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
    10·
    2 years 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.

    • Lvxferre@lemmy.mlM
      3·
      2 years 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
        1·
        2 years 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.

        • Nythos@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          2 years ago

          I deleted all my comments barring one which was a reply to Spez himself calling him a spineless coward after lying about the Apollo dev.

    • MxM111@kbin.social
      0·
      2 years 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·
        2 years ago

        I mean, ignoring the balding 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.

        • CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          2 years 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.

    • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
      11·
      2 years ago

      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? Video hosting that doesn’t work? Image hosting so bad someone had to make totally separate website for it?

      • TheFriar@lemm.ee
        2·
        2 years ago

        Look at a the way everything in tech is moving.

        We are in the age of of surveillance capitalism. It will make itself profitable with our data. Maybe identifying people, creating profiles about beliefs and personality, etc.

        What else could they possibly do? It’s proven profitable and that’s what they want.

      • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        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

    • athos77@kbin.social
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • BudgieMania@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
    6·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Steamymoomilk@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      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

      • Mongostein@lemmy.ca
        4·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • SolOrion@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    Sincerely hope it crashes and burns, even though I find it unlikely.
    Fuck spez for ruining my favorite social media ever.

      • Deebster@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        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.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.eeEnglish
    61·
    2 years ago

    Please, Reddit, finish dying, I’m banned for a bullshit reason and wanna talk abotu Jojo Memes with people again

  • roguetrick@kbin.social
    4·
    2 years ago

    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.

      • roguetrick@kbin.social
        1·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de
      1·
      2 years ago

      That is not important. They sell attention from millions of users to advertisers, just like Facebook, google, YouTube, TikTok, …

      • roguetrick@kbin.social
        1·
        2 years ago

        Every single group you listed selfhosts and uses local data centers to reduce transit fees. It’s very important because it’s how you handle the costs on your business model. Ad revenue generally forces you to operate on tight operating margins. Compare that to another cloud hosting utilizing video provider that nearly sunk despite being quite popular: Vimeo. If you think this stuff is not important, see Twitch’s exit from Korea over transit fees.

  • forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
    3·
    2 years ago

    “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.

  • iterable@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
    2·
    2 years ago

    They filed for IPO in December 2021. Its taken them THIS long. The competent management didn’t leave the building, they were never there.