Anyone else here concerned about what this means for the health of the ecosystem? If reddit was never sustainable and we are well and truly past a phase of consolidation there is potentially a lot of history / info to loose here. The damage has been done already by the funding model. While the return to federation and private hosting is nice, there is a potential "dark" age.
Can't help but feel like we're getting there already with most sites having the exact same problem. I think Facebook might be the only site that actually makes money due to always prioritising money, everyone else has dominated the market by operating at a loss for the past 2 decades and now suddenly oops we decided we need money.
I could see a Wikipedia-style donation model working to keep lots of different servers up. But I can't see it happening for servers hosting exclusively news + memes + whatever random communities people want to add.
I _could _ see it happening for dedicated broad-topic or semi-niche instances (instances for gaming, investing, Linux, music production, etc.) each hosting a collection of related and maybe more niche communities (for CSGO, Bitcoin, Arch, EDM production).
As they become more popular, server hosting costs increase, and at some point they might need to ask for donations to keep afloat. People are willing to throw a little money towards something they enjoy, especially if it's their choice to do so. And they feel good about it. And instances that stay around longer gain more users, more usability, more credibility (assuming a non-toxic community).
I could definitely see it leading down a path of growth and prosperity for the platform. However, now that I typed this out, I could see it both working positively, and being abused and exploited, so 🤷
It can't because it's actively hostile to the users that make it its content in favor of recreating a more massive version of the Stanford prison experiment. Although that seems to be a fad to the people naturally attracted to acting out their power fantasies in any sort of reddit-like social network, particularly those who want to act out Minority Report.
I receiced one of those special offer emails to buy stocks on Monday. Weren't those supposed to go only to power users? I haven't done anything with my account since the API debacle and wasn't a power user before.
I feel like their rug pull before the ipo doesn't work that good. I hope the gme bros will short reddit to the ground, that would be the best end to Reddit I can imagine. Fuck spez.
I was a semi-power user before leaving (13k link karma, 134k comments) and also received the IPO offer per email and per notification. I reported the notification as spam :)
It's so obvious that they want to squeeze some money out before everything goes down the drain.
They are going out in stages based on # of mod actions or karma. I think the lowest Karma threshold in the final batch was 25k. Which seems like a lot, but isn't really, at least for the users they alienated in the API debacle.
This is just for the sign-up for information, though. Once they get the whole list they will start going down the list of sign-ups from the top, and start asking for money. Because this isn't a free share offering, it's a chance to buy at the IPO price. So even out of the list of Redditors who signed up, a bunch will pass, because if they had a few extra $10k sitting around, they would put anywhere else except Reddit.
And I don't think they have broken out how many shares are part of this program. (To be fair I haven't looked that closely). I predict that no matter how many people sign up, they will reject 90% just for the optics. They are only doing this for the free publicity, and rhe fact that they think Redditors will have emotional attachment to the shares for being let into the "club". So they will only give out enough for the press to write stories about it.
I got one, too, which is hilarious because not only was I not a "power user," but I torched all of my comments and posts with Redacted 7 months ago and have not touched the site since. I even avoid it when it comes up in Google results for something I'm looking into.
But they still sent me one of these stupid IPO emails.
I mean, obviously there is no human oversight or thought process behind these whatsoever. We all knew that. Probably anyone who has an existing account and a positive karma score got one, and I'm not even sure the threshold is that high.
But I guess we're all here doing their work for them anyway, because here we are talking about -- even if it is to ridicule -- and generating "buzz." I'm sure that's what they want, somehow.
I got it as well. My accounts were banned... and then all the sudden an IPO comes along and the are unsuspended.... i went back in and redacted my accounts that got the email.
Your comment made me go back and check, and I definitely got unbanned at some point. I was site-banned for mass edit>deleting my comments on all my accounts during the API evacuation. One sub saw me doing it, and banned that first account. Whatever, no big loss cuz I’m scorching things on my way out the door anyways. When I did the same with the second account, both accounts were banned site-wide for ban evasion, (because that second account also had comments on that same sub.) And that same pattern happened with every account I had.
But now they’re all unbanned. I wonder if Reddit went back and unbanned old accounts, to try and boost their user numbers prior to the IPO.
