It seems like these tech IPOs happen when they are at their peak. Get a huge influx of extra cash once user growth starts to slow, pay off your early investors and then self-implode.
Well you definitely don’t want to have an IPO after it’s clear that you’ve already peaked and there is no way to gain more users or squeeze value out of the existing ones.
Looking at what reddit was and what Reddit is now, I genuinely can’t imagine why anybody goes there anymore. The odd time I do some nice doomscrolling, I find that >99% of the content is re-heated and re-served. Nothing there informs me anymore. Nothing there inspires me. Nothing makes me think in a new way.
Every day the same thing ad nausea. Fascism bad. Sexism bad. Phobia bad. Musk bad. Orange man bad. Inflation bad. Boomers bad. Cats good. Name my rescue dog. Celebrity good. Celebrity dead.
I’ve never seen the view of an IPO so heavily affected by bias. Superusers hate Reddit but so what - what matters is whether soccer moms are scrolling and being shown ads. No one cares that the most costly users are unsatisfied. You and me both are nothing to investors.
Is there some objective analysis of this IPO? All I’m seeing is “I’m a superuser who spent a lot of time on Reddit in 2007 and it was far superior back then. The stock will tank.”
Compared to other social media it’s below Facebook, Instagram and even the dying Twitter. It might get more traffic than TikTok (which seems off to me) but unlike Reddit and Twitter, TikTok knows how to make money. Reddit has never made money, but the pitch to investors is apparently “as soon as we go public, we’ll be in the black, trust me bro”.
I recently started using it because it’s actually a search engine like Google used to be. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it’s gaining traction. Google.com is just a website. I don’t think they realize just how quickly we can switch to other providers.
More traffic than Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Amazon, etc? That seems unlikely. Maybe they’re not counting any traffic from apps? If so, that isn’t all that useful.
For the same reasons that fast food is popular. It’s basically dumbed down mindless consumption. I used to be on reddit because I could talk to like-minded people about interesting topics, but the vast majority of people on the internet just want to be entertained and with the support of the admins, they ended up taking over the site. Sure, there are some niche communities where you can have valuable discussions but their time is limited. It’s essentially an artificially accelerated Eternal September.
I’m on board with your main point. I supposed I’m still left wondering why people go to a place that gives them the exact same thing every day without variation. Wait… yeah… that’s actually the appeal. It is just like fast food: sweet, salty, fatty, devoid of nutrition, and always predictable.
That whole “niche communities” thing never rang true for me. I mean sure, if you like cast iron you can go to the cast iron community. And see 9000 pictures of cast iron pans and people freaking out about cast iron. Or cooking… and you have to listen to THOUSANDS of recommendations for air fryers but not cooking.
The “communities” system never worked from the word go. The site content should have been organized with weighted tags. As I find few things more nauseating than “collective intelligence” which is mostly wrong, ill-conceived, closed-minded and half-baked at best.
I mean at least for video games especially ones that are live service games having a place to go to talk about the game and new changes is really nice and still a thing I miss a lot about Reddit.
Disagree, there were, possibly still are, good ones. A handful around mushrooms cultivation, food preserving, food fermentation and personal finance specific to my country come to mind, lots of high quality content.
But I know what you mean. I think it mainly happens once specific subreddits started going mainstream, often with an influxnl from facebook people. Out of all the fermented stuff, the kombucha one made my eyes bleed due to its popularity. Half the posts where new people asking if they had a mold problem, the other half was existing members posting “read this before posting, this is what mold looks like”, but they were obviously ignored lol
Your experience is very different from mine. Yoy make it sound rosy over there. In my experience all but a few subs have slipped to the right. I’ve seen blatantly racist top comments on racist-bait posts on multiple mainstream subs.
Every day the same thing ad nausea. Fascism bad. Sexism bad. Phobia bad. Musk bad. Orange man bad. Inflation bad. Boomers bad. Cats good. Name my rescue dog. Celebrity good. Celebrity dead.
That’s not just Reddit. That’s the entire Internet right now. Reddit or Lemmy, X or Mastodon, Facebook or anything else on the Fediverse. It’s all the same. We are living in a time of mass fear because of several different reasons. War, climate, economy, personal rights… pick whatever topic you want. There’s a reason to be angry about it.
We need to go back to the days of happy people sharing their passions, rather than angry people attacking each other. But that won’t happen anytime soon.
The big problem is algorithmically driven content feeds. They don’t feed you content that makes you happy, they feed you content that makes you mad. I think Lemmy is different in that your feeds are based on what is popular in the communities that you’ve subscribed to. Reddit used to work like that, but now it’s all algorithmic content too.
