Reddit seeks to launch IPO in March

RedditEnjoyer@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 446 points –
reuters.com
188

When can we start shorting the stock? /s

If you really want to sabotage, just upload lots of videos to subreddits that you can't advertise on.

so use Reddit for exclusively porn? way ahead of you

Im betting porn only has a year or 2 left on reddit. They already been slowly purging for years. Got to keep the advertisers happy.

There was some other social media site that banned porn a few years ago, I think it was Tumblr? I wonder how that worked out for them.

Tumblr reversed their ban a year ago, so that's pretty self evident.

What's even there now? I only knew of tumbler because of the anime titties.

It's been pretty active all this time tbh. I didn't notice getting worse, but then I was never there for the porn.

Maybe not active in the right way from an advertising perspective idk, but it's never been lacking good content.

OnlyFans tried a while back. There was probably some internal political maneuvering going on with that one.

Isn't the whole point of that platform porn though?

Tells you how scarred advertisers are of a titty.

OnlyFans isn't funded by advertising. It appears to be the credit card industry at the heart of this one.

I think it was Freakonomics that did a series on it? But yeah, quite an interesting and convoluted series of events.

They reversed the ban and in any case, there was still a shit ton of porn on the site, it was just written rather than drawn.

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But they killed APIs entirely for nsfw, so that is broken now too.

You can technically just make yourself a mod of your own private subreddit, then NSFW works fine with the API. It works with RedReader. I still use Reddit a bit for very niche subreddits.

Lemmy has way better quality porn

Disagree. Lemmy's porn in like 75% just bots reposting content.

Although this is to be expected, and at least this means we have content, it is also a bit unfortunate.

The Bot content is utter garbage. A good chunk of it is reddit links to old stuff. I'm sick of seeing Bot posts from reddit where someone posted a question 3 years ago.

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Hmmm, let's see.


  • Failing company rooted in a more traditional framework they're trying to break out of

  • Said company has no idea what they're doing and keep doing ridiculous things to "break out of" traditional framework

  • Keeps doing things no user/customer asked for

  • Said company has no real effective long-term game-plan and keeps changing tack because of bad previous choices

  • There's a good chance the company could go completely bust because of lack of good business plan and solid leadership


Redditors: Reddit is the new GameStop!! DRS!! MOASS!!!

Keeps doing things no user/customer asked for

I'm pretty sure the advertisers - their real customers - asked them to show more ads.

Huffman is ostensibly following Elon Musk's lead, and last I checked, Musk had pretty effectively chased away a massive amount of what one might call "rational" advertisers. Reddit is absolutely following a similar path, and soon enough there will be advertisers who no longer want to be associated with a toxic brand.

spez doesn't care. He's realized that, despite his best befuddled efforts, reddit is failing and that no one else will hire him for a cushy CEO job. He wants to take his bag and leave while the getting is still (relatively) good.

Dont forget the booooots sooo mannny boooots how the hell are there such low effort bots everywhere on that site

Blatantly wrong

I fucking love dumbshit comments like these!

"I'm going to say this comment is totally wrong, but I don't actually care enough about the issue to explain it or use more than *checks notes... two words to justify my position."

Fucking hilarious, every time.

It's unlikely I'll write a longer answer on my phone. But if all you have is ridicule again, and insults, I'll leave you with some short thoughts.

Gamestop has been doing fairly well, looking at financials. And people complain about not owning their virtual stuff, which NFT smart contracts could be a solution for. I don't necessarily agree on the the specifics for blockchain based solution though, nor did I like the picturefest which only obfuscated good use cases.

Edit: unlike of course vague half truths

Imagine simping for NFTs in 2024.

It's a technology, simple as. But since we're back at the start, who profits the most from not moving status quo?

What other viable and available technology options are there for a system where the consumer can somewhat freely do what they want with digital assets?

And wtf simping? Wat

What other viable and available technology options are there for a system where the consumer can somewhat freely do what they want with digital assets?

NFTs do nothing to help this.

How do you figure?

In that they do nothing to fix it. How do you figure they would work? Or do you expect me to prove a negative? Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

But it does work? And just fundamentally why wouldn't it as a concept?