I did not get one and my account has a shit ton of karma. But the bio says that Reddit can go down in flames and to go to Lemmy, so that's probably why.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they manipulated the discussion around the stock as well. Bot army or admin downvotes on critical discussions, and lots of upvotes on the hype.
Dumb people are going to see headlines about “AI” and “the first social media IPO in a long time,” and they’re going fork over money. Also speculators are going to buy after they speculate that other speculators are going to buy speculatively.
Mostly from small people either tricked into buying the "new bitcoin/Nvidia/apple/... before it's to late or dumb people hyped by other dumb people into buying it. And if enough small people invested and the stock rises the big player collect the profit.
Better, buy a lottery ticket with it. That way it might be worth as much as the ash you'd have anyway, but there's a chance you'll become a millionaire.
Or Bitcoin, but fair warning: you might find yourself tempted to start a rap career, and that's almost never advisable.
I am curious. If you were a Chief officer or VP or something. What kind of changes would you do to make it profitable? Reduce server count? Roll back old.reddit? Just cut overhead? Get rid of Spez? How can they possibly make it profitable given where they are now?
That's why I said given where they are now, how would it even be possible. What can they do outside of raise prices of reddit stickers or ad-free reddit.
It needs to become profitable because it was unprofitable for 20 years. Would you dump millions into something that doesn't even have the chance to make you money in the first place? Reddit wouldn't even exist anymore.
If reddit allowed third party apps again that would probably be enough to get me back. Maybe in another 5 years it won't but right now Lemmy only wins cause the reddit app experience is bad enough to drive me away.
Yeah, turned out I was actually more loyal to the app I was using than I was to the platform. Though I was also pretty good to the platform, I contributed and interacted daily and often spent money buying gold. I tend to take the attitude that if I'm getting a lot of use out of something I don't mind spending a little to support it. That's all in the past now and I wonder how many other paying users they burned.
There has never been a profitable social media company.
Facebook might have started out as a social media company, but it's only profitable now because it's part of an advertising duopoly that has almost all online ads completely locked up. Their actual business is renting eyeballs to advertisers. The social media part of it is just data collection for their advertising.
Reddit can't compete with the big 2 as an ad platform. They don't have the reach of the other two, and never will. So, it's not going to be a good money making platform, but it might be able to have a niche and cover its costs. There are ways it could do that and not be awful for users.
They could partner with Hollywood studios to promote shows and movies, provide forums to discuss them that are safe for those brands. They could work with local governments to be a place to release important information. Governments used to do that on Twitter, but Twitter has gone to shit. This isn't stuff that will send Reddit shares to the moon like their VC backers want. But, it could survive.
Instead, they're going to follow the Elon Musk playbook and it will die.
And, he only got away with it until he was able to pivot to advertising. Sure, small social media companies (even relatively large ones like Twitter) also want to sell ads, but the more user data you have, the more you can convince people that your ads are nearly mind control. Meta can do that because they control Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They got all the users because the users were hooked before they started selling the ads, and now network effects mean they don't want to leave.
All of that sucks in user data which they can then sell ads against. Reddit would just be one text-based ad site where people use pseudonyms. It's never going to be able to compete with Meta for ad dollars.
AMA used to be a pretty big draw for lots of people who didn't regularly use the site and often made international news, but they fucked that right up.
Yeah. You could see they were coordinating with the agents of celebrities. The celebs found it more interesting than the generic interviews they did with other media outlets. Upvoting and downvoting meant the best questions bubbled up to the top, although sometimes they were things the celebs didn't want to talk about. But, with a good PR person in the room they did fine with it.
There's a niche there, but it isn't going to be a humongous one that will make Reddit a trillion dollar business.
VIP posts which you have to subscribe to a user to view. Reddit takes a cut of the subscription fee. With the sheer amount of OnlyFans models who astroturf the fuck out of the NSFW subs, it feels beyond stupid that Spez isn't cutting out the middle man and competing with the likes of OF, Fansly, Patreon and Subscribestar.
Add more incentives to subscribe to Reddit Premium, i.e. enhanced search functionality, the ability to time travel back to the frontpage from a previous date.
Improve the official Reddit app to the point where it's on-par with previous third party offerings.
Bring back RPAN as a fully-fledged livestreaming platform with fewer restrictions. Introduce ads (Premium users get ad-free viewing) and revenue sharing for partnered creators.
Change content and moderator guidelines to curb power users.
