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.

    • 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.