Yeah reddit’s a weird one. Their financials, aside from this year, are also horrendous. Not sure what value they really bring.
Comment on Reddit stock falls for second day as references to its content in ChatGPT responses plummet
BakerBagel@midwest.social 6 months agoOk, so how does a shareholder benefit from that? My company that pays people to stomp on kittens at my kitten stomping factory has value in that in gives people jobs and controls the feral cat population, but it creates no profit for the shareholders.
ieGod@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
rafoix@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
Reddit shareholders also own a lot of shares in much more lucrative industries.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 6 months ago
I didn’t ask about their other shares. I asked how Reddit’s soft power is able to actually benefit shareholders. I understand how it benefits Spez and those who make the actual decisions at reddit, but if I own 400 shares of Reddit, how do i actually benefit since Reddit will never pay a dividend since it will never actually be profitable
rafoix@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
The people in power don’t care about people with a few shares. You can sell all your shares right now and nobody would notice.
Reddit’s power benefits whomever wants to push an agenda and a narrative while minimizing any info that could counter that.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 6 months ago
How is that any different than what i initially said?
Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 6 months ago
The ads/manipulation does a thing that helps you attain profit or power. You want to manipulate what people see and pay for… so you pay reddit to allow you to mass deploy bots bypassing moderator levers. They have the community, you have the objective, you pay for the help of doing this and they probably have their own bot farms included.
They can even internally flag these entries as bots and use their AI partnerships to analyze what works on users and what doesn’t to trigger a specific response, and to avoid using techniques that get called out as bots.
They have their public ‘sponsored’ content, but I promise for big spenders they have a program that has no sponsorship callout. They probably brand it with nice fancy marketing terminology that makes it sound like you’re an angel doing god’s work by driving conversions or some stupid shit.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 6 months ago
I understand that Reddit has value to an individual or small board that can control what is posted to reddit. What i am saying is that Reddit’s value is entirely in soft power and has no actual path to profitablity. If i am Condé Nast then i can benefit from owning reddit. But Reddit will never pay a dividend, so buying stock in the company is worthless unless you are convinced that some idiot will pay more for it down the road.
Prove_your_argument@piefed.social 6 months ago
no actual path to profitablity
You don’t think reddit can make money from advertising?
BakerBagel@midwest.social 6 months ago
It hasn’t been able to thus far, same as every other “free” social media site other than Facebook. The problem is the sheer scale of the data that these sites have to main makes their overhead costs insane. To make profit from those ad spaces would require those ads to be too expensive to justify to the companies. It would be like trying to operate the New Orleans Superdome purely on ad space. The rate would be way too high to justify to potential customers.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 6 months ago
its useful as a propaganda tool, much like Xitter.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 6 months ago
I agree. But propaganda tools typically aren’t publicly traded because they are a venture that requires a lot of expenses but being it little cash value, which is the entire point of the stock market.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
Stock value go up.
I assume the reddit stock doesn’t pay dividends based on profits. But if you bought for 10 dollars and now it is 500 dollars? You can sell some of that stuck to people hoping it will go up to 1000 dollars for a solid profit. And so forth.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 6 months ago
I understand how stocks work. Reddit stock is just a legitimizes greater fool scam as no one will ever get a dividend or see any return in their investment short of managing to sell the stock for more than they bought it. Reddit is absolutely worthless in an strictly economic sense. It’s value is soley in societial and political ways
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
So… it is a stock that doesn’t pay dividends? Like… that is what stocks are.
BakerBagel@midwest.social 6 months ago
Which will only actually ever benefit anyone that owns massive amounts of the stock. Reddit has few tangible assets other than their data, which is of questionable value at best. It’s basically like owning stock in a piblic library