Pivot towards short-form video content as a separate section of the site to compete with the likes of TikTok.
4 because video live streaming is stupid expensive. Twitch only survives cause they're owed by Amazon who owns numerous data centers to support it. Same deal with yt.
6 because everyone's already doing short form video and we don't need another tiktok alternative. We already have Instagram and YouTube, and their server infrastructure likely far exceeds that of reddit.
In 2023, the company’s revenue was $804.0 million. Research and development, at $438.3 million, was more than half, an awfully big number for a company of this age.
What the heck are they doing‽
Edit: oops, Semi-Hemi-Demigod beat me to it. Hello, fellow binner!
they're selling the ability to harvest data, not provide a platform for anything particularly useful.. they are developing data harvesting tools, including for AI..
The two options to fix that are either buy more servers or make enough idiotic decisions to drive your user base away that traffic is no longer an issue anymore.
Remember when they killed API access claiming it cost the 10s of millions each year? Turns out they could have just not spent so much on reddit avatars and we'd all still be there today.
They could have just paid the CEO a little less to cover it too. It was just greed so they could sell the data at a pittance, even though the cat is already out of the bag.
An ugly new logo, continued development on world's shittiest mobile app, and a terrible brand new UI for the website (not to be confused with the previous terrible new UI)
Oh yeah, they also did some NFT bullshit, almost forgot about that one.
I work in financial reporting, so I have a decent idea of what makes up things like operating profit/loss and Adjusted EBITDA.
This does not look good for Reddit and if the company only managed a $90.8m loss after jacking up API costs, nuking virtually every third-party client, backstabbing every power mod, giving alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin an actual user base and selling off user data to Google, then I fully expect things to get a lot worse on the site.
Seeing a report like that, that they did all these things to raise funds and are still not profitable, is there any reason why anyone would invest? Surely the price can only go down from initial offering, right? Unless the price started very low.
I'd imagine reddit could be profitable too if they stopped throwing money at stupid shit like NFTs and avatars. Selling API access for AI training was a good move in terms of bringing in income since it basically costs them nothing, and they could have totally pulled that off without pissing off half their userbase.
They could've also called reasonable prices for api access for 3rd party apps and would have a nice revenue stream now instead of the pr shitshow they got.
I think I have read this suggestion at Reddit: "Make people who wants to use API as clients pay. " The app doesn't have to have API key, user pays a very reasonable money to access Reddit with their favourite application. Obviously it would come with sane for human browsing limits and AI leechers should pay millions.
Just like a plain old radio station where you can access from web page for free but you need to subscribe for better AAC, high quality streams and standard VLC support.
Lycos isn't even a particularly bad search engine. It's just been overshadowed by bigger players like Google, Bing, Baidu, DDG, Yandex, etc. I imagine that their low traffic helps to lower their operating costs a lot.
I made a comment below about which of my old accounts were receiving the buy-shares offer. I don't know if what they're doing raises any speculation to someone with your background, but I'd be interested in hearing if it does.
Their R&D costs seem alarmingly high, when the most 'innovative' things we've seen come out of Reddit in recent years have been canned features like their own cryptocurrency and RPAN.
Other than that and Spez being paid a buttload in stock options...
I'd be really interested to see their R&D costs for 2022. I'm wondering how much of 2023's R&D was spurred by restricting the API code, and then allowing certain applications access; having to finally take seriously their decade-old promise to develop mod tools with no planning or preparation; their total surprise at having to provide access to disabled people; and having to update their app. Those are all areas where they were extremely happy to let languish, and which they suddenly had to provide expedited support for after the protests.
Reading through that article you could probably find/replace with Reddit.
The complaint alleges that Vonage's officers decided to offer shares to customers because they knew institutional investors who normally buy IPOs would be reluctant to buy Vonage stock. Vonage has consistently lost money and has never been profitable.
Earnings before interest, taxation, deprecation and amortisation. Interest is classed as other income and taxation is kinda self-explanatory.
Depreciation is spreading the cost of a fixed asset over the course of its useful life. So let's say you spend $40,000 on a machine that you expect to keep for 20 years, and scrap for $1,000 at the end of its expected life. You depreciate it on the straight-line basis (meaning it goes down by a fixed amount each financial year, or depreciate it by $1,950 each year. Straight-line isn't the only form of depreciation. Cars for example go down on a reducing balance basis, meaning their value goes down by a lot more during the early years of their lifespan.
