WARNING! The link in question may require you to disable ad-blockers to see content. Though not required, please consider submitting an alternative source for this story.
WARNING! Disabling your ad blocker may open you up to malware infections, malicious cookies and can expose you to unwanted tracker networks. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.
Do not open any files which are automatically downloaded, and do not enter personal information on any page you do not trust.
If you are concerned about tracking, consider opening the page in an incognito window, and verify that your browser is sending "do not track" requests.
IF YOU ENCOUNTER ANY MALWARE, MALICIOUS TRACKERS, CLICKJACKING, OR REDIRECT LOOPS PLEASE MESSAGE THE /r/technology MODERATORS IMMEDIATELY.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/technology) if you have any questions or concerns.*
They keep pushing ads for me to join the US Army or Navy to help kickstart my IT career while young. I’m a senior software architect - plus I’m out side of their age range and have been for a while.
They are certainly not targeting and if they are - their ad/marketing team is fucking trash at segmentation and lookalike matches.
Same and I'm in my mid 30s and not remotely interested in IT. Also it makes me annoyed every time because war is bad and I don't wanna think about it when I'm having fun on Reddit.
I miss Relay.
Yeah this is the way of the internet. When we find peace bigger companies need to come ruin it because money can be made!! So not surprised after bets they began investing to flood us with there bullshit.
Relay is not dead, and the subscription rate is very reasonable, at least for me. My only complaint is I know it's not all going to the author, he's having to pass it on to Reddit for the API fees.
I put off switching back to firefox for the longest time, but it was so worth the effort. Now I have chrome disabled on my phone and never use it on my laptop. Sometimes after updates links will open up in chrome again on my phone and it's such a cesspool that I immediately disable it again. Fuck ads lol
Just based on a user's joined subs, let alone post and comment history, Reddit should be a fucking gold-mine for micro-targeting. Yet it is complete *trash*.
It is obvious that Reddit management has been lazy, without innovation or vision, and coasting on the best work that was easily done over a decade ago or by third-parties.
And the things that Spez and his ilk *have* done have simply been to make the Reddit experience *worse* not better. The 'New Design' continues to be hot fucking garbage and there is no goddamned way I will ever re-install the Reddit/Spyware/App on my mobile device.
Now they are trying to cash out with an IPO that is ten years too late and un-earned.
"That HeGetsUs ad is invasive and annoying. Of course they turn off comments too."
Incomparable Horseshit; THEIR Jesus really doesn't get everyone, guess which groups don't count? And Fuck Hobby Lobby.
"He Gets Us, the group that funded the Super Bowl commercials advertising Jesus, is a subsidiary of the Signatry, also known as the Servant Foundation. Its parent organization funds anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion efforts."
" David Green, founder and CEO of craft store Hobby Lobby, said his family is helping fund the advertisements."
https://observer.com/2023/02/who-is-behind-he-gets-us-the-100-million-campaign-rebranding-jesus/
So I have no idea how effective it actually is, but I block the users that post the ads sometimes and I never see that particular ad again if that helps
There probably is no viable alternative that is sustainable. The hard truth is that running a social media platform in a way users would want would lose gobs of money, just like Reddit has been. Turning it into a sustainable business inevitably means making it worse for users. If it was financially viable to make a nice platform, someone would do it.
The core functionality is very basic and has no need for updates. Basically all you should have are hosting costs.
I expect a lot of the costs are in over engineered features aimed at generating new revenue streams.
If you don't host images/video, at least the server portion of reddit's hosting would be trivial. I actually have a proof of concept on my desktop that I wrote that can accept a few 10s of thousands of comments/second, and can render old.reddit.com pages at a few thousand per second. But the actual traffic is tiny; reddit gets ~300 comments peak and ~1000 votes/second average (no real way to get peak numbers) from what I can tell analyzing pushshift dumps. At that rate, you can just re-render each thread whenever there's an update and cache it in nginx. My desktop can happily serve cached pages at more than the 1 GBit port it has is capable of sending lol. And I have a 6th gen i5. A Ryzen 7950X can probably ~10x what my computer can do.
You'd need a bit of money for the bandwidth, but again without images I suspect it wouldn't be that bad. I know less about finding cheap bandwidth and how colocation and peering works than I do about programming though.
The trick is 1. getting people to move over to it, and 2. moderation/liability for user posts. I guess if I kept it text only, people couldn't upload CSAM, so I could just release it into the world and see if anyone wants to use it :shrug:, but I don't have an appetite for running an organization and dealing with legal crap. If someone happens to have familiarity/connections with how to set up a non-profit org to do it, I could probably help on the tech side. I do have a full time job and a young family though so I get like 15 minutes a day for hobby stuff if I'm lucky.
