation.
Is it just options specifically, or grants, or ...?
Would the reported compensation be at the strike price, or the current valuation, or the difference?
Face value is unlikely to be the amount reported - I doubt the options are granted below the last reported market rate. Hence it's probably relative to the amount of underlying stock the options represent.
You'd have to check the SEC-filings for more accuracy than that.
Options can come with or without the obligation to buy the underlying asset. I'd assume they will never be worth less than worthless.
Less than worthless would be when exercised, not exercising would be worth 0 - unless you paid for the option contract, in which case not exercising would represent a loss.
Yeah, they kept sending me emails begging me to invest. Reddit’s IPO is a fucking clown car headed toward a cliff.
I report them as spam.
Its nothing i signed up for, and consider it marketing. And there is no unsubscribe link in the email, and its from an unmonitored inbox.
That makes it spam, and i hope it trashes their mailer IP's reputation
Yep, I do the same. I opted out of all 20ish email comm options on that shithole site so it’s just straight up spam.
Its nothing i signed up for, and consider it marketing.
Sounds like standard Reddit content to me.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit
It’s literally the first sentence of the description of Lemmy. Of course there are differences or no one would be here.
So to be clear, are you trying to say Lemmy isn’t a reddit clone?
It's almost certainly going to do well enough that the VCs and insiders will be able to cash out. The founders will be centi-millionaires. But, people who buy in at the IPO price, I wouldn't be surprised if they lose a lot of money.
I’m not investing because fuck you Spez and wallstreetbets is certainly going to have a field day. I can’t wait for popcorn time.
Reddit’s IPO is a fucking clown car headed toward a cliff
I hope it makes a funny noise when they hit the ground
Reddit is planning six tiers of early access based on each "participant's contributions to Reddit," the company said in its updated SEC filing. Those tiers are based on a user's "karma" score, ostensibly an aggregate total of up/down votes on posts and comments.
The first tier of users will be those "who have meaningfully contributed to Reddit community programs," though what that means isn't explained more clearly. After that come tier 2 users, who must hold at least 200,000 karma points or have taken at least 5,000 moderator actions. Tier three includes users and moderators who hold at least 100,000 karma points and have taken 2,500 moderator actions. Tiers 4 and 5 are each half of the previous tier's total, and tier 6 includes everyone else, with a waitlist available if the total number of shares purchased exceeds the original 1.76 million.
Basically people who karma farm with low effort posts. This will only encourage low quality posts.
The best part is that this whole thing is about having the "opportunity" to purchase reddit stock at its IPO price. This user generated content farm wouldn't dare give away equity for free to users responsible for the site having any past, present, or future value.
I'm not a finance person, but the only gambling I'd do on this company is hope that Wall Street pumps the price post-IPO so I can short it.
My understanding is that the value of each reddit user is priced roughly at $2. A Facebook user is priced at roughly $40. Their only options to maybe be profitable are more enshittification, more users, or both. Or, you know, not paying hundreds of millions of dollars to the execs of an RSS feed with voting and comments.
I bet wallstreetbets is going to pile into shorts out of the gate because who doesn't want to stick it to reddit and its WSB lol. Then after a slumpy start some whale is going to blow up all those shorts and pump it like crazy and then everyone will buy panic calls and the early ones in will fade the top and screw over the call buyers on the way back down. Thats my prediction. Not touching this with someone else's 10 foot pole lol
I got the you’re invited to the IPO email from them and said, Fuck you Spez, as I deleted it; god that felt good. I hope they short the ever loving hell out of it.
A Reddit user is $2 now, but they have terrible ad targeting. Reddit users volunteer troves of info about themselves, so even a modest effort to start tying all those user signals together could be a great boost to that number (which really wouldn’t take much). Plus monetizing that base for LLM data and you got a stew going. They’ll of course do the cash grabby enshitifying stuff too, but their user data is much more underutilized than facebooks at the moment.
I got offered a while ago and I had 1,500 link and 0.5M comment karma after a decade. I was never a moderator or did anything important. I can't imagine that was considered meaningfully contributed. At least I hope not.
I got invited with just a bit over 100k; I considered it, just out of 'fuck it, why not' but didn't follow through. I have like 6 posts of maybe, maybe 300 upvotes combined, the rest is comments; either helpful, amusing, but not really 'meaningful'. Account since 2013, lurker for a while before that. Though I got out of my shell and shed a ton of social anxiety with those comments, so personal growth woo.