Amortisation is like depreciation, but for long term loans and intangible assets (things like customer lists, patents, etc.)
I’ve been in dozens of quarterly review calls for every company I’ve worked for where EBIDTA is mentioned and this is the first time someone explained it clearly.
Sorry, I don't work in economics so I don't follow this (but it looks like a great analysis for someone who doesn't understand it!).
Do all these things mean Reddit IPO is likely to tank (though one never knows)?
I'd like Spez to pay for all he's done to 3rd party apps and driving mods (and us users) away, but in the end I'm afraid it's only going to be regular employees to feel the pinch and Spez just cashing out...
Also, Reddit has a ton of users and some other article these days said they're going to sell everything to AI services that are going to train themselves on Reddit for a lot of dollars. Would this be enough to keep them afloat?
some other article these days said they’re going to sell everything to AI services that are going to train themselves on Reddit for a lot of dollars. Would this be enough to keep them afloat?
That's an interesting question. It was some deal with Google, to help train Google's AI. Honestly, Google probably grabbed much of what they needed for their AI while the APIs were still open, but I can still see things Google should want from reddit. First off, just on the "helping with AI" front, they'd be interested in ongoing data for Google's AI; more importantly, some kind of exclusivity to limit the amount of data other AI companies can get from reddit.
Other data they'd want: given the noticable-even-to-muggles decline in search results during the APIcalypse, I'm certain that Google wants continued access to reddit's data for their search engine (and again, some manner of limiting other companies access to that data).
As a final, admittedly paranoid thought: I'm sure Google would love access to reddit's non-public data: the IP addresses of various accounts could be used to flesh out consumer profiles, comments you made could narrow down your actual identity, upvotes and downvotes reveal your opinions, what you clicked through to reveals things of interest, etc. Yeah, they probably have a bunch of that already, but this would strengthen and increase the quality of the data that they have.
But I don't see Google really making a huge investment into reddit, either. Reddit is too toxic for a corporate giant, and their corporate cultures are almost literally polar opposites. They'll buy the data, but they're not going to fairy-godmother reddit, or give it anything except the minimum number of dollars to get the data that they want.
If i'm not mistaken (not an accountant but did do the accounts of a tiny company at one point) Interest, Depreciation and Amortization go into the calculation of gross (i.e. before tax) profits, unlike with EBITDA
EBITDA is used moreso in internal quarterly and monthly management accounts, which don't follow the exact same structure as an annual report which companies have to publish annually by law and follow GAAP and IFRS guidelinss when preparing.
I don't know how in the hell they let it go as wrong as they did. They had all the eyeballs of the internet. They had all the Google search traffic. They had an API that encouraged tons of other people to make applications that link with them to display their content.
All they had to do was light touch monetization, and slightly stroke the egos of the mods. Every new phone, car, light bulb that ever came out had a place where it could be directed right at the people they want to sell it to. All they had to do was disguise it as an unboxing or a slightly pithy review. Hell, they could have gotten competitors to bid against each other. Chevy could have been on there dissing forward, Ford could have been on their dissing Dodge. They're so many opportunities there for monetization. They have control over their own algorithm.
This is not the first time a platform goes bad and knowledge is lost. People used to think stack overflow was impossible to replace. Now we don't even use it anymore, most of us.
I mostly use chat gpt now, but I guess stack overflow is still there if you don't use chat gpt. And it can be helpful for finding error messages from apps and figuring out what they mean.
Stackoverflow is still very much impossible to replace. The amount of knowledge that it contains is simply too great to fall easily. And LLMs like ChatGPT aren't even close to being as helpful as SO answers, specially on archaic libraries.
He doesn't care about the ipo, or reddit, its employees, its "partners", or anyone who uses the site. He wants money now, and like a house fly he's not capable of learning.
You know the very credible sounding theory that Musk bought Twitter to drown it. He used Middle Eastern funds etc. and those people owning these gigantic funds had nightmares because Twitter made it so easy to organise mass unrest. I want to believe this crazy sounding theory since other option would be someone having such a capital, know how and influence is that dumb.
What if this is just a plot to kill Reddit? While crypto bros polluted it a lot, it was very similar with Twitter. Freedom of speech, diversity. It may have bugged people.
