As someone who dated a stripper in college and got to know a lot of those folks outside of work, trust me, you don’t actually want a stripper girlfriend.
Well, let’s just say that the likelihood to encounter people with a history of trauma, or atypical perspectives on intimacy, goes up.
In my case, I was dating someone that never really learned what normal displays of public affection looked like. Which created some very awkward moments for me and the people around me.
Actually all the pools I’ve come across come complete with a top and a bottom - that’s just like a car for example, usually they come equipped with an inside and an outside (but not always)
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.
For the same reasons that fast food is popular. It's basically dumbed down mindless consumption. I used to be on reddit because I could talk to like-minded people about interesting topics, but the vast majority of people on the internet just want to be entertained and with the support of the admins, they ended up taking over the site. Sure, there are some niche communities where you can have valuable discussions but their time is limited. It's essentially an artificially accelerated Eternal September.
I'm on board with your main point. I supposed I'm still left wondering why people go to a place that gives them the exact same thing every day without variation. Wait... yeah... that's actually the appeal. It is just like fast food: sweet, salty, fatty, devoid of nutrition, and always predictable.
That whole "niche communities" thing never rang true for me. I mean sure, if you like cast iron you can go to the cast iron community. And see 9000 pictures of cast iron pans and people freaking out about cast iron. Or cooking... and you have to listen to THOUSANDS of recommendations for air fryers but not cooking.
The "communities" system never worked from the word go. The site content should have been organized with weighted tags. As I find few things more nauseating than "collective intelligence" which is mostly wrong, ill-conceived, closed-minded and half-baked at best.
I mean at least for video games especially ones that are live service games having a place to go to talk about the game and new changes is really nice and still a thing I miss a lot about Reddit.
Disagree, there were, possibly still are, good ones. A handful around mushrooms cultivation, food preserving, food fermentation and personal finance specific to my country come to mind, lots of high quality content.
But I know what you mean. I think it mainly happens once specific subreddits started going mainstream, often with an influxnl from facebook people. Out of all the fermented stuff, the kombucha one made my eyes bleed due to its popularity. Half the posts where new people asking if they had a mold problem, the other half was existing members posting "read this before posting, this is what mold looks like", but they were obviously ignored lol
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".
More traffic than Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Amazon, etc? That seems unlikely. Maybe they're not counting any traffic from apps? If so, that isn't all that useful.
I recently started using it because it's actually a search engine like Google used to be. I wouldn't be surprised to hear it's gaining traction. Google.com is just a website. I don't think they realize just how quickly we can switch to other providers.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
NO - you would need a power level to be over 9000 for that.
This is half that. So you have only half control of the Universe. Like, you have to submit a request to your boss to use your power to do anything, but then he/she gets to either accept or deny your request. Requests must be submitted in triplicate and accompanied by a notary public cosignee signature. Other terms & conditions apply. Also, Huffman has veto power, and your requests may be lost or ignored at any time - but if YOU ever lose or ignore a reply in turn, then you are banned.
Hmmm, only half control of the Universe would be only half realizing my ambitions. It would be going at it half-assed - and I wanted to use my WHOLE ass this time!!
Guess I'll have to buy more shares since I must control not just Earth and Neptune and Jupiter, I want Uranus as well. (!).
As long as we are still talking about Reddit, I want you to have Huffman's anus as well:-). Have you tried sending him a picture of you dressed up as Elon Musk? Maybe you could become friends with Musk first, by sending him a picture of you dressed up as Donald Trump? :-P
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.)
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.
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.
Not a clue, but they did go from having 230 employees back in 2017 to 400 in 2018, 700 in 2021 to finally over 2000 in 2023.
So they have to be doing something. ...right?
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.
Options come with the obligation to pay for the underlying asset, so unless they are valued above the strike price, they are effectively worse than worthless.
Face value is unlikely to be the amount reported - I doubt the options are granted below the last reported market rate. Hence it's probably relative to the amount of underlying stock the options represent.
You'd have to check the SEC-filings for more accuracy than that.
Less than worthless would be when exercised, not exercising would be worth 0 - unless you paid for the option contract, in which case not exercising would represent a loss.
It seems like these tech IPOs happen when they are at their peak. Get a huge influx of extra cash once user growth starts to slow, pay off your early investors and then self-implode.
Well you definitely don't want to have an IPO after it's clear that you've already peaked and there is no way to gain more users or squeeze value out of the existing ones.
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 reputation
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I got the you’re invited to the IPO email from them and said, Fuck you Spez, as I deleted it; god that felt good. I hope they short the ever loving hell out of it.
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 to 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 do the cash grabby enshitifying stuff too, but their user data is much more underutilized than facebooks at the moment.
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
For the first group though they didn't actually bother to look into them. The 2 subs I ran have both been private since the last priest despite numerous warnings that I'd be removed if I didn't make them public. And my subs participated in numerous protests before then.
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.
So it would be less about buying a product to keep for a long time and more about something to exploit for a few years and throw it away.
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.
The issue is every mintue Spez has been at the helm, they've actively crashed any positive value the brand has had. It's been dead man walking before the IPO, which is not how you want your exit to go.
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.