I'm really curious about how it's going to launch, and the first few months.
As someone who was invited to that first group and told them to go fuck themselves, it's actually mostly people who have participated in reddit surveys and reddit mod meetups (where mods from a local area get blasted on Huffman's dime). Almost every mod that I know that went to one of these events got an invite and all of them gave similar answers to me.
Also, 200k karma isn't a ton. It likely places you in the top 1%, but most people don't participate anyways. I had over 300k (I think, I'm not checking) and maybe 1k was from a single post. Everything else was from the occasional comment
For the first group though they didn't actually bother to look into them. The 2 subs I ran have both been private since the last priest despite numerous warnings that I'd be removed if I didn't make them public. And my subs participated in numerous protests before then.
Still a mod on there all this time later!
Wait I could’ve gotten drunk on huffman’s money? I just skipped mod meetups because the company sounded awful
Oh yeah. They brought us in for one and said it was a 2 drink maximum. No one was actually checking, so we were all plastered with the admins
"Website that never made a profit thinks it's worth over 6 billion dollars. Yes US dollars."
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 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.
Separate business that licenses the trademark, and they still use Google instead of Bing!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Yeah, reddit is astroturfed to hell and back. unless its something programming, the idiots on reddit are usually wrong.
Honestly not much different on largerv lemmy communities either.
This is more of a symptom of our society than of a specific platform.
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.
Given that CEO pay was like 30% of their budget last year, administrative overhead seems like a good guess
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?
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.
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.
I'm considering buying a few shares (if I can grab just a few) just to watch it burn. And so I can be part of history. Or I'll wait for it crash after the ipo and grab a few as a likely to never profit but might type of play.
You guys really are no fun. I'm not going to throw thousands at them but if robinhood or sofi or whoever will let me grab 5 or less shares, I may make it happen. It's also likely to be a longer term profitable trade if the stock tanks (as I am sure others already expect) and then reddit gets bought out by musk or even openai.
One last edit and then I'm done here. I bet every one of you here is a broke mofo crying about your utilities, groceries, etc going up while you're income stays stagnant. You have fun with that.
Clearly you aren't doing it right. Me buying shares is a death knell for companies. I'd be surprised if my broker doesn't give companies a courtesy call when I've bought a few shares to let 'em know the company's about to go under.
At the very least, me buying shares in a company makes certain it will never rise any higher than at that share price, not until right after I’ve sold my shares.
I made quite a bit of money back in the day on Apple. Bought their shares dirt cheap, and watch them come back from the brink of irrelevance.
.... Then they said they were making a phone. "That's never gonna work", I said to myself, and sold it all.
At least I made a nice profit, right?
If you watch many IPO, you will see it spike quickly then a large dump after that. I know the last IPO I was part of, we couldn't sell for several days after the IPO.
Days? When my company went public employees couldn't sell their stock for several months. And as soon as we could the price tanked, because everyone wanted to cash out.
The selling was understandable, having 80% of your net worth in a single stock is scary, but hundreds of first-time stock owners doing a fire sale didn't do the stock price any favors.
By the time we could sell. The stock had already dropped. It never really recovered after that
I bought Facebook at $18 thanks to the post IPO dump. I waited for the Google post IPO dump but it never came.
I read the Reddit S-1, the lock-up period is three days. Yeah, I'm a nerd, but in this case it was more just wanting to know how long Huffman et al will be forced to sit and watch the stocks freefall before they could ditch them, lol.
Most the time they are restricted in their sales. He has to declare his in advance. Most likely he can sell for six months
How to get downvotes:
-Complain about getting downvoted
-Name call anyone who does not upvote your comment
part of history
What every idiot who lost money on Gamestop said.
I might wheel it after it tanks, but probably not. My tax advisor always lectures me when I claim stock profits.
I want some, if nothing else as a souvenir of all the time I spent there before the place turned to shit. Too bad nobody makes actual certificates anymore, I would pay extra to get a few shares in certificate form.
No way I am paying that much for it. The true value is probably much closer to $.30 than $30.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Twelve dollars and a bitten sandwich. That's my final offer, and already more than generous.
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
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. :-(
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. (!).
As long as we are still talking about Reddit, I want you to have Huffman's anus as well:-). Have you tried sending him a picture of you dressed up as Elon Musk? Maybe you could become friends with Musk first, by sending him a picture of you dressed up as Donald Trump? :-P
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.
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 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.
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.
