Now the social media platform is aiming for an IPO in the first quarter of 2024 with a valuation of $15 billion, and has been in talks with potential investors like Goldman Sachs and and Morgan Stanley, per Bloomberg.
“I submitted most of the content for the first couple of months myself — I had all these different accounts… and sometime in August was the first day that I didn’t submit any content. Real users did. And literally every day since then, Reddit has been bigger than I ever thought it would be.” -Steve Huffman
So there you have it, all of you single instance users, don’t fret! Reddit didn’t become popular in a day, it was mostly Spez posting to himself.
As far as the IPO goes, I’ve left Reddit so it can succeed or crash and burn, I care little at this point.
These valuations on companies that use cloud hosting for delivering video like reddit does is fucking imaginary. Reddit does not have enough of it's own infrastructure to justify a $15 billion valuation. It's ephemeral in the end.
Also, its now a dogs breakfast too. Whenever I drop by there, a lot of the subreddits have become ultra right wing and weird or bot infested, where even the aussie subs are pro-gun zones now (despite very few people in AU actually giving a toss about guns).
It went from being somewhat toxic to toxic all over. And the only people who will want to buy it, will be asking for more ads, more posts which are actually adverts, and more BS.
There are so many alternatives to Reddit now too (like lemmy) which are likely to slowly eat into it’s market share
I get it, but like I said, that's ephemeral. Compare that to say Meta or alphabet with YouTube. They have distinct advantages in serving their content that prevents them from completely losing out. Then you've got Reddit, who pays hosts that could decide themselves to spin up a competing service pretty quickly and already isn't profitable due to those harsh hosting costs and isn't particularly stand out in its advertising business compared to those two.
Well YouTube is worth far more than even this valuation, so that tracks. There have been many competing services (like the one we’re on, and Voat) but none of them have put a dent in Reddit’s ability to serve ads to a huge number of eyeballs. I wouldn’t invest in it but to suggest it’s valueless because they don’t own their servers is a stretch.
Money and countries aren’t “ephemeral”, whatever you mean by that. Countries are large collections of individuals and groups united by common culture, language, geography, economies, religion, etc. They’re as real as your family or friends group is, because they’re based on voluntary association.
Money is “real” because governments accept it for payment of taxes. Taxes are not optional, thus businesses find it convenient to ask for payment in local currency. This creates a common medium of exchange as long as people have faith that the current government will survive.
So no, they don’t just have value because “we decided” they do. We can’t change our minds tomorrow and shift all the countries and money around because they are based on reality.
Every single group you listed selfhosts and uses local data centers to reduce transit fees. It's very important because it's how you handle the costs on your business model. Ad revenue generally forces you to operate on tight operating margins. Compare that to another cloud hosting utilizing video provider that nearly sunk despite being quite popular: Vimeo. If you think this stuff is not important, see Twitch's exit from Korea over transit fees.
And I sincerely hope anyone that invests in Reddit loses everything they put into it. The company deserves to die for the bullshit they did last year. It’s past time to move on.
As of 7 months ago, spez claimed that the company still wasn’t profitable. If, after 18 years, a social media link aggregator still isn’t profitable, then what are they going to do with the IPO capital other than burn through it as well?
Rexxit had over $500,000,000 in revenue in 2022. It wasn't profitable because spez spent money paying for all the infrastructure and bandwidth for multiple AI companies to harvest all of rexxit's data, and because he's constantly distracted by trying to incorporate the latest tech-bro trends into rexxit - rexxit crypto, rexxit NFTs, now he's trying to figure out rexxit AI. He's a breathtakingly incompetent CEO.
It’s amazing to me that these internet billionaires have really cool, popular, useful websites that are unique, and used for their uniqueness. Then they spend all their time and money trying to make the site into a clone of some other popular site because they view them as competitors. What they actually end up doing is destroying what made their website special to begin with, and then we the users end up with a few sites that are desperately trying to clone each other, that don’t actually work well for anything anymore.
I don’t want to sound stupid but every time I hear this I don’t understand what they mean. If I don’t make enough money then I lose my possessions and house and certainly wouldn’t be able to afford servers. If it’s not profitable then why keep doing it? Does he just mean he doesn’t get massive bonuses? Clearly this word means something different to me.
I think there are a lot of extreme measures that would theoretically increase its profitability that they have not yet taken, most of which I have to assume are in the cards in the foreseeable future.
Most of them are, of course, measures that would severely impact user experience in a very negative way, but it's clear at this point that they are drunk on hubris and believe users will stay no matter what.
That's true, I have to imagine a significant amount of the people driving the push for the IPO are only doing so to drive value up, cash out and vanish
Users will stay no matter what. When was the last time you saw meaningful exodus off a major platform? The Reddit to Lemmy, or Twitter to Mastodon migrations were the largest in decades and they had almost zero impact on the number of visitors to the origin sites. The days of Digg to Reddit are gone. Average users don’t have the patience or attention span to build communities anymore, especially not when whatever they build will eventually be heavily monetized, changed beyond recognition, and generally enshitified.
Also less tech savvy, people in the internet in the 2000s I think still had more of a hacker mentality compared to 2010 where everything moved towards apps with simplified UIs and can’t look under the hood.