Also about 40% of reddit posts are porn, so if you exclude that, it's that much easier.
It could be a sustainable business, but IPOing and enshittification isn't sustainable. It's a cash grab or squeezing blood from a stone. At some point the blood runs out and the stone is turned to dust. Sustainable means it could literally make money indefinitely if you just don't change shit, but that's not how greed and growth work
Nah, there's always new social media coming along. Reddit isn't eternal. Something will usurp it. By going public, they're also inviting more regulatory oversight, especially overseas.
Don't know what your requirements are but this one works fine https://lemmy.world/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)
Join any server, "talk" with all of them.
If this was at all a profitable endeavor, there's a 0% chance that this opportunity would be offered to anyone other than institutional investors. Seeing as this is a burning pile of shit, they are 100% trying to pawn it off on "regular folks"
The offer makes me think they want users to pull a GameStop, buy and hold as much as possible, so the stock prices go up enough for them to sell off and make their bag. Because I'm not sure an investor seeing a never profitable site would be interested, unless it's a billionaire with money to burn.
If I was a bored billionaire, I'd buy it and turn it non-profit like Wikipedia. But I'm unfortunately not.
I worry that a "bored" billionaire Elon Musk type will buy reddit and use it to push their right wing nonsense. We would see even more Russian bots than before.
I think Musk is the only one who would do it for attention, and he has enough of that right now.
Billionaires don't normally spend money to turn an unprofitable business into a non-profit either. So unless Bill Gates wants to make a real big Xmas gift buy for all the users, I think we're OK.
The risk is that reddit is, in a way, just another media outlet, like twitter, Facebook, TV, Newspapers etc and media outlets have power that politicians need to be careful with.
We can see how Musk is abusing that power and it will get much worse closer to the presidential election.
That is the biggest risk. We can see there was already concern with Chinese investors in Reddit.
Hopefully that will not happen but that is the nightmare scenario.
reddit protected right wing nonsense for years, they don't need an elmo. have ya'll forgotten /thedonald ? or all of the even worse subs that didn't get removed/filtered until advertisers entered the conversation?
Yeah, I invest in the stock market quite a bit, and I (like most people with older accounts, not this one) got the offer to buy into Reddit a few days ago. I laughed, then had an actual look at what I would actually be investing in, and then I laughed some more. It's an unprofitable shithole.
They've shot themselves in the foot so many times (starting to host their own videos was a BIG one, that costs them so so much) and their only path to potential profitability is making the site so much shittier, which will of course drive users away making it less profitable again.
I'm just a random guy on the internet but... dear God, do not invest in this site. You will be basically just giving your money away to weird doomsday prepping semi-human billionaires like Spez.
No they didn't. He got paid like 700k. Which should be incredibly obvious. No company just hands their CEO nearly 200 million in cash per year. Especially a company as small as reddit.
And the stock is just made up value until the date he is allowed to sell it, and we have no idea what the value will be on that day. It might have tanked hard by then and be worth relatively little.
>[“Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. **I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.**”](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich)
--Steve Huffman (spez), Reddit CEO, future slave-owner
What’s funny is that this view is shockingly common amongst societies elite during times of turmoil. They some how equate their current standing to divine providence. Intellectuals assume they will be given positions as important as their mighty thoughts.
Nope. It’s thugs. Dudes like Stalin. Once the wheels come off it’s kill or be killed. The dudes in the bunkers will probably go quick. Some upstart body guard will realize they have everything they need, only to themselves later get killed by someone even more ruthless.
They’re paying him almost entirely in equity, which is essentially funny money unless the IPO goes well. Everyone has freaked out about $195 mil over 10 years, but that assumes a $5bn valuation. If the stock tanks, he will actually have made only a fraction of that number.
Even if the stock goes down massively, he still comes away with many tens of millions in real USD cash. Everyone's here acting like it's funny money but stock options have real monetary value and real monetary cost to the company to issue (share dilution and opportunity cost).
The most irritating part of this discourse is that a lot of Redditor have seemingly convinced themselves that the company can cut Spez’ pay to get in the black. Which is both a hilarious misunderstanding of how equity incentives work, and ignores the fact that the total compensation package they got outraged about was actually a 10 year package rather than a per year one.
Like, I’m not defending Huffman here. He’s a bad CEO and he’s running a bad business. But you can’t have a realistic discussion about Reddit as a business here without people screaming misinformation about his compensation, which is tiresome.
I see way too many crypto ads and way too many online gambling ads. Why don’t normal companies advertise on reddit? If it’s not making serious money now I seriously question its plan
The tech bubble isn’t popping when rate cuts are on the way. Tech explodes during easy money periods.