I go there still when I want product recommendations that aren’t full of marketing/ads. If I use a search engine to search for example, “dashcam recommendations,” I get a million results that are sponsored, SEO-optimized, or otherwise garbage. If I go on Reddit, I’ll find an entire community devoted to the topic with seemingly real people discussing the pros/cons of all different models.
I’ve tried searching with Lemmy but most of the time I can’t find the answers I’m looking for so end up crawling back to Reddit.
I absolutely don’t go there to doomscroll like I used to, I’ve thankfully moved on from that life.
I go there still when I want product recommendations that aren’t full of marketing/ads.
I need you to understand that Reddit Astroturfing is a gigantic market. You’re no more getting authentic experiences than you are with random (I got it for free with a check for $5000) YouTube review.
Actually all the pools I’ve come across come complete with a top and a bottom - that’s just like a car for example, usually they come equipped with an inside and an outside (but not always)
As someone who dated a stripper in college and got to know a lot of those folks outside of work, trust me, you don’t actually want a stripper girlfriend.
Well, let’s just say that the likelihood to encounter people with a history of trauma, or atypical perspectives on intimacy, goes up.
In my case, I was dating someone that never really learned what normal displays of public affection looked like. Which created some very awkward moments for me and the people around me.
But reddit, like twitter, has demonstrated it is a brand/service (just service in the case of xitter) that people are addicted to and will not quit. And stuff like AMAs and astroturfing demonstrate it has a lot of marketability.
Combine that with it being a treasure trove for LLM training and I could easily see it pulling 2-4 billion. More if the FOMO model works out for them and they have /r/wallstreetbets do another “the greatest act of democracy in all of human history” or whatever the tagline for rich people to convince idiots to help them manipulate stock prices.
So it would be less about buying a product to keep for a long time and more about something to exploit for a few years and throw it away.
But reddit, like twitter, has demonstrated it is a brand/service (just service in the case of xitter) that people are addicted to and will not quit. And stuff like AMAs and astroturfing demonstrate it has a lot of marketability.
The issue is every mintue Spez has been at the helm, they’ve actively crashed any positive value the brand has had. It’s been dead man walking before the IPO, which is not how you want your exit to go.
I was for many years a heavy user and while I liked my niche communities, I abhorred the platform and how it was manipulating us through multiple schemes.
Oddly enough, while the communities here are smaller or nonexistent, the experience seems better and healthier.
Maybe in time this will change too.
I report them as spam.
Its nothing i signed up for, and consider it marketing. And there is no unsubscribe link in the email, and its from an unmonitored inbox.
That makes it spam, and i hope it trashes their mailer IP’s reputation
It’s almost certainly going to do well enough that the VCs and insiders will be able to cash out. The founders will be centi-millionaires. But, people who buy in at the IPO price, I wouldn’t be surprised if they lose a lot of money.
It’s just hilarious to me how they have moderators on their platform doing all the work for them FOR FREE and they just sit there and try to get money for it.
There needs to be more of a movement away from Reddit towards things like Lemmy.
Who cares, we’re leaving an economy where no one cared about profitability. Just growth. It’s all about whether they can capitalize on that growth now.
Spotify was the same. Turned a profit the first quarter after shifting the focus towards profitability.
Because profit requires you to pay taxes. It’s not uncommon at all for growing companies to invest and otherwise use up any profit they generate so the balance sheet stays negative while the company keeps growing in value.
Also allows you to cry how those dirty 3rd party app developers are stealing all your profit boo hoo.
When you look at the revenue growth of reddit, it’s not hard to see that if they were able to function at all when they had a revenue 1/10th of what it’s now, they could turn profit if they wanted to.
It’s not uncommon at all for growing companies to invest and otherwise use up any profit they generate so the balance sheet stays negative while the company keeps growing in value.
That’s absolutely true. But what exactly has Reddit been expanding into? Its not like they’ve got AWS like Amazon or they’re rapidly expanding their infrastructure footprint like NextEra or some novel product like OpenAI.
As far as I can tell, the company’s biggest primary expense is administrative overhead. Not exactly value-add.
Not a clue, but they did go from having 230 employees back in 2017 to 400 in 2018, 700 in 2021 to finally over 2000 in 2023.
So they have to be doing something. …right?
You don’t have to be profitable to have a desirable stock, but usually there is some promise of future profitability (like Tesla for most of its history.)
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