It’s mind boggling to me that Gen Z doesn’t know anything about computers or the Internet, despite growing up using both their entire lives. All they know how to do is use simplified apps to browse social media, send text messages, and take pictures. Apparently Gen X is the only generation that had a large portion of the generation that understands the inter-workings of the internet and computers. We’ve had to constantly help both our parents and our kids with computer problems.
And what could they use the money to do? How much innovation has there been on Reddit since it was written? Fancier Reddit gold? A shitty redesign? Video hosting that doesn’t work? Image hosting so bad someone had to make totally separate website for it?
Well recently more people have been using the official reddit app. No relation to anything going on, by the way, just the app getting better, obviously.
None. No innovation. Every update to the site has made it worse and less reliable. I could single-handedly code a better Reddit in a few months than that entire team has done in ten years. But they’re not focusing their efforts on UI/UX improvements. They focus all their efforts on tracking, data harvesting, and circumventing the user safety protocols built into web browsers. We view the project as a cool public forum. They view it as a means to riches, and they don’t give a shit if it’s a pleasant experience for the users.
This is true for almost every social media. They get popular for one thing and one things only and it’s mostly just content formatting. The rest is ads that make very little and they can’t diversify.
Well they control the mobile apps now, which is most of the userbase. The redesign is still terrible but nobody has much of a choice about image hosting since it’s built-in.
If you’re eligible for the Contributor Program and your content meets the requirements for monetization, you can receive cash from Reddit for the gold and karma you earn on qualifying contributions.
But that’s definitely not going to help them be profitable lol
if your content meets requirements for monetization
“Requirements” being key there. The vast majority of even power users won’t end up getting paid with the system as it stands. If anything, it’s just there for people to give them credit for making it “possible”.
Which requirements are difficult to meet? The highest hurdles I see is receiving 10 gold in a 12-month period and making sure your content isn’t porn/gore/drugs. I think reddit blows, but this doesn’t seem like difficult-to-obtain goals for somebody trying to make some extra scratch.
Yeah, and while the country thing sucks, it’s at least a quick “yes/no” answer before you even start trying. This isn’t a deceptive lure like roblox, where they entice millions of kids to try to monetize their content, but make it exceptionally hard to actually make a profit or to even cash out (and even if you meet their ridiculous requirements, there is a huge imbalance of exchange rates when converting to and from a real currency to robux).
We are in the age of of surveillance capitalism. It will make itself profitable with our data. Maybe identifying people, creating profiles about beliefs and personality, etc.
What else could they possibly do? It’s proven profitable and that’s what they want.
It is just there will be difference between users and customers (those who pays money to promote something or get data on users). And users are not customers.
I mean, ignoring the balding neonazi dipshit for a moment:
Twitter is more or less showing the path forward. They fucked up on the advertisement side, but it has clearly been demonstrated that there is a strong desire for users to be “power users”. Which is more or less what twitter ran on before. The idea that, because you have ten followers, you are just as important as Barack Obama.
Reddit, coupled with Google fucking up their own shit, is rapidly losing the “best place on the internet to find user sourced information” badge. But there is definitely room for a subscription that either boosts user engagement (not sure how that would work) or provides corporate moderators so that individual people can have their own board about their Sonic OC or whatever.
And then it becomes about converting those users into customers.
I’ve had multiple comments on Reddit that were the first things or among the top results that popped up on Google regarding certain topics/issues/ect. Taking that away from Reddit even though my slice of the results pie was small, still felt so damn good.
I've considered this, but knowing the pain that I had to go through because there was nothing, I'd rather that future developers don't have to suffer through the same.
I remember Reddit being the only place to find out which VLAN I needed to put my PVRs through to work with my personal router. Now it’s a struggle to find anything that specific or useful, and it’s getting worse.
But there is definitely room for a subscription that either boosts user engagement (not sure how that would work)
Swap “subscription” for “multiple small transactions” and you have the new gold system. So Reddit is already doing what you (and me, and everyone else) was predicting them to, we just didn’t know “how”.
It’ll likely fail hard though, at least in the long run. For similar reasons as Digg failed.
I feel like Greedy Pigboy and Reddit Inc. as a whole deserve to be punished, for all that “my precious data! No, it is not the users’, IT IS MINE! MY PRECIOUS!” fiasco. Enshittification will happen either way.
I editted all my comments, replacing whatever the text was for a message telling that greedy little pigboy to go fuck himself, and to train his AI on that. Every single one that I could find, because Reddit history sucks as much as its search.
Uber has also never turned a profit. Share prices aren’t based on the value of the company, they’re based on how much people think the company will be worth in the future
If he’s looking to control communication infrastructure as I suspect, he might actually try, and succeed. Even if it’s not him, it’s going to be a similar scenario involving someone very much like him.
Amen. 9 years on reddit. I spent countless hours per week browsing and posting. I don’t have Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or any of that shit… Literally was just reddit. And he destroyed it.
If I being honest… I know that all those hours I was wasting was literally just that… Wasted time. But… I enjoyed it, so I don’t care. I miss the good ol reddit days.
Fuck Spez should be a t-shirt.
Edit: I should clarify that I DO appreciate what has gone into the fediverse and it provided me a place to go for a similar experience. To any of the devs and people growing it… Props to you all! The dev who made sync work for lemmy… My dude… Thumbs up! Sync was hands down my all time favorite reddit app, and now I have it here!
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