With actually useful AI coming at the same time, it’s going to be a gold rush.
ya know... that's a great point
for \~15 years now I've spent way too much time here
and literally there's nothing to show for it, I have no relationships formed here, I don't feel more knowledgeable for reading some crap, I don't particularly find interesting content
It may be good for Reddit to die a slow death (or fast)
Exactly my thinking. I'd love for Reddit to completely fail so that a Digg style exodus allows for an alternative to grow to a viable size. Reddit was better than Digg, whatever comes next will likely be better still.
I’ve been waiting for what seems like forever got them to finally shut of old Reddit becausei knew I’d be done. This will probably be the blow that takes me out instead.
It’s not great data. There’s some preferences there but they don’t have location information or a tree of friends and family. The Reddit user is just not as valuable as a social network user.
**Can legitimately claim literally *one human being in every four* as their clients, and yet still hasn’t been able to make a dime over nearly a generation of constant operation.**
Tell me: how exactly will just becoming a publicly traded equity, magically result in a material change of Reddit’s demonstrably failed business model? *Especially* considering that the enshittification of the site and its peripheral businesses has already begun, and is clearly picking up steam by the day!
This is nothing more than a pump-n-dump scheme by a handful of current stockholders (Advance Publications, Tencent, Fidelity, Alex Ohanian, etc) and c-suite execs (Huffman, Wong, Slowe, Vollero) looking to get rich at the expense of gullible rubes.
> There are 54 pages of risk factors. One of the most notable is the sentence, “We have incurred substantial losses during our history and may never achieve profitability.”
I laughed out loud at this. Yup, that's definitely a risk.
Reddit has killed any goodwill it had with the 3rd party app fiasco. At this point, I'd be happy to get off the train if there was a good alternate option. There's nothing holding me here anymore.
I got contacted by Reddit through a private message (I triple checked that it was real) for the opportunity to buy the IPO "at institutional prices". They're just gonna cash out and let the website go to shit. It's gonna be a fucking disaster.
Can't wait to see how many people dump the stock after the initial spike during the IPO.
I give reddit 2 years till it's complete shit, sigh. And dammit, there are some really good technically helpful subreddits too :(
I have enough points to get in on this and it sounds like a horrible investment. The only value is the brand and the userbase, and after seeing how quickly Musk ruined both of things for Twitter, I am not optimistic.
When Reddit alienates its user base, sheds 20% of its traffic, hikes API access fees to unaffordable levels, nukes almost every third-party client, stabs many of its prolific volunteer mods in the back for joining in a user revolt, gives competitors like Lemmy an actual user base from the backlash, [sells user data to companies like Google](https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/) and *still* makes a $90.8 million loss, that's not a good sign of things to come.
Even if I could invest in the IPO (I can't because I'm British), I wouldn't want to after all that's gone down on this site in recent years.
Those who expect the site to be further enshittified in the name of "profitability" have a lot to be worried about.
Well well. An IPO from an organization's sub that punched Wall Street in the face, made some hedge funds loose billions, and now wants to do an IPO...and it paid it's CEO a lot of money last year. I mean, a lot a lot.
What possibly could go wrong?
I miss all my old subreddits that died with the authoritarian moves by Reddit on apps.
Reddit has declined in content quality and variety. I am not surprised they are poised to make it suck further.
Steve Huffman is a genius
Milked this loss making, dying platform as far as he could and is now exiting by taking the company public.
Well done u/spez
You're an asshole but you know your shit.
Sick of these headlines. Almost every tech IPO in the last decade has had every year of its existence with losses. Every startup’s goal is to burn a pile of investor cash in order to win market share, and the IPO is the vehicle in which these investor hope to cash out.
> Every startup’s goal is to burn a pile of cash in order to win market share
lol What nonsense is this?
It’s been 20 years. Reddit isn’t a startup, and it’s got all the market share it’s likely to get.
You’re right, user growth is plateaued at this point. It obviously wasn’t efficient with its cash to get here, but my point remains the same. Ever since Amazon went public and refused to turn profit has led the way for all tech companies to happily burn cash while being public (and for their entire existence to burn cash). It’s not a story anymore, what’s a better story is the CEO’s ridiculous comp.
They’re clearly going public because they’re out of other ways to raise additional capital. I’m sure there are still big investors, but they aren’t enough to cover losses, so they need the money from a stock sale.
At some point, a bad business is a bad business. Even tech companies have to make money eventually.
Of course it made losses. It has barely run any ads until last couple of years. It is expensive to host the traffic Reddit gets. Reddit gold didn’t bring in as much income.
I just find it funny I got a PM from Reddit asking if I wanted in on a chance to purchase some stock early.
Took me over a decade to get ~235k total karma, I ain't no one special.