Gods Unchained, immutable X. NFT is a back-end tech and no one should buy anything just because it is a NFT. The whole idea is to add to the value proposition for the customer/end user

No, it does not work. It's a URL that's attached to a blockchain. That's it. The URL can disappear, or you can create a parallel blockchain with the same URL given to someone else.

Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

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It takes a few weeks for options to become available, but they will.

If you have a shit ton of money you can buy shorts directly.

Why do ya need tons of money for shorts? I can buy some $15 shorts at Walmart just easily.

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Well we have 6 weeks to prepare for the next mass exodus lads and lassies

Why should the IPO change anything at this point? It's not like it'll have any immediate effects on the website.

It's not the IPO that will cause the exodus. Its the first actions that Reddit takes to appease shareholders that will cause people to leave

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Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting "up" or "down" on the content posted by other members.

I appreciate this extremely sly shade at Steve Huffman.

He's not an entreprenuer because he didn't do dick between leaving Reddit and coming back to Reddit whereas Ohanian had a few other companies in his back pocket.

I mean, Ohanian sucks, too, but this sentence is just Reuters kicking dirt in Steve Huffman's smarmy little bitch face and I'm fucking here for it.

And Huffman’s programming skills weren’t even that great because they quickly brought in Aaron Schwartz to make it all work, yet they always conveniently leave him off of the founders’ list.

This is literally the story of almost every successful tech venture. Even in the company I work for, the CEO was a former salesperson while the dev who started it all was still a dev after 20 years. He singlehandedly created the entire product catalog but no one outside of the company knows his name. The CEO's name is all over everything, including a "book" he "wrote".

There's always a low profile nerd somewhere in the background who is absolutely key to the whole operation but they rarely get cred.

Man I wish you were wrong but I have seen this exact thing 95% of the times I had a look behind closed doors of companies.

And even more dumb: this nerd usually gets undervalued, and as soon as they leave, it takes about half a year for ppl to realize how fucked they are and frantic recruitment noises to fill the offices in the hopes to pick up the pieces.

There is a certain satisfaction in leaving a job and then hearing they had to hire three new people to do what you did.

Huffman was fucking pissed about how good Alien Blue and Apollo were. He bought and absolutely fucking ruined AB and when he couldn’t buy Apollo (he tried) he crushed it under his boot heel.

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Oh good, some breathing room to finish Voyager's new onboarding flow

Onboarding flow? Are they making like a fediverse tutorial or something?

I've been adding signup support and making login a bit nicer too. Some screenshots

I do wish they tried to push people to smaller servers instead of cramming everyone in the same top 3. Send people to the server which matches their interests

I’m on voyager now. Thank you. :)

My shortcut is still called wefwef but I know what I’m using haha, I’m just lazy.

I love the app and you made my transition from Apollo so easy. I would probably be wandering around in the dark with no content if you hadn’t pulled this off. So again, thank you.

Voyager?

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Goodness I hope the gamestop nerds find a way to absolutely destroy this. If there is any chance of a scheme working, I will invest.

Time to buy shorts. Or puts. Or kangaroos. Whatever.

I don't know a fucking thing about stonks.

It will launch, spike up a little that day, then drop pretty hard for a month or so, getting down to about 60% of its launch price, before slowly gaining back up to around 80% of its launch price after several months.

Also, my prediction is that big puts will be selling for way higher than their likelihood, because so many retail investors want to to fail. So even though the stock will go down, tons of people will lose money betting that.

For sure. Calls and puts both will go overpriced. Be a lot of "enthusiasts" buying options for funsies thinking they'll totally be right.

Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting "up" or "down" on the content posted by other members.

Disgraceful, disgusting, lying scum. Say his name: Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz actually didn’t found Reddit. He built a similar company that wasn’t gaining traction, and as both of them were under y-comb and Reddit secretly seeded fake accounts, Swartz and y-comb decided to merge into Reddit. Swartz was sort of their first and hardworking employee instead of a co-founder.

Reddit doesn't exist without him period full stop. His didn't get traction and theirs didn't work.

Not the same thing.

Seems like a terrible investment, I can’t see what they can possibly do to add value. Everybody who wants to use Reddit is already on it and anything they do to try and milk it will just lose them users.

I've had the impression for a long time that Reddit could stand to lose a large part of its users in order to be more profitiable. The nerds getting into long winded "ackchually" "debates" are making the site worse for the meme scrollers and they are also not the type to click on ads. They're not trying to attract more users, they want to maximise revenue from the existing pool. I don't think it's a coincidence Reddit has been slowly moving away from "discussion board" and towards image and short video (like the other three big platforms) because that's where the money's at.

