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Reddit IPO: Company's biggest risk is its reliance on unpredictable users
(www.moneycontrol.com)
No, its biggest risk is its CEO.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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The CEO who got paid $193,000,000 last year?
Did any CEO do 193 million dollars worth of work last year? Almost certainly not, but who definitely did not? Spez. I think I'll redirect my Internet traffic. I want to make sure I never, ever accidentally give that asshole any more unearned power, money, and fame...
Honestly, if one of reddit's competitors tasked him with running reddit into the ground as effectively as possible, he'd be just about worth that figure by now.
If you are in the EU file a complaint with your supervisory authority as reddit is illegally processing and selling data of children to be trained with by Google, not to mention all other users who weren't properly informed, nor consent retrieved. This one is going to be fun.
How would one go about this?
I posted an extensive write up over here: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/854162/Any-EU-based-users-of-reddit-should-immediately-file-a
Scroll down to the last section for tl;dr instructions :)
Cheers!
The wild thing about last summer was it revealing how remarkably stable their unpaid labor pool is. Take away their tools, mock them in the national press and on the site, and the worst most of them will do is participate in a perfunctory protest. They weren't willing to go to war or even organize in a meaningful manner.
It makes me think of how nationalism has sent millions to their deaths. Who needs money? People will put themselves through hell just to protect an identity.
The users haven't left, that's for sure, but didn't the mods of most of the larger subs (something like 48/50 I thought?) leave? Some unwillingly actually...
But if you mean the enormously long tail of smaller subs, then yeah, that happened, fo sho.
Yeah, mostly in terms of the day-to-day operations of the site remaining largely business as usual, at least in terms of what matters to corporate. Plenty of impotent response abounded, too. For example, one of the largest subreddits, /r/games, never even joined the 48-hour blackout.
There's an argument to be made that content quality is down, but that's a subjective measure, and I'm not even going to try to unpack my own personal bias on that front given I moved here because of this in the first place.
I stayed awhile longer, but prepped for the worse that came yesterday.
Honestly, I think it did impact the content objectively for the worse. Now that I'm fully moved into Lemmy I'm recognizing that a bunch of subreddits basically declined into irrelevance after the blackout (and I'm only remembering them as I try to recreate my subscription list here).
And it kinda affected the vibe of the front page. As of now, I'd describe current reddit as very meta-naval gazing. So many of the posts are basically rival subreddits going "nuh-uh" and "yuh-huh" to each other. There may also be a new algo in use that's basically encouraging fights between subreddits?
Edit: I should clarify, I think there's objectively less actual content with now the literal same content being posted multiple times but with different takes on it.
I was mostly in the niche subreddits anyway, and it's frustrating that Reddit is essentially still the only searchable website for non-sponsored content in hundreds (if not thousands) of niches. Quality in my niches is still the same ebb and flow that it was.
There still are questions of validity, though. Message boards like Reddit haven't really had their payola/Gamergate/astroturfed-FCC-comments moment yet.
Yeah, it helps that's what my initial prep was: migrating over to discord for niches. It doesn't hit all the marks you mentioned, but it's good enough for me (for now, it's probably gonna have its true enshittening moment too but it's still usable for me at least).
Making the final move here was for the news aggregation with some community discovery, and so far it feels like it's adequate here too.
Same - well, at least in regard to r/popular, though I did keep going back to the small niche sub that I used to mod and felt a connection to, but while I couldn't call it "dead" now, it definitely does not seem as vibrant as it used to be, and nowadays I only check it perhaps once a week, and haven't commented in a LONG while. Just people trying to drum up content, sorta like here except more inane posts there vs. just silence here. I prefer here regardless:-P.
A couple of months ago, r/popular seemed mostly people arguing with bots - or else I couldn't tell the difference and that is just as bad - while in my smaller sub at least it is people wishing they had something to say, and arguing with what looks like literal and actual children.
Wherever the actual content creators went, they don't seem to be on Reddit anymore.
I'm not sure how much moderators could even do.
I was actually there so my view of events is pretty biased, but watching mods get removed from their position and replaced with more complying people made me think that the power dynamic was insurmountable. Regardless of how much free labor they perform, moderators don't actually get bargaining power in return, Reddit employees untimately are above them to defend the company's interests. Realistically, the function of a Reddit mod is to spare admins the grunt work of ground-level moderation decisions.
And of that, 26% came from just 10 ad clients in 2023.
That's interesting. Does anyone know which are those ad clients? It would be a shame if users were to shame them in public for advertising in a site full of nasty shit, like Reddit...
The going rate for a content moderator around the world varies greatly, but for the sake of expedience, let’s say it might average around $50,000 a year. That’s $3 billion worth of free labor.
...or if users publicly mocked Reddit jannies, oopsie moderators, working for free for a company that ridicules them as "landed gentry"...
Reddit has a highly intriguing plan for counterbalancing these risks.
"Intriguing" sounds like an euphemism for "experimental and with high chance to fail".
"Intriguing" sounds like an euphemism for "experimental and with high chance to fail". The flip side of the AI deal with google?
They train on the dataset, reddit gets a free/cheap AI moderation system?
Sounds like a bad deal.
AI-only moderation simply doesn't work - any sort of automated system can be easily circumvented, as users reverse engineer how it works. So you'd still need to rely on the fleshy jannies to not have the place imploding, except that those jannies already abuse the automod, so you'd have yet another system for them to abuse.
I never said it would be good moderation.
But reddit saying to its shareholders "we have cut down our reliance on unreliable user's free labour moderation by employing advanced state of the art AI moderation from Google specifically trained on our own content" is a big confidence booster, thus shares booster.
Problem is, thats not what reddit is/was. Thats not the attraction of reddit.
Good for the shareholders. Bad for the users. Likely short term profits for long term losses
Sure, you never mentioned good moderation. But I don't think that they'll be able to exploit it - for investors risk assessment is bread-and-butter, and they know that anything "AI" might crash the following second. Plus the lower quality of the site would be visible as soon as they implemented AI moderators, generating even further risk almost immediately.
I get your reasoning though - it doesn't need to be good for the site, only passable enough for the suckers buying shares to trust it.
Jfc, I got the "invitation" for the IPO.
If they're sending it to me, the whole fucking thing is a bigger joke than I thought it was.
I didn't get one... What does that say about me haha
I realized I hadn't deleted my account when they said that. Thanks for the reminder Spez!
I predict an initial IPO spike upwards (for maybe 2 weeks) to bait suckers.
That will likely be followed by 2 years or more of bag holding 📉
But from a CEO perspective it doesn't matter. Highly successful IPO, huge bonus, retirement. Sadly that's how modern gambling works, hike share prices, cash out.
Dude reportedly made 193 million $ last year. By this point he must have enough money safed up, that he could spend a million every year for the rest of his life.
It is never enough to feed his voracious appetites. He craves power, and he's trying to win like Elon Musk (ignoring how the latter is nowhere close to "winning").
The new Robinhood
Oh no, the IPO starts off ridiculously inflated, and it'll crash on day 2
Whoever stacks up on shorts during the fire sale peak in the first three days after IPO is gonna be a very happy sailor.
Last couple IPOs I watched didn’t even make it a couple days before tanking.