Yeah, they kept sending me emails begging me to invest. Reddit’s IPO is a fucking clown car headed toward a cliff.
Reddit wants to raise $748M with IPO, sets value at $6.4B
Submitted 8 months ago by jeze@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/11/reddit_wants_to_raise_748m/
Comments
ZeroCool@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
towerful@programming.dev 8 months ago
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 reputationZeroCool@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
Yep, I do the same. I opted out of all 20ish email comm options on that shithole site so it’s just straight up spam.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Its nothing i signed up for, and consider it marketing.
Sounds like standard Reddit content to me.
merc@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
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.
QuarterSwede@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m not investing because fuck you Spez and wallstreetbets is certainly going to have a field day. I can’t wait for popcorn time.
A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I hope it makes a funny noise when they hit the ground
Mereo@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
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.
Basically people who karma farm with low effort posts. This will only encourage low quality posts.
xodoh74984@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The best part is that this whole thing is about having the “opportunity” to purchase reddit stock at its IPO price. This user generated content farm wouldn’t dare give away equity for free to users responsible for the site having any past, present, or future value.
I’m not a finance person, but the only gambling I’d do on this company is hope that Wall Street pumps the price post-IPO so I can short it.
My understanding is that the value of each reddit user is priced roughly at $2. A Facebook user is priced at roughly $40. Their only options to maybe be profitable are more enshittification, more users, or both. Or, you know, not paying hundreds of millions of dollars to the execs of an RSS feed with voting and comments.
Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I bet wallstreetbets is going to pile into shorts out of the gate because who doesn’t want to stick it to reddit and its WSB lol. Then after a slumpy start some whale is going to blow up all those shorts and pump it like crazy and then everyone will buy panic calls and the early ones in will fade the top and screw over the call buyers on the way back down. Thats my prediction. Not touching this with someone else’s 10 foot pole lol
Nurgle@lemmy.world 8 months ago
A Reddit user is $2 now, but they have terrible ad targeting. Reddit users volunteer troves of info about themselves, so even a modest effort to start tying all those user signals together could be a great boost that number (which really wouldn’t take much). Plus monetizing that base for LLM data and you got a stew going. They’ll of course make do the cash grabby enshitifying stuff too, but their user data is much more underutilized than facebooks at the moment.
Neato@ttrpg.network 8 months ago
I got offered a while ago and I had 1,500 link and 0.5M comment karma after a decade. I was never a moderator or did anything important. I can’t imagine that was considered meaningfully contributed. At least I hope not.
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I got invited with just a bit over 100k; I considered it, just out of ‘fuck it, why not’ but didn’t follow through. I have like 6 posts of maybe, maybe 300 upvotes combined, the rest is comments; either helpful, amusing, but not really ‘meaningful’. Account since 2013, lurker for a while before that. Though I got out of my shell and shed a ton of social anxiety with those comments, so personal growth woo.
I’m really curious about how it’s going to launch, and the first few months.
dhork@lemmy.world 8 months ago
250k karma was enough to get into the first round of invitations
kboy101222@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
As someone who was invited to that first group and told them to go fuck themselves, it’s actually mostly people who have participated in reddit surveys and reddit mod meetups (where mods from a local area get blasted on Huffman’s dime). Almost every mod that I know that went to one of these events got an invite and all of them gave similar answers to me.
Also, 200k karma isn’t a ton. It likely places you in the top 1%, but most people don’t participate anyways. I had over 300k (I think, I’m not checking) and maybe 1k was from a single post. Everything else was from the occasional comment
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Wait I could’ve gotten drunk on huffman’s money? I just skipped mod meetups because the company sounded awful
Krudler@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
That site should be renamed Reggurgitatit.
kenopsik@lemm.ee 8 months ago
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.
Toribor@corndog.social 8 months ago
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.
jeze@lemm.ee 8 months ago
It’s still insanely popular.
merc@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I don’t know about “insanely”.
It’s not in the top 10 globally. It gets less traffic than Yahoo or Yandex.
www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
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”.
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
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.
thecodeboss@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
Patches@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
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.
designated_fridge@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.”
aniki@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Yeah, reddit is astroturfed to hell and back. unless its something programming, the idiots on reddit are usually wrong.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Honestly not much different on largerv lemmy communities either.
This is more of a symptom of our society than of a specific platform.
JeffKerman1999@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
It’s because LLMs don’t have imagination
vinyl@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Boo hoo cry some more 🤌🎻
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 8 months ago
r/sffpc is still good tho.
agitatedpotato@lemmy.world 8 months ago
“Website that never posted a profit thinks it’s worth over 6 billion dollars. Yes US dollars.”