My prediction is that shortly after the IPO we'll see .old go away, and a further sterilizing of subreddits ability to forge unique identities. The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators, buuuut they haven't had trouble after the API debacle so maybe there are more people willing to provide free labor than I assume!

The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators

I mean YouTube comment sections were known for years to be an unmoderated nightmare of just people saying the absolute dumbest shit.

YouTube was and still is the most popular video site.

I think reddit has just stopped caring about the real content of the comments since, like you said, they've pretty much pivoted to images and video. Expect the comments section to be further eroded as well, in the name of needing less moderation. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see Reddit do an "AI" push where the "AI" is mostly just replacing moderators with what amounts to a more advanced automod.

Contrary to many in here, I don't think this will cause another exodus from reddit. those who might be concerned by this have already left or reduced their time on the platform

If Facebook hasn't had a mas exodus, neither will Reddit.

Facebooks death is slow and ongoing, and I'm pretty sure Reddit's will be too.

I don't know where you are getting your numbers. maybe it's your selection bias, but facebook's userbase keeps groing, and even if its getting less teenager engagement, those teenagers are flocking to Meta's other platform Instagram.

If you move from facebook to instagram or threads why move at all?

Because many more people are concerned with where their friends are and what’s cool.

Yeah I understand that but I mean it's same hands so why try at all.

Because they don’t care who owns what platform. They care that they’re different and only some of their friends are on one of them and not the other.

I’d expect another big exodus around then.

Yes. Best thing we can do is be ready (from a tech perspective) and welcoming (from a human perspective). They'll come or they won't.

Compared to summer, Lemmy now has thousands more users, hundreds of active communities (no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects), actual made-on-lemmy content in a bunch of places, and a bunch of apps that mostly have the bugs worked out. It's probably fair more appealing now to join than it was in summer.

We still have roadblocks: general confusion about federation (the email analogy seems to be working best), difficulty properly explaining how to sign up, a harder time finding communities, and it's impossible to migrate between instances without starting fresh.

no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects

I'm always saddened by how not-active some of those subjects are. For example: Even many large games struggle to have dedicated, active communities on Lemmy (assuming I'm not terrible at finding them, which is sadly also possible). Even some of the largest games have only completely dead communities here. A huge draw of Reddit for me was to be able to talk about the games I play with other people who do too. And mostly, the games I'd love to talk about aren't in the top 10 most played games list.

Now I could try to (re)vitalize those communities I would love to see around, and I have done so shortly after the exodus (on my previous account that died with the instance it was on). However, there's only so much talking into the void I can do until it gets boring.

I also feel like that might be a big issue for people coming over. After I manage to explain to my friends how federation works, they ask me to help them find the [topic of their interest] community, and all I can show them is a community with 10 threads, all over 3 months old and with 0 comments. Sadly it shouldn't surprise anyone they're not sticking around after that.

I think part of the problem is that we migrants decided that each reddit community also needed a corresponding lemmy community right out of the gate. For example, on reddit, there is r/hockey, then there's a sub for each individual team. However on lemmy, the team subs are dead due to insufficient traffic, and stay dead due to the exact chicken-and-egg problem you describe. The solution is to congregate in a larger community instead, where traffic is higher, even if you're posting about your relatively popular game. So as a Winnipeg Jets fan, I should post in the lemmy hockey community and not the Jets community. Likewise, if you want more chatter about Cyberpunk2077, post in the general gaming community. It works reasonably well for now, and if the signal to noise ratio ever gets bad in the larger community, then you can split off into specialty topics.

Ironically, reddit also went through this exact process 10-12 years ago. r/science became too noisy, so people ended up in r/physics and r/chemistry, and r/askscience and such. We need to start with communities with larger scope until they're active enough to split.

At this very moment I'm looking for a discussion on sci fi oriented table top rpgs. On reddit, there is dedicated discussion forums for a few of them. Here, I'll post to !rpg@ttrpg.network because there's more people there. Off I go!

Exactly.
Communities need to be more generic until a specialisation becomes too much of the content, then a specific community should be started.

