“They’re shooting themselves in the foot,” Mir says. “The content of the users is what makes the platform worth visiting. These hosts kind of run into this confusion that their hosting is the reason people are going there, but it’s really for the other users on the medium.”
What really did it for me was Huffman’s quote on how “Reddit users, communities, and discussions are one of the largest data sets that cannot be given away for free” (summarized quote).
The rumored IPO made an entire corporation do a 180 so ruthlessly and clumsily in a way that I have never seen. It’s destroying itself and rightfully so.
I honestly can’t believe he’s being so egotistical about it. Insults mods as “landed gentry” and users’ concerns as “noise” - those are literally the people that have created this “valuable dataset” he’s coveting so greedily.
Fidelity dropping reddit’s valuation by ~40% made me go “oh boy that’s bad news” when I saw it at the start of the month.
Imagine thinking you’re cashing out at 10 billion and now you’re only getting 6. The horror.
Imagine you’re an employee thinking you’re going to have stock worth 100k, and suddenly it’s worth 60k and falling.
Damn if that’s the amounts they’re actually talking about, I don’t know how much I would care as an employee.
My former employer introduced stock options last year in an effort to entice people into staying. This in the middle of multiple rounds of layoffs, real-wage paycuts, a 100% return-to-office mandate, and other shitty behaviours that had morale at an all-time low. That “incentive” to stick around amounted to…about $2k. Maturing after 2 years. Suffice it to say, that was not sufficient to get people to stick around, and by the time I left over 50% of the years of experience in my department had already left.
Sure, that is pretty crappy. But I liken that to employees who build their budgets and personal financing around bonuses. Nice to have, but not a guarantee and wrong thing to assume you’ll get them. Always assume equity will be zero, IPOs benefit C-levels and investors heavily.
I can’t find much on reddit’s equity offerings for employees but I imagine it’s, at best, a pittance. Their other benefits are top notch though. No wonder they “don’t turn a profit”.
Except that it already has been. They’ve already scraped it, and can refer back to either the archives, or just scrape Reddit like they do with other websites if they want to pull more information.
They didn’t pay before, why would they bother paying now? Worst case is that they just exclude Reddit (like they did Twitter), and train from other sites instead. It’s no great loss.
