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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Bloomberg reported on Monday that Reddit “is holding talks with potential investors for an initial public offering.”
The San Francisco-based company, co-founded by Steve Huffman, Aaron Swartz and Alexis Ohanian in 2005, is considering going public as early as the first quarter, sources told Bloomberg.
In December of 2021, Reddit confidentially submitted a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public.
That move took place just months after Reddit had raked in a hefty $410 million financing led by Fidelity, valuing it at $10 billion.
Then, in January of 2022, Reddit had even gone as far as to tap Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to work on the listing.
When contacted, a Reddit spokesperson told TechCrunch via email that the company is in a quiet period and cannot comment.
The original article contains 213 words, the summary contains 133 words. Saved 38%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
When contacted, a Reddit spokesperson told TechCrunch via email that the company is in a quiet period and cannot comment.
What, like… the company has taken a vow of silence? The company has a sore throat from screaming all night at a Nickelback concert? The company partied way too hard last night and just wants a morning of 90s cartoons and an isotonic drink? What?
It’s an actual legal IPO thing:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quietperiod.asp
But I like your imagery better. Heh.
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.
“We’ve entered a quiet period”, what in the Tallarico
Firms planning for an IPO go quiet, ie stop releasing financial info etc, in the four weeks leading up to the IPO per SEC rules. The purpose is to give all prospective buyers an equal amount of time to research an equal amount of information. Sometimes the firm backs out or delays the IPO if buyers aren’t satisfied, so going quiet leads to all sorts of speculation along the lines of “will they do it this time?” We’ve all seen this before with reddit. It feels like old news because it’s not the first time, but it’s the most recent time so here we are talking about it again.
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.
Fuck em.