“Our company doesn’t make money, it also is projected to not be able to continue to make money. We’ve attempted multiple ways of monetizing the userbase, all of which has not recouped costs. We value ourselves at 6.4 billion dollars.”
That means that over and above whatever debts they have, they think the market values the data their users have given them is worth that much. That said, if Google is only paying then $60M/year for access to that data, they are going to need a lot of customers like that to reach $6.4B valuation.
It’s also only valuable if people keep contributing to it. It’s highly likely the majority of current existing reddit data has been largely incorporated into many LLMs prior to the API access limiting. Google paying them 60 million dollars is a hilarious pittance to keep training their LLMs, given how much money AI services will likely generate off of the training data.
I don’t actively use reddit anymore, but when I need an answer to something that isn’t programming-related, it’s usually the top source on any given web search. That kind of content is basically the only stuff I would give a shit about. I can’t imagine how much absolute garbage you have to sift through on the platform to get reliable training data. Maybe the ratio is terrible and that’s why Google paid so little.
Oh wait, they axed the main vector to make those valuable (third party apps), didn’t build a real market for any of it, then rugpulled everyone. Guess it’s just the Google results now… for comments that people forgot to blank.
I mean, this will probably kill the platform long term. Not the stock its self, but what’s going to happen when they need to start answering to an outside pool of share holders.
The website became popular because of its user curation and moderation. That meant it was showing people what they wanted to see and allowed them to self select into communities that facilitated that.
They’ll be forced to bring in smooth brained business types that will focus on putting ads and “native content” in people’s faces as much as possible. At the same time cracking down on “not advertiser friendly” content and mod teams that don’t play ball.
All of this has kind of happened already to some extent, but it’ll get a lot worse when shareholders demand they bring in consultants or new leadership who think they know better than the team that’s been struggling with this for over a decade. Even if the average user won’t understand what is wrong, they’ll spend less time there as it starts to fail to show them what they want. But hey, the share holders might make their money back before the platform dies.
I received the offer on my 16 year old Reddit account, but not on another account I have that’s more like 12. Not sure if they went by account age or activity or what.
I can only imagine that they’re offering it to me because my account is like 15 years old… Either that, or I have about 200k post karma and 100k comment karma. (Not big numbers compared to karma whores, but still more than your average user).
Oh man are reddit users in for it when they have to answer to the market and public shareholders. Who really will just be a bunch of evil boomers holding institutional blocks.
They know it will be big backlash so they got to wait till the move is profitable. Knowing these morons though, they will do it as soon as business times brings it up.
Or OnlyFans 😆 They almost went out of business. It was really disingenious to have a porn site… ban porn? 🤔 😶
I don’t think porn is a huge part of Reddit though. I always loved the way they had these great amateur communities of real exhibitionists, but lately things have been ruined anyway with more commercial people just teasing their onlyfans.
But due to the niche communities there, I think reddit banning porn would be a real opportunity for lemmynsfw. A mainstream community is much harder to move but a niche community can move pretty rapidly.
Actually part of their IPO paperwork lists WSB as a potential positive benefit to the stock, in terms of having a clear userbase that will theoretically help sustain the value through shenanigans. That, to me, however, sounds like a securities violation waiting to happen.
I don’t check reddit anymore. Does WSB actually consider this stock to be, uh, actually valuable? Every corner of the internet I’ve seen discuss this topic have all noted how worthless they think the shares are going to be. My money is on them shorting it.
They must not have gotten a lot of takers when they offered buy-in options to power-Redditors (or whatever they called it). My account is old but was never super active, and I got an email a few weeks ago trying to get me to buy in. LOL nope.
I haven’t logged in for months, but I’d guess I’d have similar DMs too (that will forever remain unread). Only reason I didn’t delete the account was because so many people kept showing their accounts being restored against their wishes.
I had two accounts, one had been scrubbed and was mostly used for commenting, and the other was a porn alt.
The porn alt has hundreds of thousands of karma and it got multiple IPO messages while the original, older account got nothing due to being sub 5k on posts.
Edit: Suspicions confirmed!
Reddit is planning six tiers of early access based on each “participant’s contributions to Reddit,” the company said in its updated SEC filing. Those tiers are based on a user’s “karma” score, ostensibly an aggregate total of up/down votes on posts and comments.
The first tier of users will be those “who have meaningfully contributed to Reddit community programs,” though what that means isn’t explained more clearly. After that come tier 2 users, who must hold at least 200,000 karma points or have taken at least 5,000 moderator actions. Tier three includes users and moderators who hold at least 100,000 karma points and have taken 2,500 moderator actions. Tiers 4 and 5 are each half of the previous tier’s total, and tier 6 includes everyone else, with a waitlist available if the total number of shares purchased exceeds the original 1.76 million.
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