Despite having been founded in 2005, the S-1 notes that Reddit is “in the early stages of monetizing our business and there is no assurance we will be able to scale our business for future growth.”
Did they seriously just say "although our company start 19 years ago, we only able to start figure out how to make money, and if you buy our stock, we can't guarantee our company will grow further and give you more profits."
These are very common things for CEOs to say because if they give assurances and it doesn't happen they get in trouble with the FTC.
If you see how often Reddit comes up in search results, you will understand the value of the data. Potentially the most valuable single source of information on the internet.
Of course, all of that means nothing as long as AI companies are allowed to suck up and regurgitate any publicly available info on the web for profit.
Reddit's pretty good for niche support communities that still manage to have an active userbase. I wish I could cut the cord entirely but Lemmy just isn't there yet.
There aren't even a lot of specific game related communities that are active here. Even big games like Elden Ring, which recently announced the release date and gave us a huge trailer for the upcoming DLC, have little to no activity here on Lemmy. And that makes me sad. Because I'm not going back to Reddit just to get hype and deep dive into the imagery show in the trailer even though I hella want to 😬
Nobody is upset that Reddit is not good for active support comminities. They're upset that they're having their options taken away and being exploited for profit.
Lemmy will never "be that way" so long as people like you perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If thousands of people contribute to it, even if it is insider trading, can it be reasonably investigated and prosecuted?
But more seriously, not a lawyer, but no I don't think so. The users don't know any non-public business information about future Reddit business decisions (i would assume) and compete fairly with other potential shareholders. It's not like other shareholders couldn't do the same thing, after all.
In the MOONs sunsetting, some moderators got a 1 hour advance warning before the public announcement... and some sold before it was made.
For the IPO, it would depend on the kind of user: if some mods decided to short Reddit, then stage a sub locking protest like during the APIcalypse, they would have both information and means not available to other public investors.
This is the most interesting information I could find (while skipping a lot paragraphs): BTW Huffman is CEO Steve “u/spez”.
Altman was, and still is, the CEO of OpenAI. Altman’s also Reddit’s third-largest shareholder and owns more than twice as many shares as Huffman. Altman was the CEO of Reddit for eight days.
It's clearly a move for Huffman to cash out before bailing out. I wonder if things would have gone any differently with the last CEO? I forget her name.
Also buying into the stock early, seems stupid. For a company that's never been profitable, during a time of mass tech layoffs, and how the valuation of other social media has tanked after an IPO, just seems like you're gonna lose money investing in Reddit.
My guess is that they're offering early sales because they predict that the stock value will tank after the public offering, so this way there's a slightly higher margin of profit for the current shareholders. If that's correct then it's completely scummy. (i.e. extremely typical for Reddit)
Another possibility is that they're trying to "force" power users to be more cooperative towards the platform, by giving them a financial incentive to do so - "if you shit here you'll be tanking your own shares".
Stock options: "if you make the thing work, you'll be able to cash in on the stock price increase"
Pre-sale: "pay us now, find about later"
One incentivizes cooperation, the other can be a way to get support from large investors to grow a new business... or a scam to cash out from a 19 year old unprofitable one.
Nothing like investors who they perceive will be less rational, and will buy / not sell at a price above what the fundamentals suggests is rational.
It could pay off for Reddit if they get a short squeeze - non-institutional investors might be slower to sell, and I bet a lot of people will be shorting the stock unless the IPO price is really low.
I did too. My life is all the better for it. The fediverse is much more positive overall, and even if you don't like something, just find a different instance then. You don't lose the ability to peacefully use the product. Unlike Reddit...
Of course we hate it. It will trigger a whole new phase of enshittification.
I still use reddit because for some things it's still a valuable resource that Lemmy isn't yet for lack of users. Hopefully more redditors will find lemmy as this proceeds.
One of the nice things this time around is that Lemmy has really crystallized as an ecosystem. It's missing some significant niches, but now people who need a working example, and can't just envision it based off of the concept, can see it truly in action, instead of just seeing Leninist wankery.
It's missing some pretty mainstream interests, as well. Some of my favorite parts of reddit from the before times related to sports, television, music, etc., and there just isn't a critical mass on any lemmy community to really get that robust dialogue going.
Just curious here, because I don’t really know how this works - will they have to disclose how many shares they sold to power users prior to the IPO? I’d love for that number to be as close to zero as possible.
Why do boomers put a license link on public comments where the license has no value? I'd recommend removing it since having it automatically makes your opinions worth less.
From the notices section
You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain
This comment, and others in the thread below, are not engaging in the spirit of this instance. If you have questions about why someone has formatted their post the way they have, you can ask them without insulting the user. I'll be removing any further comments that engage in this manner.
Do you have any source for your claim that comments on the Internet are public domain? It's a common sentiment that anything posted on the Internet is public, but I don't believe it has any legal basis. Often websites have a ToS saying that anything you submit belongs to them in perpetuity, but programming.dev doesn't have that.
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On r/technology, the top comment on the IPO story is, “The beginning of the end.” There’s gloomy speculation about the measures management may take to make the company profitable — which subreddits might be banned, how much users might have to pay to post, a heavier ad load.
“While the rest of the internet is all a giant mess, Reddit still feels like a place where you can learn things and have fun,” says u/itsreallyreallytrue, who also received an invitation and is considering buying into the share program.
Events such as the war in Ukraine and the release of the video game Elden Ring — these are Reddit’s own examples — lead to spikes in user engagement.
Sure, Reddit’s trying to diversify its revenue by selling its data to help train AI; I don’t think the timing of that Google deal, just days before the S-1 became public, was a coincidence.
(During the peak of NFT hype, some of these assets sold for millions — and now the majority of NFTs are “worthless.”) It also had to end the Community Points product, which was a disaster for many whose tokens suddenly had no value.
He’s said that the API price increase last year that led to user protests, for instance, was partly because “Elon Musk did it.” (How’s Twitter — sorry, I mean X — doing with advertisers, spez?)
It's going to be a dumpster fire. I think any savvy investor can see straight through it. Institutional investors are fucking sick of these trainwreck, unprofitable tech companies. The only people lining up for these IPO shares are going to be a few FOMO folks, the CNBC crowd, and other uneducated idiots that want in at the beginning plus (lol) all their power mods. All of whom are going to be left holding the bag following the first earnings call.