They finally did it: Reddit made it impossible for blind Redditors to moderate their own sub

DeadNinja@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 1239 points –
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I hope reddit advertisers can see this. Why would you want to be associated with a site that discriminates against the blind?

they already lost 4.5bn because of this. Their valuation was cut down to 5.5bn from 10bn just the other day

And if I remember correctly that value cut was from before all this happened so it’s probably fixin to drop even more

Here's hoping. (yeah, I'm an unreasonable, hateful bitch. I despise what they did with the Apollo dev (and others) and I hope it bites them in the arse.)

I wish it lives. May we never forget Aaron's dream for the platform. May we never forget it. It's my goal in life to carry on in his and other's footsteps so we may use what we have made to help others.

I think if he was still around, he’d be all for ActivityPub and stuff like Lemmy/Kbin.

He definitely would have been all about ActivityPub, if not involved with bringing it about. Still amazes me that he was one of the inventors of RSS, arguably a proto-ActivityPub.

May we never forget Aaron's dream for the platform

Can you tell us about it?

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/30/fidelity-deepens-valuation-cut-for-reddit-and-discord/

Valued at 10 billion when fidelity bought an ownership stake in 2021.

Currently they estimate Reddit is worth 5.6 billion

Well done team, I bet the investor calls are going great!

If I understand the article correctly, that 5.6 billion evaluation was at the end of May - before any of this shitshow started

That valuation cut was from before the whole shitstorm. We've yet to see the impact that this has all had on them, but given the attempts to crush the protests by the reddit admins, when they've just sort of ignored this stuff in the past, its likely not good

On one hand, it's likely exactly what they wanted. They get a vanilla app with vanilla content, perfectly tailored for vanilla investors. The part they forgot is that the beacon of internet culture will never be vanilla.

They basically buzzfeedified themselves

They tumblr'd themselves and they haven't even 100% gotten to the porn part. I hope all the only fans people on reddit have backups and start jumping ship.

Most amazing thing about them doing this is, its not some random CEO with no connection to reddit doing it. Its the literal founder

*co-founder

If I recall correctly

Steve and Alexis were the founders, in 2005. Aaron joined later, when reddit bought/merged with notabug inc, Aaron's company

That’s not them actually losing money, though. They’re a private company, not a public one. Their valuation is just what analysts think that they’re worth—it has nothing to do with how much money they have.

But valuation is a very real predictive measure on IPOs, and what Reddit is making all these bad decisions in preparation for. They tried to cut a little more pie by dragging third party app users onto their app to try and increase revenue and bump valuation, it's just that it was so terribly misguided and executed that it had the opposite effect and blew up in their face.

True, but the valuation is for investors and per fucknut, Reddit isn’t making any money, hence the api push to a paid platform.

Also, Reddit is going public soon when they IPO and investors aren’t going to want to invest in a bot ridden, non active community.

I’d say 75%+ used Reddit on their phones and many of them used 3rd party apps.

The point is, Reddit IPOing soon and then this fiasco is the worst thing for them.

Splez recently said he thinks they will now go for the IPO later than they had planned originally. So I guess he's hoping this will blow over, the public/investors will forget and they'll recover. I'm not so sure.

They definitely pulled a digg. This is going to hurt them a lot more than they think.

Reddit is antsy to effectuate their exit strategy.

Or to put it more simply: everyone with a stake in Reddit, from pigboy Huffman, to institutional investors like Fidelity, to employees who earned equity is eager for Reddit to have their IPO so they can offload their shares on the public stock market.

Their valuation will be an important factor, if not the most important factor, that will determine for which price those stocks will initially be put on the market.

So while slashing the valuation in half will not directly lose them money, it could translate into the initial stock price being half of what they anticipated, causing them to get half of what they would’ve gotten had the valuation not be slashed in half.

There is no way in hell that people with equity in Reddit are not pissed about the slashing of the valuation, since they now anticipate getting a haircut as much as half of what they initially expected to get.

Private companies (which is most businesses) are still worth something. If big investors like Fidelity value your business at $1bn, banks will absolutely consider that as collateral for loans and so on. And if they say your business has halved in value, they’ll consider that too.

Greedy Pig Boy has said for a long time that Reddit isn't profitable. That means they're losing money every year.

It could also be accounting tricks. If they pay themselves a bunch of money, reddit inc. doesn't make a profit, but the individuals working for it do.

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Only 5.5 billion more to go

Buy shorts? Buy puts?I need some ill advise, where's wallstreetbets when you need them?

We need an unethical life tips here on how quickly we can bankrupt reddit

That would be a quad-leveraged short on their IPO you could be wanting. Go big or go back to Wendy's.

That valuation was inflated as fuck anyways

I mean I have first editions of the original runs from 1997 when they were brand new to the states. In fact, all of my cards are from the original set that was released, I never collected anything past the first 151 set. I'm not saying their valuation was not inflated, but it's the usual trope of "oh hey, you remember that old nintendo, those old basketball cards, old baseball cards, etc.. I got rid of them" trope

Now something that was super inflated, beanie babies and yes, I still have almost all of the old mcdonald's ones still in bags from when I was a little girl. I don't care that they aren't worth monetary value, they are worth something to me sentimentally. Something I collected with my mom.

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There have been reports of the traffic to their advertising portal dropping by about 20% over the past month

I'm actually surprised that metric would change much, because the users viewing ads aren't impacted by changes to the API or third party apps. So that's literally just 20% of people who either stopped using the site in solidarity or couldn't get to their content because of the protests.

If good people left Reddit, then the content that remains for the others might not be good enough to keep them engaged.

I hope reddit advertisers can see this

I see what you did there. (Pun fully intended)

I get advocacy and I think this is a major point in the API changes, but the blind community deserves better than to just be ammo for this fight.

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