ShepherdPie@midwest.social 8 months ago
I’d laugh about this but then I remember that someone recently bought Yahoo for $5B
RGB3x3@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Who’s the moron that bought Yahoo for that much? Anybody using yahoo mail is going to be dead or not need email in 10 years and yahoo answers doesn’t exist anymore.
So what value could that company possibly have?
jeze@lemm.ee 8 months ago
More like $599 US dollars. Riiiiidge Racer!
DogPeePoo@lemm.ee 8 months ago
☠️Reddit has NEVER been profitable ☠️
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
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.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
db2@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You mean Steve Huffman has said something that isn’t true? This is totally unprecedented! 🤡🤣
Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee 8 months ago
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.)
Not sure what reddit has going for it, though.
DogPeePoo@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I think Reddit will be Robinhood 2.0
It’s a bag pass/exit liquidity
It’s a ruse
GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
This has never been necessary for an IPO.
DogPeePoo@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Typically, IPO’s are nothing more than exit liquidity
designated_fridge@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
They should do a reverse gamestop on the ipo
Zuberi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
I guarantee you they do just that if you buy it through some shitty sub-brokerage
shininghero@kbin.social 8 months ago
748 million? I'll be surprised if they get more than 748 thousand.
Haus@kbin.social 8 months ago
Three fiddy.
rdyoung@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m considering buying a few shares (if I can just a few) just to watch it burn. And so I can be part of history. Or I’ll wait for it crash after the ipo and grab a few as a likely to never profit but might type of play.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 8 months ago
If you’re buying, you’re stopping it from burning…
db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Voluntary bagholder or P&D gambler?
wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee 8 months ago
If you watch many IPO, you will see it spike quickly then a large dump after that. I know the last IPO I was part of, we couldn’t sell for several days after the IPO.
Voyajer@lemmy.world 8 months ago
How to get downvotes: -Complain about getting downvoted -Name call anyone who does not upvote your comment
Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee 8 months ago
part of history
What every idiot who lost money on Gamestop said.
I might wheel it after it tanks, but probably not. My tax advisor always lectures me when I make money wheeling.
Contend6248@feddit.de 8 months ago
Doesn’t get more brainless
dhork@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I want some, if nothing else as a souvenir of all the time I spent there before the place turned to shit. Too bad nobody makes actual certificates anymore, I would pay extra to get a few shares in certificate form.
No way I am paying that much for it. The true value is probably much closer to $.30 than $30.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
lol I kinda hope it crashes and burns
massive_bereavement@kbin.social 8 months ago
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.stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
You need strict rules and strong moderation once any community gets to a certain size and starts attracting people outside of the enthusiasts.
The platform doesn’t matter, it’s just that lots of people suck and ruin the experience for others if there are enough of them.
romp_2_door@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I truly hope this.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I will be shorting once it plateaus a few days after launch. I’ll at least finally get paid for them selling my data for a quick buck.
ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Best of luck (mean that sincerely)
casmael@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I mean I want a stripper girlfriend and a gold-top les Paul but we don’t always get what we want do we, Steve you prick
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Access to.
But I don’t think I know a single redditor who got the offer who is buying. I’m not.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
Why buy a company that can’t make money and intentionally kills decent revenue streams?
tygerprints@kbin.social 8 months ago
Now why, (me doing a Jack Benny impression): why, ya see - why would I go and buy stock in a company that hated everything I ever posted, and then banned me for saying that progessive thought is a good thing. I ask you.
Kyrgizion@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Twelve dollars and a bitten sandwich. That’s my final offer, and already more than generous.
qwed113@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
6 billion seems REAL high
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.
metaStatic@kbin.social 8 months ago
ended up clicking a reddit link the other day and saw DMs about reddit stock. Reported them for scamming and blocked the admins that sent it.
literally pointless but it felt good anyway.
Neato@ttrpg.network 8 months ago
So they’re only trying to sell 11.7% of their total stock? Is that normal?
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What’s a reddit?
BallsInTheShredder@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Hello
modifier@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Now pull the other one. It has got bells on.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 8 months ago
So only three years of Steve Huffman’s salary?
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Great marketing for an IPO … we need enough money to equal three times what our CEO gets
OpenStars@startrek.website 8 months ago
Watch as he burns through it in one:-).
Also, bold of us to assume that he has not already spent it:-P.
GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
It’s in the form of stock options, which won’t be worth any particularly noteworthy amount unless the IPO goes really well.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 8 months ago
If it has a dollar valuation, if it’s taxable, it can be liquidated.