Reddit seeks to launch IPO in March

ardi62@lemmy.wtf to Reddit@lemmy.ml – 143 points –
reuters.com
45

They are about 2 years too late.

The rise in interest rates and the end of easy VC money has swung the dial back to: Companies actually need to generate profit and not just show user growth to be attractive to investors.

The IPO will not go as spez dreamed for so long.

They rise in interest rates and the end of easy VC money has swung the dial back to: Companies actually to generate profit and not just show user growth to be attractive to investors.

Yep, but also, I think spez is done. He's just cashing out and fuck you etc.. etc..

He'll catch enough to successfully eject and thats that for him. Reddit will die. But we'll have survived, and the open web will continue.

Yes, he will cash out but I feel it will only be a fraction of what he hoped to get.

He will be comfortably rich but to someone who expected to be obscenely rich, he will see it as a failure.

Serves him right for pissing on Aaron Swartz's grave. In fact, it's hardly justice.

it’s hardly justice.

To quote that great late 20th century philosopher, Terry Pratchett:

There is no justice in the world, there is Just Us. (and many of us are not nice people.)

I’m not convinced Reddit will die. I think it will continue to limp along in its zombie state. But I kind of wish you were right, just because I’m still a bit mad about it.

I think it will continue to limp along in its zombie state.

Well, Digg still exists...

Ha I went from Digg to Reddit to Lemmy. Does that make me old?

Your chain is missing at least BBSs, slashdot, and fark. My own is missing Usenet and IRC (I played with them, but didn't spend time there)

Depends, I went from BBSes to slashdot to koro5hin to reddit to kbin and do not feel old.

To me old-age begins when you feel you are past the time when you can learn/experience something new and/or new tech no longer feels exciting/interesting but scary.

I have met people in their 80s who have a younger outlook on life than some people in their 40s.

Of course spez is cashing out. That was the whole point of returning as CEO after Ellen Pao was sacrificed to cleanse the site and make it investor friendly. He just wants to cash out more than the $6 million he got the first time.

He'll only get to buy three yachts instead of 5. Seriously, he's going to have a s'ton of the highest rank shares, all they have to do is hold the lie together long enough to sell.

all they have to do is hold the lie together long enough to sell.

That last phrase is really doing a lot of heavy lifting. When you own a large chuck of stock in a post IPO company, trying to cash out large ownership stakes has the effect of crashing the price.

My expectation is that what ever the IPO price is, one year from then (the usual minimum time to be able to sell a stake like spez will have) it will be lucky to be 5% of the launch price.

Not just that but the golden era of social media is probably over. With the advent of free access to powerful AI, user content is about to become hot garbage. And with 30% of the Internet using adblockers, I wouldn't touch reddit with a long stick.

What's Reddit

It's a terrible Lemmy clone from what I've seen.

Exactly. I would recommend people do another blackout right before it, but who gives a shit? It's so corporate and shitty. I'll never go back...

Can we make an enshittification graphic that you can put a website/product on and track it as it goes through the enshittification cycle? We gotta move Reddit from stage 1 enshittification to stage 2 enshittification (going for an IPO).

Stage 2 involves a disorienting attempt to portray everything as fine with the website/product when in actuality enshittification is aggressively accelerating.

That's a pretty cool idea for a website, tracking the enshittification of major sites and products. I'd read it but I'm sure it'd be a lot of depressing, hard to monetize work for those involved to run.

And I'm sure inevitably, the site will become harder to run as more and more companies enter the shit list. Over time - features will be cut to save effort. List entry will be out sourced. The company itself, of course, will not see the irony. Finally - a new website emerges to track the enshittification of enshittification tracking websites. And the prophecy continues.

It must not be a commercial site then, you just cannot monetize that

Reddit, which filed confidentially for its IPO in December 2021, is planning to make its public filing in late February, launch its roadshow in early March, and complete the IPO by the end of March, two of the sources said.

Should be interesting to see people pick apart the filing. I think it's obvious why they left such a narrow window from reading the filing (which was 2 years ago, before the API change and all the backlash) to the actually offering. However, I don't think it will be short enough for them to not be held over the fire.

Just wait, they will be heavily moderating the discussion about the filing on their platform.