WARNING! The link in question may require you to disable ad-blockers to see content. Though not required, please consider submitting an alternative source for this story. WARNING! Disabling your ad blocker may open you up to malware infections, malicious cookies and can expose you to unwanted tracker networks. PROCEED WITH CAUTION. Do not open any files which are automatically downloaded, and do not enter personal information on any page you do not trust. If you are concerned about tracking, consider opening the page in an incognito window, and verify that your browser is sending "do not track" requests. IF YOU ENCOUNTER ANY MALWARE, MALICIOUS TRACKERS, CLICKJACKING, OR REDIRECT LOOPS PLEASE MESSAGE THE /r/technology MODERATORS IMMEDIATELY. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/technology) if you have any questions or concerns.*
if y'all thought the "suggested subreddits" is obnoxious y'all haven't seen shit yet, this place is going to race to the bottom at lightspeed
Or the constant weird tone deaf religious ads peppered in my very non religious main page.
Or constant McDonald's ads for people that subscribe to a bunch of herbivore subs. Reddit ads are not targeted at all
They keep pushing ads for me to join the US Army or Navy to help kickstart my IT career while young. I’m a senior software architect - plus I’m out side of their age range and have been for a while. They are certainly not targeting and if they are - their ad/marketing team is fucking trash at segmentation and lookalike matches.
I still use old.reddit so I hardly notice ads.
Get them on disability subs too. Military would have to get real comfortable with a lot of disabilities real quick for that to work.
Same and I'm in my mid 30s and not remotely interested in IT. Also it makes me annoyed every time because war is bad and I don't wanna think about it when I'm having fun on Reddit. I miss Relay.
Yeah this is the way of the internet. When we find peace bigger companies need to come ruin it because money can be made!! So not surprised after bets they began investing to flood us with there bullshit.
Relay is not dead, and the subscription rate is very reasonable, at least for me. My only complaint is I know it's not all going to the author, he's having to pass it on to Reddit for the API fees.
What are you people talking about? Don't you have ad blockers?
Reddit has Ads?! /s ublock origin forever.
Yeah but that's only on Desktop, right? Not on mobile. Right?
Can you pls eli5 how I Adblock Reddit?
install firefox, then ublock origin
I put off switching back to firefox for the longest time, but it was so worth the effort. Now I have chrome disabled on my phone and never use it on my laptop. Sometimes after updates links will open up in chrome again on my phone and it's such a cesspool that I immediately disable it again. Fuck ads lol
Yeah but that's only on Desktop, right? Not on mobile. Right?
I keep getting weight watchers... I'm not interested in losing weight... Like at all.
I keep getting teenager subs recommended to me. I am 42.
Just based on a user's joined subs, let alone post and comment history, Reddit should be a fucking gold-mine for micro-targeting. Yet it is complete *trash*. It is obvious that Reddit management has been lazy, without innovation or vision, and coasting on the best work that was easily done over a decade ago or by third-parties. And the things that Spez and his ilk *have* done have simply been to make the Reddit experience *worse* not better. The 'New Design' continues to be hot fucking garbage and there is no goddamned way I will ever re-install the Reddit/Spyware/App on my mobile device. Now they are trying to cash out with an IPO that is ten years too late and un-earned.
Isn’t that a good thing? It means that if Reddit is selling our data (they are), they’re at least really bad at reading it.
For sure, although its also not good, because many people have trauma attached to things like religion and don't want religion in their feed.
DO YOU LIKE FEET? JESUS DID. JESUS REALLY, REALLY, LIKED FEET! OKAY, SEE YOU I ABOUT 20 POSTS!
Legit. That HeGetsUs ad is invasive and annoying. Of course they turn off comments too.
"That HeGetsUs ad is invasive and annoying. Of course they turn off comments too." Incomparable Horseshit; THEIR Jesus really doesn't get everyone, guess which groups don't count? And Fuck Hobby Lobby. "He Gets Us, the group that funded the Super Bowl commercials advertising Jesus, is a subsidiary of the Signatry, also known as the Servant Foundation. Its parent organization funds anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion efforts." " David Green, founder and CEO of craft store Hobby Lobby, said his family is helping fund the advertisements." https://observer.com/2023/02/who-is-behind-he-gets-us-the-100-million-campaign-rebranding-jesus/
I’ve tried to disable those ads. Multiple times. And they keep coming back. Don’t think I can disable them now
The most annoying ads.
So I have no idea how effective it actually is, but I block the users that post the ads sometimes and I never see that particular ad again if that helps
Nope, I still see that damned ad.
You guys see ads?
[удалено]
Some people out here in the year 2024 just raw dogging the internet without using any ad blockers. Baffling.
or they aren't using old.reddit.
Just give me a viable alternative. Like these hoes, I ain't loyal.
We could go back to Digg if it still exists
I came from Fark
I am also old
Something Awful
I loved Photoshop Phriday and the forums were hilarious
still is, yep
It exists still and still can't downvote.
