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.
These valuations on companies that use cloud hosting for delivering video like reddit does is fucking imaginary. Reddit does not have enough of it’s own infrastructure to justify a $15 billion valuation. It’s ephemeral in the end.
The value is in IP and eyeballs, not physical assets.
I get it, but like I said, that’s ephemeral. Compare that to say Meta or alphabet with YouTube. They have distinct advantages in serving their content that prevents them from completely losing out. Then you’ve got Reddit, who pays hosts that could decide themselves to spin up a competing service pretty quickly and already isn’t profitable due to those harsh hosting costs and isn’t particularly stand out in its advertising business compared to those two.
Well YouTube is worth far more than even this valuation, so that tracks. There have been many competing services (like the one we’re on, and Voat) but none of them have put a dent in Reddit’s ability to serve ads to a huge number of eyeballs. I wouldn’t invest in it but to suggest it’s valueless because they don’t own their servers is a stretch.
Also, its now a dogs breakfast too. Whenever I drop by there, a lot of the subreddits have become ultra right wing and weird or bot infested, where even the aussie subs are pro-gun zones now (despite very few people in AU actually giving a toss about guns).
It went from being somewhat toxic to toxic all over. And the only people who will want to buy it, will be asking for more ads, more posts which are actually adverts, and more BS.
There are so many alternatives to Reddit now too (like lemmy) which are likely to slowly eat into it’s market share
Honestly the most surprising part of this news is that it took so long
A few years ago I would have bought some stocks to support them … Now, I’d counsel anybody to stay away from that stock because the company could further alienate and lose most of their active users at any time.
more like IPOO
As of 7 months ago, spez claimed that the company still wasn’t profitable. If, after 18 years, a social media link aggregator still isn’t profitable, then what are they going to do with the IPO capital other than burn through it as well?
And what could they use the money to do? How much innovation has there been on Reddit since it was written? Fancier Reddit gold? A shitty redesign?
Well they control the mobile apps now, which is most of the userbase. The redesign is still terrible but nobody has much of a choice about image hosting since it’s built-in.
The only thing I can really think they “improved” is that the new gold system allows to be paid for your content:
If you’re eligible for the Contributor Program and your content meets the requirements for monetization, you can receive cash from Reddit for the gold and karma you earn on qualifying contributions.
But that’s definitely not going to help them be profitable lol
“What’s your business model?”
“We pay people to post on our site.”
if your content meets requirements for monetization
“Requirements” being key there. The vast majority of even power users won’t end up getting paid with the system as it stands. If anything, it’s just there for people to give them credit for making it “possible”.
Which requirements are difficult to meet? The highest hurdles I see is receiving 10 gold in a 12-month period and making sure your content isn’t porn/gore/drugs. I think reddit blows, but this doesn’t seem like difficult-to-obtain goals for somebody trying to make some extra scratch.
Yeah, I went through a few pages and they don’t seem unattainable. The hardest would probably be living in a country that isn’t included
Yeah, and while the country thing sucks, it’s at least a quick “yes/no” answer before you even start trying. This isn’t a deceptive lure like roblox, where they entice millions of kids to try to monetize their content, but make it exceptionally hard to actually make a profit or to even cash out (and even if you meet their ridiculous requirements, there is a huge imbalance of exchange rates when converting to and from a real currency to robux).
I think there are a lot of extreme measures that would theoretically increase its profitability that they have not yet taken, most of which I have to assume are in the cards in the foreseeable future.
Most of them are, of course, measures that would severely impact user experience in a very negative way, but it’s clear at this point that they are drunk on hubris and believe users will stay no matter what.
They only have to be profitable long enough to sell their bags.
That’s true, I have to imagine a significant amount of the people driving the push for the IPO are only doing so to drive value up, cash out and vanish
Rexxit had over $500,000,000 in revenue in 2022. It wasn’t profitable because spez spent money paying for all the infrastructure and bandwidth for multiple AI companies to harvest all of rexxit’s data, and because he’s constantly distracted by trying to incorporate the latest tech-bro trends into rexxit - rexxit crypto, rexxit NFTs, now he’s trying to figure out rexxit AI. He’s a breathtakingly incompetent CEO.
What a little shitbaby, that IPO is going to be worse than Robinhood’s
Well I checked back. I also went to wipe the last bits of posts from a couple accounts. Soon as the scripts got done running…
Uh oh! We have suspended your account due to suspicious activity.
They filed for IPO in December 2021. Its taken them THIS long. The competent management didn’t leave the building, they were never there.
Sincerely hope it crashes and burns, even though I find it unlikely.
Fuck spez for ruining my favorite social media ever.What is IPO?
initial public offering aka the company goes on the stock market
What is Google?
Don’t be snarky
What is love ?
Please, Reddit, finish dying, I’m banned for a bullshit reason and wanna talk abotu Jojo Memes with people again
Ok there. I finally deleted my account for realsies.
I keep going back to check out their Marvel discussions, but tell myself not to log in and engage. The community around that is bigger, definitely, but man… so full of dickheads. Thanks for being nicer, Lemmy users.