Basically this is similar to my "organicness" argument. Reddit grew over many years and these niche subs got created as they were needed, not all at once. On Lemmy and the Fediverse in general, there will be another layer of organic growth and organisation with regards to federation, where instances will clump into "neighbourhoods" that users can choose.

I feel like in some big game communities (like BG3) it looks deader than it should but if you post something you actually get quite a few replies. People are there it’s just that not everyone feels like making a new post.

Though I agree that concentrating on more generic communities for now is a good solution

User migration is now possible in Lemmy 0.19:

Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.

Source: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-12-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.0_-_Instance_blocking,_Scaled_sort,_and_Federation_Queue

Oh hey, I guess I learned something today :)

0.19 has been a real improvement in many ways. I'm a huge fan of the Scaled sort -- it helps the niche community content to surface.

Do you use an app or the website for this feature?

Scaled sort? Both. The app needs to support 0.19 though.

I tested Sync and Boost but can't find it. Which app do you use where this already works?

I'm on iOS. I use Voyager and Mlem and both have it.

All those toxic Redditors coming here... I hope we can manage to significantly beef up the mod tools before then.

I still feel like if we want to grow faster organically we need to natively support more "discovery functions". Just things that you can toggle off like for example a recommendation screen and stuff. The algorithm for it we can make and adapt open source so no one is scared we collect data.

We're running into the Linux Vs Windows problem, where you can technically do more stuff and have more control over you account on Lemmy, but you need to be familiar with the fediverse before joining, just to Unterstand how to use Lemmy. That's a big problem for any potential new user.

I find Kbin's Collections feature a good fix for federation confusion. Honestly I think it should be the default type of view when browsing communities, you need to abstract the average user from federation as much as possible and leave browsing by instance as an advance option for those that want to engage with federation in detail

Confusion about federation is not helped by federation not working recently due to a few notable Lemmy bugs (which are now fixed). Hopefully anyone new coming over doesn't encounter any new major bugs.

If a user didn’t exodus for the popular subs last time, I don’t see why they would this time.

Some of those popular subs were reopened with a new mod team that falls in line. Spez was too busy stuffing his ears with ad money instead of listening to his stakeholders

The point being?

That new mod team is obviously full of loyal Redditors.

Point being casual users didn't see much interruption in the popular subs. So they did not have much incentive to switch to another platform.

“Didn’t see much interruption”? It was all over r/all and they simply decided to not switch. How will less people remaining to protest make more of a difference?

I've never bought options before, but I'm in for 10grand and shorting the shit out of this.

I don't really care about Reddit but this is probably a bad idea

Usually they don't allow options on new stocks until after the cutoff period. Unless your broker allows naked shorting.

Probably not through some online broker, but OTC with an actual trading desk you can short just about anything. In the end it's just a contract.

Proof or ban

Oh wait, I forgot we aren't on wallstreet

We need a Lemmy version of WSB

Do we really though? Don't get me wrong it's some of the most entertaining content I've seen on the Internet but I think it brings more harm than good on the whole, especially with the fervor around GME that spun off into being downright delusional. I'd prefer if we don't end up bringing that over here tbh.

I think the 'old' wsb even would be sort of borderline with the egging on and memefication of gambling one's life savings on weeklies

I guess I mean the old version prior to the GME and AMC fiasco.

I think what may buoy them is the fact that you must append “Reddit” to searches, however, ChatGPT, DuckDuckGo, and Kagi are giving them a run for their money

Not financial advice, but there's been a few times I wanted to short something (I didn't in the end) but one thing to watch out for after an IPO is the date insiders are allowed to start selling stock. It's often 6 months or so after the IPO and can cause share price to drop.

So if a company jumps in value post IPO, there might be an opportunity to short it at some point, with the options expiring a period of time after the insider sell off date.

I imagine I'm going to do some paper trades on reddit on this and see what happens. I'm rooting for them to do poorly. Fuck u/Spez

Edit: And to clarify, I mean buy puts on something. I'd never short something directly.

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I'm curious how they will tank their worth by then, as is tradition.

Wouldn't be surprised to see lemmy activity spike in March. Probably not as big as during the API debacle, but still.

