REDDIT posted a more than 20 per cent rise in revenue in 2023 versus the year before, sources familiar with the situation said, as it prepares for one of the United States’ most anticipated potential initial public offerings (IPOs).
I trust Reddit enough to manipulate the numbers to make the situation better than it looks like. to make the situation look better than it actually is.*
That said, some increase in short-term profit is to be expected, when a company exploits its own value: getting rid of third party apps, decreasing running costs by locking LLM training bots out, being rather aggressive on pushing towards the official app to anyone who “dares” to use a plain mobile browser, wrestling control of the subreddits from the “landed gentry”, so goes on. The problem will be only quantified later, as profits will drop and “nobody will know” why.
So it’s a lot like eating the seeds for your next season. Sure, you’ll be fuller now, but you’ll starve later.
Doesn’t matter as long as the people who did it got their money and are sailing to the sunset in their private yachts.
What do they care if yet another fantastic website got turned into a steaming pile of enshittification in the process.
They don’t care, indeed. And that genuinely leaves me with a sour taste in the mouth - that they’re enshittifying a platform that used to be decent, and getting away with it.
I wish that users fought against it, by simply… leaving. However whoever was to leave already left, like us; the rest is like that sort of dog with an abusive owner, no matter how much Reddit Inc. kicks them they’ll remain there, and never fight back, at most whimper.
no matter how much Reddit Inc. kicks them they’ll remain there, and never fight back, at most whimper.
Reddit is who still “feeds” a lot of us. I looked for alternatives, and use Lemmy as much as I can, but there just are communities that only exist on Reddit.
I did prune my subscribed subreddits from 140 down to 11 though, and will never install their official app.
Cases like yours count as “leaving”, for the sake of this division. Sure, you’re still interacting with the platform - but you’re doing it in a limited way, only with the comms that you couldn’t find elsewhere, dictating how you do it, looking for and feeding alternatives. You aren’t passively accepting the shite going on, like the majority there.
What I said applies the most to the moderators still there, rationalising excuses to not migrate their communities. Lemmy/Kbin, Tildes, oldschool forums, even Discord (eew), unless the alternative is 120% perfect it is not good enough. Still submitting their users to an abusive administration, knowing that Reddit will go downhill past IPO, but doing nothing against it.
You made me realise that I worded it really, really bad. (I need to fix it.)
I’m glad that you guys got the meaning that I was trying to convey though - that Reddit Inc. is scum, you can trust on the fact that they’re scum, and spez et al. are likely distorting the situation to make Reddit look more profitable than it is.
Thanks for reminding me of this. For those not aware, in 2016 Spez secretly edited users’ reddit comments. It’s fascinating that he survived as CEO after that given that it shows an absolutely breathtaking failure of judgment and self-control.
I still keep reddit as a read-only resource, and yes, plenty of people still use it. There are niche communities that I sure do wish could hit a critical mass on the threadiverse, and the archive of advice and (mostly) human reviews of stuff are helpful.
That said, either it's reddit or it's me, but any community that's even slightly large seems to have a lost a little thoughtfulness and vibrancy. The takes are more boring, the jokes more repetitive, and I run across others' "goodbye overwrites" a lot more often than I thought I would, and generally in places where it seems like the original posts were genuine attempts to be helpful. Reddit is not gone, but it is reduced, and must eventually fade into the west.
The company is moving ahead with its plans to go public more than two years after it first confidentially filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Reddit’s listing is closely watched as a bellwether of an IPO market in the midst of a tentative rebound from a two-year dearth of first-time share sales.
Looks like the enshittification is about to get even worse than it was. Perhaps we might see another exodus to lemmy/kbin once this happens?
I don't really get how these "IPOs" work. Someone actually has to pay that money for Reddit, right? Even if they manage to get Reddit temporarily profitable, are people really going to get fooled into investing just from that? Or are they guaranteed to get whatever Reddit's value is at the time of the IPO somehow?
Reddit The current owners set the offer price, and tries to argue for why it’s worth that much. It’s up to investors to sign up to buy. If not enough investors sign up, the deal won’t go through and Reddit has to go back to the drawing board.
You’d hope investors would see through the facade and not sign up unless it’s dirt cheap, and maybe they will. There are plenty of dumb investors though.
A company determines how much it thinks it is worth (i.e. $1 billion dollars) and then splits that into a certain number of stocks. If it wants it’s shares to cost $100 each, then they offer to sell people 10 million shares (10,000,000 shares for $100 each is $1 Billion).
If people think the company really is worth that much, or is worth even more, or can become more valuable in the future, they will buy those shares at $100 in the hopes that they can sell them for more later.
If they don’t think the company is worth that much, they don’t buy it, and wait to see if the price comes down.
If 1 million people buy 10 shares each at $100, they each own 0.0001% of the company and the company gets their $1 Billion dollars to them spend on research/products/capital investment/CEO Bonuses, etc.
If the company then becomes worth $2 Billion dollars, those shareholders now own 0.0001% of $2 Billion instead of $1 Billion.
Or the company could fuck up and go lower in value where the shareholders will lose value.
IPOs are typically a cash grab. Stock is offered for purchase at a price, and usually there’s a bump in price. The first investors will sell for a profit at peak price, and then it will drop to whatever value the market decides. And that could be higher or lower than the initial price per share.
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