Reddit's cofounder said that at first the company felt like 'a homework assignment that got out of hand' rather than a business
www.businessinsider.com
Reddit's cofounder Steve Huffman said in its early days he filled up most of the site with content using different accounts until it got more users.

Now the social media platform is aiming for an IPO in the first quarter of 2024 with a valuation of $15 billion, and has been in talks with potential investors like Goldman Sachs and and Morgan Stanley, per Bloomberg.

  • @cyborganism@lemmy.ca
    0•4 months ago

    Let the enshittification begin continue. Now that stockholders will be expecting increasing profits, I don’t see how Reddit can remain free to use.

    • LvxferreM
      0•4 months ago

      I feel like Greedy Pigboy and Reddit Inc. as a whole deserve to be punished, for all that “my precious data! No, it is not the users’, IT IS MINE! MY PRECIOUS!” fiasco. Enshittification will happen either way.

      • @cyborganism@lemmy.ca
        0•4 months ago

        Exactly. Reddit has been building this huge knowledge base for well over a decade. Built by the users themselves. He knows what he’s got.

        I think I’ll go ahead and log back in and delete all my old posts and comments. Fuck him.

    • MxM111
      0•4 months ago

      All other social media platforms are free.

      It is just there will be difference between users and customers (those who pays money to promote something or get data on users). And users are not customers.

      • @NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
        0•4 months ago

        I mean, ignoring the blading neonazi dipshit for a moment:

        Twitter is more or less showing the path forward. They fucked up on the advertisement side, but it has clearly been demonstrated that there is a strong desire for users to be “power users”. Which is more or less what twitter ran on before. The idea that, because you have ten followers, you are just as important as Barack Obama.

        Reddit, coupled with Google fucking up their own shit, is rapidly losing the “best place on the internet to find user sourced information” badge. But there is definitely room for a subscription that either boosts user engagement (not sure how that would work) or provides corporate moderators so that individual people can have their own board about their Sonic OC or whatever.

        And then it becomes about converting those users into customers.

        • LvxferreM
          0•4 months ago

          But there is definitely room for a subscription that either boosts user engagement (not sure how that would work)

          Swap “subscription” for “multiple small transactions” and you have the new gold system. So Reddit is already doing what you (and me, and everyone else) was predicting them to, we just didn’t know “how”.

          It’ll likely fail hard though, at least in the long run. For similar reasons as Digg failed.

        • @CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
          0•4 months ago

          I remember Reddit being the only place to find out which VLAN I needed to put my PVRs through to work with my personal router. Now it’s a struggle to find anything that specific or useful, and it’s getting worse.