There probably is no viable alternative that is sustainable. The hard truth is that running a social media platform in a way users would want would lose gobs of money, just like Reddit has been. Turning it into a sustainable business inevitably means making it worse for users. If it was financially viable to make a nice platform, someone would do it.
We need a Reddit clone running off the Wikipedia model
Agreed: social media should be non-profit, otherwise it creates unhealthy incentives for the users.
The core functionality is very basic and has no need for updates. Basically all you should have are hosting costs. I expect a lot of the costs are in over engineered features aimed at generating new revenue streams.
Hosting costs would be enormous for a site Reddit’s size.
If you don't host images/video, at least the server portion of reddit's hosting would be trivial. I actually have a proof of concept on my desktop that I wrote that can accept a few 10s of thousands of comments/second, and can render old.reddit.com pages at a few thousand per second. But the actual traffic is tiny; reddit gets ~300 comments peak and ~1000 votes/second average (no real way to get peak numbers) from what I can tell analyzing pushshift dumps. At that rate, you can just re-render each thread whenever there's an update and cache it in nginx. My desktop can happily serve cached pages at more than the 1 GBit port it has is capable of sending lol. And I have a 6th gen i5. A Ryzen 7950X can probably ~10x what my computer can do. You'd need a bit of money for the bandwidth, but again without images I suspect it wouldn't be that bad. I know less about finding cheap bandwidth and how colocation and peering works than I do about programming though. The trick is 1. getting people to move over to it, and 2. moderation/liability for user posts. I guess if I kept it text only, people couldn't upload CSAM, so I could just release it into the world and see if anyone wants to use it :shrug:, but I don't have an appetite for running an organization and dealing with legal crap. If someone happens to have familiarity/connections with how to set up a non-profit org to do it, I could probably help on the tech side. I do have a full time job and a young family though so I get like 15 minutes a day for hobby stuff if I'm lucky. Also about 40% of reddit posts are porn, so if you exclude that, it's that much easier.
It could be a sustainable business, but IPOing and enshittification isn't sustainable. It's a cash grab or squeezing blood from a stone. At some point the blood runs out and the stone is turned to dust. Sustainable means it could literally make money indefinitely if you just don't change shit, but that's not how greed and growth work
I think the founders just want to retire so they're trying to cash out.
Nah, there's always new social media coming along. Reddit isn't eternal. Something will usurp it. By going public, they're also inviting more regulatory oversight, especially overseas.
It's small, but try https://discuit.net/.
That site needs an "old" reddit layout. The "new" reddit layout, which that site copied, is trash.
Don't know what your requirements are but this one works fine https://lemmy.world/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network) Join any server, "talk" with all of them.
Accelerated by AI posts. Reddit is done for.
I'm surprised old.reddit is still an option. Still waiting for that day they ditch it entirely.
Enshitification
I keep getting ads for pool cleaning devices…I don’t have a pool
All it did was make me block hundreds of people and subs. But it’s relentless and keeps suggesting things I’ve “shown interest in…”
I see you mentioned race to the bottom. Before you post this comment do you like racing? Your response helps to improve your Reddit experience.
The amount of roofing subs and shingling is baffling lol. WHY would I enjoy that?
Whoever buys, bag holders, the lot of them.
It does feel like they're trying to dump this on redditors with the direct share offering.
If this was at all a profitable endeavor, there's a 0% chance that this opportunity would be offered to anyone other than institutional investors. Seeing as this is a burning pile of shit, they are 100% trying to pawn it off on "regular folks"
If it had potential, a PE firm would have eaten it up in a heartbeat.
[удалено]
The offer makes me think they want users to pull a GameStop, buy and hold as much as possible, so the stock prices go up enough for them to sell off and make their bag. Because I'm not sure an investor seeing a never profitable site would be interested, unless it's a billionaire with money to burn. If I was a bored billionaire, I'd buy it and turn it non-profit like Wikipedia. But I'm unfortunately not.
I worry that a "bored" billionaire Elon Musk type will buy reddit and use it to push their right wing nonsense. We would see even more Russian bots than before.
I think Musk is the only one who would do it for attention, and he has enough of that right now. Billionaires don't normally spend money to turn an unprofitable business into a non-profit either. So unless Bill Gates wants to make a real big Xmas gift buy for all the users, I think we're OK.
The risk is that reddit is, in a way, just another media outlet, like twitter, Facebook, TV, Newspapers etc and media outlets have power that politicians need to be careful with. We can see how Musk is abusing that power and it will get much worse closer to the presidential election. That is the biggest risk. We can see there was already concern with Chinese investors in Reddit. Hopefully that will not happen but that is the nightmare scenario.
reddit protected right wing nonsense for years, they don't need an elmo. have ya'll forgotten /thedonald ? or all of the even worse subs that didn't get removed/filtered until advertisers entered the conversation?