Is it even worth anything to investors anymore at this point? Huffman kind of destroyed any faith anyone had in Reddit, seems like it's just going to slowly turn into an ad distribution service to scam people who don't know any better lol

I've said myself that reddit's biggest assets were it's passionate userbase and it's trove of commentary. But I remember reading a comment, years ago now, that reddit's biggest asset was it's profile data. They know what communities you visited, and which you were most passionate about. They know what specific topics and keywords got you involved in a conversation. They know the content that you upvote and that you downvote. They know roughly where you live, what times you're online. They probably have a decent idea of your job and how much you earn. They data is worth something to data brokers, and it wouldn't surprise me if they start selling it after the IPO.

There's always some value to vultures (and vulture capital) that want to pick over the pieces. It might even still have meaningful value as an ongoing social media platform. But the expected IPO value has dropped heavily in the past few years, and is likely to keep dropping. This really isn't because of anything at Reddit, but of the financial markets in general.

The big question is how will investors feel about the potential for returns, i.e. revenues. I expect to see (well, read about) a whole lot of enshittification over there. Much more data mining, ads, freemium features, etc.

I hope the STONKS Apes are ready...

They will short the fuck out of it. There is literally no way this company can make money without making the product so much worse they will really start bleeding the users they need for revenue. It will explode on launch week and crash two or three weeks later.

Long short, long volatility until it flatlines. Basically free money. Their product is users and their data. If they upset the ecosystem users leave and decrease valuations... leads to layoffs and cost saving measures. Rinse and repeat until sufficiently dead.

The second they're publicly traded layoffs will simply be part of the cycle regardless of stock performance. C-Level must be seen to do SOMETHING to generate profits, or at least try. Regulators suck hard at following up on anything, but you gotta play by the book to keep them from sniffing around.

I'm also fully expecting this to be a case of butchering the pig. Huffman and the other cunts in charge will sell of their shares, make millions and run it into the ground. Much less scrutiny if a publicly traded company evaporates due to bad stock performance than when a private company suddenly disintegrates and the C-Level runs away with all the cash. Blame it on the STONK crowd and you're literally golden.

I'm sure they'll try and make as much money on the way out as possible, but tinfoil: This is the start of the end with a certain degree of intent by those in charge of that fucking company.

Without a doubt. They can't reasonably increase revenue so they need to pad* the books with layoffs. Those will result in the platform rotting out (further) from the inside. That's the long short position. Long volatility while the price bounces around like a coked up jack russel terrier.

Hope we see some more migration. Lemmy is miniscule in comparison, with 60,000 active users by last count across all instances.

Heck, even /r/mildyinteresting has 220,000 users and that isn't even the main subreddit, it's a misspelled version of /r/mildlyinteresting.

/r/videos used to be a default and supposedly has millions of subscribers, but when I was still on reddit you'd regularly see content with 100 upvotes reach the top of the subreddit and maybe 10 comments. Often this was on bot reposts.

Their numbers should be take with a huge grain of salt.

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I think it's fine. Lemmy was actually nicer with less users. Now it grew a bit and all the trolls also came along. If it becomes huge, it will probably lose most of its charm.

Bigger is actually not better sometimes I think.

I'm happy right now with it. But sure, mostly memes and Linux stuff which I like, so...

Also Reddit has been around for over a decade and lemmy has existed for about 4 years. It's hard to compare the two in that regard.

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The offering would also test the willingness of some Reddit users to back the company's stock market debut. Many investors posting on the platform have helped fuel dozens of "meme" stock rallies in the last three years.

Whatever nonsense the're implying here is twisted and awefull. Like they owe it to the platform?

How are futures doing on MemeEconomy?

Over here on Lemmy, Star Trek memes are doing fine, so that bodes well for our future stonks.

No idea, my account over there got soft-locked more than a year ago, moved here when Apollo stopped letting me lurk.

Surey those communities moved over aswell? Cant imagine its more then bots and my dad nowadays.

Can someone tell me what IPO is, and act like I'm not an idiot XD

They're going to start selling shares of the company on public markets

Grabbing popcorn, I'm ready to be entertained by their failure. :)

Lots of people will buy the stock because $$$. Reddit site will get worse and worse as they cater to shareholders.

What if Musk buys the front page of the internet. There are some interesting Pro's and Cons Edit: interesting doesn't mean good

He can buy in but he can't buy all of Reddit. According to the article the IPO will only be for 10% of the company. If he goes in, that's only going to drive up the price.