IPO = Initial Public Offering, where shareholders offer to sell their shares to the public, shifting a company from a “private company” (it belongs to me, you, and that guy) to a “public company” (it belongs to anyone who pays enough for the shares).
The userbase has been always touchy when it comes to IPO, and rightfully so; they know that the new owners will only care about squeezing the platform dry. As such, I predict a new flood of Redditfugees to Lemmy and Kbin.
Who will be the sucker that buys a site full of bots reposting content for other bots to “discuss”?
Vulture capital. They don’t really care about what they’re buying as long as they get some profit out of it.
during the entire API fiasco some people had a look at their financials and the conclusion was that they should be making a profit if their revenue numbers are remotely correct. Somewhere in this pit of dung they have several money pits of unknown nature
It’s gotten really bad. Since the protests a lot of subs seem to be just gone and a lot of the old subs that are still there are mostly just bots reposting top posts, with a bunch of bots reposting top comments. Someone made a bot who tracks those repost bots and calls them out (which Reddit could do from within their backend automatically), and some submissions had like 60-70 percent removed bot comments. And of course all of them had a bunch of gullible idiots talking to them.
Three key differences: bot content here is marked, avoiding it is as easy as checking a box in your profile, and Lemmy not being sold.