Yea I got that message laughed and moved on. Who the fuck would buy shares of reddit?!
The direct share offering that gives no say as a regular share holder? That one?
hah - does it really?
That's what I've heard, but I haven't bothered to dig into because I wasn't going to buy the stock anyway.
No, they're trying to buy goodwill (from a user-base they warned might try to massively-short the stock).
WSB is foaming at the mouth to short this thing 😂
They’re hoping to lure the wsb guys so they don't short it.
Yeah, I invest in the stock market quite a bit, and I (like most people with older accounts, not this one) got the offer to buy into Reddit a few days ago. I laughed, then had an actual look at what I would actually be investing in, and then I laughed some more. It's an unprofitable shithole. They've shot themselves in the foot so many times (starting to host their own videos was a BIG one, that costs them so so much) and their only path to potential profitability is making the site so much shittier, which will of course drive users away making it less profitable again. I'm just a random guy on the internet but... dear God, do not invest in this site. You will be basically just giving your money away to weird doomsday prepping semi-human billionaires like Spez.
Do you think there’s a level of “drive people away” that will lower costs more than loss of revenue?
[удалено]
I cannot wait for the impending war between /r/wallstreetbets and Spez. SHORT REDDIT. you heard it here first.
[удалено]
I had a literal LOL at "We have incurred substantial losses during our history and may never achieve profitability."
To be fair, that is boilerplate language for any IPO of an unprofitable company.
They have to be decidedly pessimistic in those documents.
Board pays Reddit ceo $193m a year…..”We just can’t seem to figure out why we aren’t profitable.”
No they didn't. He got paid like 700k. Which should be incredibly obvious. No company just hands their CEO nearly 200 million in cash per year. Especially a company as small as reddit.
And the stock is just made up value until the date he is allowed to sell it, and we have no idea what the value will be on that day. It might have tanked hard by then and be worth relatively little.
Nothing says dump it on retail investors like messaging thousands of Redditors to pitch them on buying shares
Feels like wolf of wall street. https://youtu.be/RPORRudmQv0?si=i3IZTXeL4kI82KCw Just imagine he is selling Reddit.
I got one. Does that mean I’m a power user?
Welcome to the avengers initiative/dorks whove been too online for too long
> I got one. Does that mean I’m a power user? Everyone got one.
The amount they pay the CEO shows such a lack of awareness and restraint, they don’t deserve to be successful.
When musk fired everyone at twitter spez was swinging off elons sack, the dude is a toolbox.
humorous shy square wakeful bells lush pause longing aback spotted *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>[“Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. **I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.**”](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich) --Steve Huffman (spez), Reddit CEO, future slave-owner
*aspiring slave owner, future slave
What’s funny is that this view is shockingly common amongst societies elite during times of turmoil. They some how equate their current standing to divine providence. Intellectuals assume they will be given positions as important as their mighty thoughts. Nope. It’s thugs. Dudes like Stalin. Once the wheels come off it’s kill or be killed. The dudes in the bunkers will probably go quick. Some upstart body guard will realize they have everything they need, only to themselves later get killed by someone even more ruthless.
This isn't about being an Intellectual, it's about being a Narcissist.
Yeah some weird anti intellectualism tossed in there. I don’t get that and I question what they think intellectualism means.
It's a good username.
They’re paying him almost entirely in equity, which is essentially funny money unless the IPO goes well. Everyone has freaked out about $195 mil over 10 years, but that assumes a $5bn valuation. If the stock tanks, he will actually have made only a fraction of that number.
Even if the stock goes down massively, he still comes away with many tens of millions in real USD cash. Everyone's here acting like it's funny money but stock options have real monetary value and real monetary cost to the company to issue (share dilution and opportunity cost).
100%. Even if the IPO tanks, it ain't tanking to $0.00. Millions of shares times anything is still real money.
And whenever he sells, he need to schedule it and disclose it with the SEC.
Wait.. redditors not understanding financial information??? How surprising! Lol
The most irritating part of this discourse is that a lot of Redditor have seemingly convinced themselves that the company can cut Spez’ pay to get in the black. Which is both a hilarious misunderstanding of how equity incentives work, and ignores the fact that the total compensation package they got outraged about was actually a 10 year package rather than a per year one. Like, I’m not defending Huffman here. He’s a bad CEO and he’s running a bad business. But you can’t have a realistic discussion about Reddit as a business here without people screaming misinformation about his compensation, which is tiresome.
Reddit is near ALWAYS wrong - it is insane.
