Reddit, the launchpad for many meme stocks, could now become one: The social media giant makes its debut on Wall Street Thursday in one of the most highly anticipated initial public offerings of the year.
While AI search crawlers have been scraping data from websites including Reddit to develop their models without permission from those sites, lawsuits have recently put that practice under threat, so Google has been eager to secure licensing deals with major publishers.
The subreddit has previously made and ruined fortunes, temporarily driving up the price of stock in down-and-out companies like GameStop, the movie theater chain AMC, and Y2K smartphone maker BlackBerry.
Without doxxing myself, I thought my username was a clever allusion to one of my favorite books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; the mods derided it as “one of them high-brow classic lit references about your destructive nature as a journalist.”
Unlike X, where blue checks with verified identities have always driven the conversation, Reddit has a flatter structure where communities form around niche topics, giving way to an unruliness that doesn’t respect anyone because of their title (especially because many people go by pseudonyms.)
Reddit has historically had no shortage of such content, even if it was later banned: take r/thefappening, where photos of naked celebrities stolen from their private iCloud accounts were posted, or r/thedonald, a MAGA subreddit that often violated the social network’s policies on hate speech.
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I have a 3p app that still seems to be working. I don’t log in, so I only read occasionally, but I have to say that the number of upvotes seem much higher than when I was using the site. I was a very active user who quit during the exodus (when Apollo went dark), but I don’t remember the number of upvotes being regularly in the thousands to tens of thousands.
It makes me wonder whether they’re artificially boosting traffic ahead of the IPO, to be honest. I mean, if they are, it probably would have leaked by now - but it still feels like it doesn’t line up with the third party traffic reports.
In any case, I think that going public is just going to increase the pressure for monetization, and Spez has already said how much he admires what Elon did with Twitter, so I think we know where it’s heading. It’s really just waiting for a replacement. Whether lemmy can be it or not is yet to be determined, but the enshittification has started and the migration will come as soon as someone drops a couple of billion building a service and app that’s a real substitute for the casual users.
Oh I'm not saying they aren't, I'm just saying they're corpo bootlickers who probably don't have ublock installed because they think piracy is wrong or some shit and I'd never want to be around them anyway
I doubt most users care about the IPO directly. What does it matter if the platform is owned by a few scumbags or many?
But as we know, pressure to attain profitability may push Reddit to introduce increasingly user-hostile features. This is where the possibility for the next revolt lies.
Let that sinking ship join Myspace and Tumblr already. Revolting may rise awareness of the problem, but it isn’t going to change the direction where Reddit is headed. They need to become profitable, and they’ve decided to do that by backstabbing the users.
The users and mods are already covered in dried caked blood from the many times they've already been back stabbed, front stabbed, side stabbed, thrown off a cliff and pissed on yet they're still there working away for free while those who care absolutely nothing about the site are all making money off it.
More specifically: are there ways to encourage the current Reddit userbase to act so notoriously destructively towards the platform, that no sane investor would burn their money buying Reddit stock?
I feel like someone could do better than SomethingRotten though, by playing both sides, and encouraging users from both to brigade and annoy the shit out of your typical user. To the point that the users start asking themselves "what am I supposed to do here? If I support [cause], Reddit screeches at me; if I oppose [cause], Reddit screeches at me; and if I don't do either, both screech at me! Perhaps I should stop using Reddit."
This could be based on porn (perhaps a good target for that; as @remotelove said, who controls porn controls the internet)), or even some ultimately pointless matter, like pineapple on pizza.
I have said it before, yes, people might leave. But the kind of people that stick so long to a dying platform are the ones that will never make it to Lemmy, Mastodon or whatever fediverse alternative you have.
None of these federated platforms employs any dark pattern algorithms to keep users engaged and clicking as much as possible. The kind of user that stays until the enshittification is not bearable anymore will not like the way the fediverse operates. So they go to some other place. Maybe its Facebook again, maybe Instagram, who knows.
The time is ripe for a new contender, so expect a bunch of The Next Big Thing (tm) apps that are almost identical, begging for your email address and contacts list so they can sign all your friends up too!
Man i wish people would understand just how funny it would've been to just drop twitter literally the tay elon took over. Same with reddit. Of course you'll always have people who don't even know, don't care or even like it. But fucking imagine the twitter takeover and only elon and a few of his dick sniffers are basically a private discord server
Maybe not right now, but when shareholders start demanding action over NSFW subs or subs that discuss illegal activities or subs that discuss the evils of capitalism or subs that just aren't profitable and those subs start getting shuttered, then they will.
Reminds me of Youtube. Guns and drugs, don’t make advertiser friendly videos, and that’s why the platform only barely tolerates those videos. From the predictive of YT, they demand resources without giving any direct revenue. I can see the reason why those channels tend struggle so much.
