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.
Imagine investing in reddit, an actively hostile user base that will do anything to avoid ads and will completely bolt if you take the porn away.
They’ve already ran plenty of us off too. I used it for more than a decade. I miss good video subs though.
Once again? I thought they were already in the process of it. The API-change was just another piece of it.
They’ve been talking about IPO for a few years, but apparently this time it’s a bit more serious. Unless something happens that throws their valuation down the drain.
Hopefully! Last time reddit did shitty things to annoy their community lemmy wasn’t ready. We now have working apps, set up communities and have an active user base. We can take the refugees this time.
I joined here yesterday; figured I’d give this thing a try. So far I’m really liking the overall experience with Memmy in my phone.
The whole thing isn’t as active as Reddit, obviously. But the overall experience is quite nice. So uh, if Reddit bans a bunch of cool users, that’d be fine with me :D
You’d have to be nuts to invest in Reddit, given the current state of the platform.
- The the CEO admitting reddit is not profitable in its current state.
- The amount of media attention the API change protests have gotten. * The ever increasing amount of search engine links to removed content.
- Memelords already talking about shorting the stock into the ground if it goes public.
- Various scandals involving the CEO, with likely more to come.
- Little to no third-party developers willing to write new software that integrates with Reddit anymore because they are now seen as an unpredictable party.
There is no way any of this leads to significant growth. The user base that has stuck around is generally not interested in the things that make reddit reddit, being a community-driven and -moderated platform. And significant changes to how the platform works (thereby taking away the unique selling points) will put it into a position where there is no real advantage over using competing platforms. This will make binding new users to the platform a difficult task.
The only ones stupid enough to buy lots of reddit stock will have an incentive to change it and make it profitable. We’ve seen musk attempt this with Twitter and just look how that has worked out so far.
The worst part is that Spez will likely still get to cash out and fuck off while the platform dies and burns in his wake.