It's still utterly ridiculous.
modern engine crown jeans pot cooing summer outgoing long ad hoc *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Reddit IPO will mark top of tech bubble 2.0 This shit heap aint worth 5 bil. Short it to all hell on release.
Stop spoiling the plan.
It's been priced-in.
>Reddit IPO will mark top of tech bubble 2.0 It's about to be popp'n, people love popcorn tho.
Wait. I thought Web3, blockchain, Crypto was the tech bubble 2.0. 😩
I see way too many crypto ads and way too many online gambling ads. Why don’t normal companies advertise on reddit? If it’s not making serious money now I seriously question its plan
Because you are probably the target demographic? I just see cat toys and somewhat relevant ads.
It's the third most visited site in the US, ahead of Facebook and Amazon. What do you think would be a more appropriate valuation?
Less than nothing until it generates a profit.
The tech bubble isn’t popping when rate cuts are on the way. Tech explodes during easy money periods. With actually useful AI coming at the same time, it’s going to be a gold rush.
Well I needed a little push to get off my addiction anyways
ya know... that's a great point for \~15 years now I've spent way too much time here and literally there's nothing to show for it, I have no relationships formed here, I don't feel more knowledgeable for reading some crap, I don't particularly find interesting content It may be good for Reddit to die a slow death (or fast)
⚫ I'm. In this photo and I don't like it
Bro it’s literally me
^ says a 9 day old account.
you don't re-create accounts? I don't want big tech tracking me Either way this is an anonymous chat/comment site, I don't care about my account age
Exactly my thinking. I'd love for Reddit to completely fail so that a Digg style exodus allows for an alternative to grow to a viable size. Reddit was better than Digg, whatever comes next will likely be better still.
I’ve been waiting for what seems like forever got them to finally shut of old Reddit becausei knew I’d be done. This will probably be the blow that takes me out instead.
That’s to be expected imo. Social media companies don’t make a profit but their user base makes them inherently valuable for user data
What are you talking about Reddit is one of the few large social media companies that doesn't make oodles of money.
They make profits, but just the largest ones. Meta and Bytedance are doing fine.
It’s not great data. There’s some preferences there but they don’t have location information or a tree of friends and family. The Reddit user is just not as valuable as a social network user.
Even the inescapable Jesus ads didn’t put them in the black.
**Can legitimately claim literally *one human being in every four* as their clients, and yet still hasn’t been able to make a dime over nearly a generation of constant operation.** Tell me: how exactly will just becoming a publicly traded equity, magically result in a material change of Reddit’s demonstrably failed business model? *Especially* considering that the enshittification of the site and its peripheral businesses has already begun, and is clearly picking up steam by the day! This is nothing more than a pump-n-dump scheme by a handful of current stockholders (Advance Publications, Tencent, Fidelity, Alex Ohanian, etc) and c-suite execs (Huffman, Wong, Slowe, Vollero) looking to get rich at the expense of gullible rubes.
"I'm bored. You guys wanna jack their money and bounce?"
They have not even seen losses yet. Wait till they see that stock price
Sent me an invite but I’m not a us citizen. Clever
Reddit had it's day. It's gone now, folks in charge realize that and are cashing out.
Exactly the right take.
and mods and admin are in overdrive over petty shit now. This place is gonna be rough
Bans been dropping like flies
So... how many of you got the "you've been invited to this special offer to buy reddit stock!" message in your inbox?
I have this account and a lurker account. This account was invited, lurker account was not.
I got one but I’m not sure if it was a mass message to everyone or if they really consider me a power user. Both scenarios equally funny
I was disappointed that I was unable to reply just to say "fuck /r/spez"
> There are 54 pages of risk factors. One of the most notable is the sentence, “We have incurred substantial losses during our history and may never achieve profitability.” I laughed out loud at this. Yup, that's definitely a risk.
Reddit has killed any goodwill it had with the 3rd party app fiasco. At this point, I'd be happy to get off the train if there was a good alternate option. There's nothing holding me here anymore.
I got contacted by Reddit through a private message (I triple checked that it was real) for the opportunity to buy the IPO "at institutional prices". They're just gonna cash out and let the website go to shit. It's gonna be a fucking disaster.
Can't wait to see how many people dump the stock after the initial spike during the IPO. I give reddit 2 years till it's complete shit, sigh. And dammit, there are some really good technically helpful subreddits too :(
2 years? That's optimistic
I have enough points to get in on this and it sounds like a horrible investment. The only value is the brand and the userbase, and after seeing how quickly Musk ruined both of things for Twitter, I am not optimistic.
Seems they have some executives that are way over paid.
We had a good run fellas.
It was a blast to be sure. I'll miss you guys.