O SO YOU THINK WERE NICE HUH! WELL YOU HAVE A NICE DAY!!
YEAH THATS RIGHT I JUST WISHED YOU A NICE DAY, WHAT YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT >:D
Don’t get me wrong, fuckface, I can be a dick too. I’d just rather not, so have a pleasant fucking evening your foul smelling philanthropist.
THANK YOU FOR WRITING IN ALL CAPS, I ALWAYS FELT THE UPPERCASE LETTERS DESERVE MORE TIME IN THE SPOTLIGHT SINCE THEY ARE VASTLY UNDERREPRESENTED IN REGULAR FORMS OF TEXT. LET’S KEEP TALKING LIKE THIS!!
go fuck yourself…in a nice way
Honestly, Lemmy is a lot nicer.
My experience with reddit is checking my inbox every now and then and seeing some random nazi posting harassing shit on a 2-month post.
Same here. I was holding off on properly deleting my account for some of the more niche stuff on Reddit, but at this point… fuck it I’ll still lurk occasionally but I ain’t logging in.
I got locked out when my 2fa couldn’t be transferred off my phone that died unexpectedly. Oh well
And the super majority of investors will not understand one bit what Reddit is and why it use to be so popular. The pyramid scheme continues.
“I submitted most of the content for the first couple of months myself — I had all these different accounts… and sometime in August was the first day that I didn’t submit any content. Real users did. And literally every day since then, Reddit has been bigger than I ever thought it would be.” -Steve Huffman
So there you have it, all of you single instance users, don’t fret! Reddit didn’t become popular in a day, it was mostly Spez posting to himself.
As far as the IPO goes, I’ve left Reddit so it can succeed or crash and burn, I care little at this point.
OK so wait until the inevitable hours after opening peak and buy puts?
Honestly, I don’t know on this one. It’s tough to guess on internet companies, especially social media.
I think they’re facing pretty strong headwinds that have nothing to do with how we may personally feel about the company. Going off of memory, their valuation was slashed between their first talking about an IPO in 2022 and April-ish of 2023, which is when they started with the push towards monetization and which eventually led to shutting down the API to third party apps. I’m not sure where the $18B falls on that spectrum. I’m also not sure about the underlying metrics, like revenue per user, costs of acquiring new users, and so on. I don’t know if their growth has slowed or accelerated since the API change, but I also don’t think there’s a real competitor at this point (lemmy hasn’t reached critical mass and community fragmentation will probably mean it never will).
On the other hand, I’ve felt since last April or so that the stakeholders are looking to exit. It really feels like spez mismanages the company and is just looking to cash out, take the billion or two and move on to his next thing, after which it will be run by a b-school type who will run it into the ground.
All of which is to say I wouldn’t buy it for my retirement portfolio, but I also wouldn’t short it on opening day. I do suspect they’re underinvested in trust and safety and will run afoul of regulatory bodies, and Reddit is not the household name that Twitter is, so they’ll be easier to ban from markets.
Sorry, what is a “put”?
A publicly traded stock option contract. Buying a Put allows you to bet on the share price dropping.
“Calls” and “puts” are types of contracts about buying/selling stocks (they aren’t the stock themselves but are centered around a given stock and its trading price, so they are called “derivatives” as they are “derived” from the stock).
A put is a contract that allows the buyer of the contract to sell stock at an agreed upon price to the seller of the contract, regardless of the current trading price. They are used for a variety of reasons. In one usage, someone who is buying some of the stock at the current trading price may also buy a “put” on the stock at a slightly lower price. This way, they spend a little more money at the time of buying the stock, but if the trading price plummets, they can still sell it at that slightly lower “put” price and not lose too much money.
In this case, the idea would be to buy a “put” (without buying the stock at the same time) when the buyer thinks the stock’s trading price is overvalued. Then when the price falls below the “puts” agreed upon value, buy the stock at the lower price and immediately invoke the contract to sell at the "put"s higher price.
Short selling is when you borrow a stock, then sell that stock, then buy it back in time to return it. The idea is that you think it will go down, so you can buy it back at a discount and make a profit.
A put is when you have the option of doing that – i.e. if it doesn’t go down you don’t have to do anything with the stock, and you’ve only lost the fee you paid for the put contract. It’s a way of hedging your bets.
The only way reddit is worth $15 billion is if they have plans to sell user data to AI companies.
Nah, they don’t need to do that when they can already influence user decisions by faking a consensus.
They “fuzz” votes. They give themselves “gold” and promote articles. Then they have the first few comments all say the same opinion in a few different ways, and suddenly people start agreeing for fear of being “in the out-group”. It takes so much effort to flip the tone of the components section once it’s got a vibe.
If not, delete and restart until it works.
As a public company, not disclosing that they manufacuter conversation and opinion with fake data and instead saying it’s all natural would be fraud and they would face fines or go to jail if discovered.
Edit: reddit could turn a blind eye to others doing it, but they cant do it themselves and say otherwise.
