this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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I'm still trying to figure out how reddit expects to "become profitable" while simultaneously destroying everything that made it valuable.
"Become profitable" is just their stated goal.
I think that their actual goal is to look profitable for the upcoming ipo so that the CEOs can cash a fat check and leave. They likely don't care about what happens after that.
So the "become profitable while simultaneously destroying everything that made it valuable" platitude is more like "they're cutting down the tree for the wood without thinking about the squirrels"
Yep.
Say the IPO is 9/1/23. The company wants to do anything they can to juice the numbers for that date, even if it means on 9/2/23 it crashes and burns.
When a company prepares for an IPO, every long-term metric is thrown out the window
Time to figure out if I can short it at the IPO
Not public yet, I’m afraid
But there are only so many Elon's that would buy a sinking ship for a shit ton of money.
That's the dumbest part. There's no guarantee that this ipo bid is going to pan out. Huffman is betting big, it's just too bad he's so full of himself that he doesn't realize his actions will probably be what causes this ipo to fail.
He wanted to fly under the radar and make changes that look good on paper while keeping the community relatively the same. Instead he made a splash so big that major news outlets are still talking about it months later, and now he's actively alienating the volunteer work that holds the whole site together.
Greed kills another thing, history of humankind.
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding your comment but.. it's an IPO, they're going from private to public. Twitter was the opposite, which is unusual. Right now Steve Huffman is the musk of reddit.
They still need people to actually buy the shares of a sinking ship.
There's gonna be plenty of institutional investors and index funds who don't give a shit about drama that will buy it up regardless.
For what? To lose money?
SNAP 2.0
Sounds like Lynx Africa
But are investors this stupid? Who invests in an IPO without doing research on the company's activities? If they check the internet and it's countless articles about how their users and moderators are pissed and leaving, why would anyone think it's going to be profitable?
The sad thing is that reddit will probably do alright for at least a few years. It may not be an awful investment in the short term.
That said, it'll slowly burn out and investors will be left holding the bag. But that's alright, because Steve Huffman will have gotten his payday and retired to the decommissioned missile silo that he converted to luxury apartments in case of doomsday. All he had to do was fundamentally change the way people use the internet by selling the company that his two smart buddies created.
Fucking preach.
Yes. Look at the 2008 housing crash, and tell me average investors are intelligent.
They definitely do, check out WSB and Robinhood subs
Investors aren't great at seeing what makes or breaks a community. They just want to see how Reddit plans on profiting from the community.
Not necessarily, companies like Twitter make consistent losses with no real path to change that, yet its deemed to have value by investors.
It's more like "cutting down the forest to harvest the wood once" rather than "manage the harvesting so that it can be generating wood for generations". It's typical capitalism.
Very poor leadership.
Spez was smart enough to realize that there's value in aggregate votes on text content in specialized niches for training AI, but too dumb to recognize that the owners of that value are the users and moderators and not Reddit corporate, and that the greatest frontend contributions have been by 3rd party developers.
So he complained about "landed gentry" while implicitly suggesting he sees Reddit as a monarchy where he sits on the throne.
Which in turn pushed users and moderators and 3rd party developers to look elsewhere.
It's the beginning of the end for the site that for a few years now was my pick for "massive untapped and underappreciated value."
It's wild that he failed so badly in even just ad sales. Targeting my profile there based on something like a vectordb of comments, posts, and liked content would have been 1,000% more relevant than Google or Meta could have offered advertisers.
But the fool couldn't even get their basic search to work.
While many comment on how Reddit enhances Google searches, the flip side of that is how insane it is that people go to Google to search Reddit.
Incompetent man child ruins company. A story as old as companies (and part of why "founder driven startups" is such a piss poor model for entrepreneurship).
I never considered that I search google for reddit before. Good point.
That's the thing, reddit doesn't need to be profitable for the venture capitalists to make their bag. They're trying to cash out at the IPO and have no concern for it after that.
That makes it even dumber though, surely? Lots of people invest in tech businesses that are not profitable and have no plans to become sustainable, some idiots even buy them.
It's things like user count and activity that will be more meaningful in that scenario, so one should avoid doing anything to reduce those figures.
I mean, Reddit was already drowning with repost bots, I'm sure when the time comes they'll have tons of ""users"" generating loads and loads of ""activity"" to impress the investors
The users reddit lost are the whiniest ad blocking power users, I'm included in this group so don't take it as an insult, maybe 3% of total users.
Reddit is still doing fine, long term the writing may be on the wall but the venture capitalist just need it to make it until September.
@RagingNerdoholic @BraBraBra because what they are looking at to determine profitability isn't actual profitability. They have certain metrics and they are making those metrics as high as possible. One might be, for example, ads served per page view.
I still can't figure out why anybody is using the site whatsoever.
If someone didn’t bother to use 3rd party apps, they probably wouldn’t bother to switch to a whole new platform. Also federated sites are not intuitive and lemmy is scary of you go in without understanding that.
I mean, google lemmy and you don’t get much, its not a .com but rather there’s tons of instances which would just look like fake sites. And the design of the official site doesn’t exactly scream trustworthy. Im pretty tech literate and i had to find a tutorial to join the fediverse.
Im assuming there’s a bunch of folks who just don’t care to put that effort in so they’ll just stick around until it fails to meet their low standards.
I didn't use 3rd party apps and I'm here bc fuck spez
Exactly this. A huge amount of the major lemmy instances look like sites I would explain to my non-tech-savvy parents to avoid blindly clicking on, between domains that most browsers don't even automatically detect as links, and a ton of, frankly, sketchy af names.
I mean, Facebook is also "profitable" but it's still an utter shitehole content- and community-wise
This is such a perfect way to put it.