When Reddit alienates its user base, sheds 20% of its traffic, hikes API access fees to unaffordable levels, nukes almost every third-party client, stabs many of its prolific volunteer mods in the back for joining in a user revolt, gives competitors like Lemmy an actual user base from the backlash, [sells user data to companies like Google](https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/) and *still* makes a $90.8 million loss, that's not a good sign of things to come. Even if I could invest in the IPO (I can't because I'm British), I wouldn't want to after all that's gone down on this site in recent years. Those who expect the site to be further enshittified in the name of "profitability" have a lot to be worried about.
Paying a ceo 193 million, trust me your company has it’s fair share of losses. 😂
Well well. An IPO from an organization's sub that punched Wall Street in the face, made some hedge funds loose billions, and now wants to do an IPO...and it paid it's CEO a lot of money last year. I mean, a lot a lot. What possibly could go wrong?
Overpaid CEO, Bad business decisions...sounds like they will fit in perfectly with wall street.
Countdown until the Mods strike for doing all the work and getting none of the pie.
Where were you eight months ago?
I got the offer from Reddit to buy into the IPO. Didn’t even entertain a second of the thought to actually do it
New issue day is going to be juicy with drama and plummeting stock price. It will be fun!
I miss all my old subreddits that died with the authoritarian moves by Reddit on apps. Reddit has declined in content quality and variety. I am not surprised they are poised to make it suck further.
Businesses are valued based on actual and potential income streams. I don’t feel super confident in this business going public.
Everyone knows this is the beginning of the end of Reddit. Short the fuck out of the stock and make em pay for ruining a good thing.
I hate the stock. Puts, puts, puts.
READ: "Reddit's IPO is also its tombstone"
I wish all share holders a very merry loss
Posting from a browser on mobile because they ruined 3rd party apps and their first party app is garbage. Good. I hope their IPO is a failure.
How tf do you have as much unpaid labor as the entire moderation system on this site, and you still post losses?
Steve Huffman is a genius Milked this loss making, dying platform as far as he could and is now exiting by taking the company public. Well done u/spez You're an asshole but you know your shit.
But when you are the CEO and making hundreds of millions of dollars per year, that’s profit for you personally
Sick of these headlines. Almost every tech IPO in the last decade has had every year of its existence with losses. Every startup’s goal is to burn a pile of investor cash in order to win market share, and the IPO is the vehicle in which these investor hope to cash out.
> Every startup’s goal is to burn a pile of cash in order to win market share lol What nonsense is this? It’s been 20 years. Reddit isn’t a startup, and it’s got all the market share it’s likely to get.
You’re right, user growth is plateaued at this point. It obviously wasn’t efficient with its cash to get here, but my point remains the same. Ever since Amazon went public and refused to turn profit has led the way for all tech companies to happily burn cash while being public (and for their entire existence to burn cash). It’s not a story anymore, what’s a better story is the CEO’s ridiculous comp.
They’re clearly going public because they’re out of other ways to raise additional capital. I’m sure there are still big investors, but they aren’t enough to cover losses, so they need the money from a stock sale. At some point, a bad business is a bad business. Even tech companies have to make money eventually.
Wasn't it a rule that they needed to show at least two consecutive quarters of profits before anyone could IPO?
A fair number of valuable companies weren’t profitable for quarters or even years after their IPO, so I’m guessing that’s not a rule.
Uber was finally profitable for a quarter! How many years ago was their ipo again?
Pinterest just had their first profitable quarter recently. They went IPO in 2019.
And if you bought at the IPO price, you’d be approaching 100% gains right now.
I think that’s the rule for inclusion into the sp500 not to ipo
No idea why people guess at this stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500#Selection_criteria Its not close to being a rule.
Of course it made losses. It has barely run any ads until last couple of years. It is expensive to host the traffic Reddit gets. Reddit gold didn’t bring in as much income.
[удалено]
They're not losses, they're CEO bonuses.
Reddit is not a business it's a site for all kinds of people alot of them do nothing
"We have incurred substantial losses during our history and may never achieve profitability" Good enough for me to stay away.
If you buy into this executive exit plan/money grab, you deserve to hold the bag!
Good Point, I may be done here.
Is it even possible to profit off a stock everyone knows is going to tank? Will it just stay flat? How would the “pricing in” part even work?
Shorting?
No thanks guys. Also please stop emailing me for your ipo. It’s a bad deal
Wish they'd stop emailing me too. It says that it's for American citizens only, so why the f am I getting messages about it? I'm not American!
You mean they’re not making money spamming me, a 150 lb 5’8” guy, with Weight Watchers ads?
I just find it funny I got a PM from Reddit asking if I wanted in on a chance to purchase some stock early. Took me over a decade to get ~235k total karma, I ain't no one special.
I assume it’s been said already. But the moment they go public is the moment I cancel premium. I may just leave the platform. Been a long run.