REDDIT posted a more than 20 per cent rise in revenue in 2023 versus the year before, sources familiar with the situation said, as it prepares for one of the United States’ most anticipated potential initial public offerings (IPOs).
I trust Reddit enough to manipulate the numbers to make the situation better than it looks like.
That said, some increase in short-term profit is to be expected, when a company exploits its own value: getting rid of third party apps, decreasing running costs by locking LLM training bots out, being rather aggressive on pushing towards the official app to anyone who “dares” to use a plain mobile browser, wrestling control of the subreddits from the “landed gentry”, so goes on. The problem will be only quantified later, as profits will drop and “nobody will know” why.
So it’s a lot like eating the seeds for your next season. Sure, you’ll be fuller now, but you’ll starve later.
I trust Reddit enough to manipulate the numbers to make the situation better than it looks like.
What? Nooo, Spez would never make undocumented changes to misrepresent things! Don’t be silly.
Thanks for reminding me of this. For those not aware, in 2016 Spez secretly edited users’ reddit comments. It’s fascinating that he survived as CEO after that given that it shows an absolutely breathtaking failure of judgment and self-control.
You made me realise that I worded it really, really bad. (I need to fix it.)
I’m glad that you guys got the meaning that I was trying to convey though - that Reddit Inc. is scum, you can trust on the fact that they’re scum, and spez et al. are likely distorting the situation to make Reddit look more profitable than it is.
The company is moving ahead with its plans to go public more than two years after it first confidentially filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Reddit’s listing is closely watched as a bellwether of an IPO market in the midst of a tentative rebound from a two-year dearth of first-time share sales.
Looks like the enshittification is about to get even worse than it was. Perhaps we might see another exodus to lemmy/kbin once this happens?
So we were holding it back all the time and now once we were gone they can finally make some money?
I don’t really get how these “IPOs” work. Someone actually has to pay that money for Reddit, right? Even if they manage to get Reddit temporarily profitable, are people really going to get fooled into investing just from that? Or are they guaranteed to get whatever Reddit’s value is at the time of the IPO somehow?
IPOs are typically a cash grab. Stock is offered for purchase at a price, and usually there’s a bump in price. The first investors will sell for a profit at peak price, and then it will drop to whatever value the market decides. And that could be higher or lower than the initial price per share.
@CoffeeAddict People still use reddit?
I still keep reddit as a read-only resource, and yes, plenty of people still use it. There are niche communities that I sure do wish could hit a critical mass on the threadiverse, and the archive of advice and (mostly) human reviews of stuff are helpful.
That said, either it’s reddit or it’s me, but any community that’s even slightly large seems to have a lost a little thoughtfulness and vibrancy. The takes are more boring, the jokes more repetitive, and I run across others’ “goodbye overwrites” a lot more often than I thought I would, and generally in places where it seems like the original posts were genuine attempts to be helpful. Reddit is not gone, but it is reduced, and must eventually fade into the west.
