I work in financial reporting, so I have a decent idea of what makes up things like operating profit/loss and Adjusted EBITDA.
This does not look good for Reddit and if the company only managed a $90.8m loss after jacking up API costs, nuking virtually every third-party client, backstabbing every power mod, giving alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin an actual user base and selling off user data to Google, then I fully expect things to get a lot worse on the site.
I don’t know how in the hell they let it go as wrong as they did. They had all the eyeballs of the internet. They had all the Google search traffic. They had an API that encouraged tons of other people to make applications that link with them to display their content.
All they had to do was light touch monetization, and slightly stroke the egos of the mods. Every new phone, car, light bulb that ever came out had a place where it could be directed right at the people they want to sell it to. All they had to do was disguise it as an unboxing or a slightly pithy review. Hell, they could have gotten competitors to bid against each other. Chevy could have been on there dissing forward, Ford could have been on their dissing Dodge. They’re so many opportunities there for monetization. They have control over their own algorithm.
You’re totally forgetting the part where from the very top down that company is run by total fuckwads.
They’ve fucked up at every single step and remained utterly self righteous throughout.
No, that would give them some of the money, but they want all of the money.
Seeing a report like that, that they did all these things to raise funds and are still not profitable, is there any reason why anyone would invest? Surely the price can only go down from initial offering, right? Unless the price started very low.
People who invest are betting that the problems can be solved by a new team or when the company is sold to Facebook.
Imagine thinking that about a company that isn’t even doing remotely as well as Lycos.
That’s right, it still exists and unlike reddit it’s profitable.
I’d imagine reddit could be profitable too if they stopped throwing money at stupid shit like NFTs and avatars. Selling API access for AI training was a good move in terms of bringing in income since it basically costs them nothing, and they could have totally pulled that off without pissing off half their userbase.
They could’ve also called reasonable prices for api access for 3rd party apps and would have a nice revenue stream now instead of the pr shitshow they got.
I think I have read this suggestion at Reddit: "Make people who wants to use API as clients pay. " The app doesn’t have to have API key, user pays a very reasonable money to access Reddit with their favourite application. Obviously it would come with sane for human browsing limits and AI leechers should pay millions.
Just like a plain old radio station where you can access from web page for free but you need to subscribe for better AAC, high quality streams and standard VLC support.
How much do you imagine it costs to make an NFT?
Not the NFTs themselves so much, but the code development to integrate it with reddit for example.
it still exists
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a loooong time.
Lycos isn’t even a particularly bad search engine. It’s just been overshadowed by bigger players like Google, Bing, Baidu, DDG, Yandex, etc. I imagine that their low traffic helps to lower their operating costs a lot.
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One would imagine the chief asshole would reduce his 190m payday by 100m to make the balance beautiful before an IPO.
Nah, he wants the money for his doomsday bunker. I’m sure he considers the $93m for the COO to be fair game, though …
Probably thinks $93k for the COO to be fair game, honestly.
He doesn’t care about the ipo, or reddit, its employees, its “partners”, or anyone who uses the site. He wants money now, and like a house fly he’s not capable of learning.
That’s the first time I’ve heard that analogy and I love it
Why do that when he can golden parachute instead?
Profitable businesses have to pay taxes
I don’t work in financial reporting, and I have no clue what even EBITDA is…
But even me, I come to the same conclusion!^^
Earnings before interest, taxation, deprecation and amortisation. Interest is classed as other income and taxation is kinda self-explanatory.
Depreciation is spreading the cost of a fixed asset over the course of its useful life. So let’s say you spend $40,000 on a machine that you expect to keep for 20 years, and scrap for $1,000 at the end of its expected life. You depreciate it on the straight-line basis (meaning it goes down by a fixed amount each financial year, or depreciate it by $1,950 each year. Straight-line isn’t the only form of depreciation. Cars for example go down on a reducing balance basis, meaning their value goes down by a lot more during the early years of their lifespan.
Amortisation is like depreciation, but for long term loans and intangible assets (things like customer lists, patents, etc.)
I’ve been in dozens of quarterly review calls for every company I’ve worked for where EBIDTA is mentioned and this is the first time someone explained it clearly.
Thanks!
Thank you very much for the great explanation, I learned a lot.
Sorry, I don’t work in economics so I don’t follow this (but it looks like a great analysis for someone who doesn’t understand it!).
Do all these things mean Reddit IPO is likely to tank (though one never knows)?
I’d like Spez to pay for all he’s done to 3rd party apps and driving mods (and us users) away, but in the end I’m afraid it’s only going to be regular employees to feel the pinch and Spez just cashing out…
Also, Reddit has a ton of users and some other article these days said they’re going to sell everything to AI services that are going to train themselves on Reddit for a lot of dollars. Would this be enough to keep them afloat?
some other article these days said they’re going to sell everything to AI services that are going to train themselves on Reddit for a lot of dollars. Would this be enough to keep them afloat?
That’s an interesting question. It was some deal with Google, to help train Google’s AI. Honestly, Google probably grabbed much of what they needed for their AI while the APIs were still open, but I can still see things Google should want from reddit. First off, just on the “helping with AI” front, they’d be interested in ongoing data for Google’s AI; more importantly, some kind of exclusivity to limit the amount of data other AI companies can get from reddit.
Other data they’d want: given the noticable-even-to-muggles decline in search results during the APIcalypse, I’m certain that Google wants continued access to reddit’s data for their search engine (and again, some manner of limiting other companies access to that data).
As a final, admittedly paranoid thought: I’m sure Google would love access to reddit’s non-public data: the IP addresses of various accounts could be used to flesh out consumer profiles, comments you made could narrow down your actual identity, upvotes and downvotes reveal your opinions, what you clicked through to reveals things of interest, etc. Yeah, they probably have a bunch of that already, but this would strengthen and increase the quality of the data that they have.
But I don’t see Google really making a huge investment into reddit, either. Reddit is too toxic for a corporate giant, and their corporate cultures are almost literally polar opposites. They’ll buy the data, but they’re not going to fairy-godmother reddit, or give it anything except the minimum number of dollars to get the data that they want.
I’m dumb, how is this different from gross profits?
If i’m not mistaken (not an accountant but did do the accounts of a tiny company at one point) Interest, Depreciation and Amortization go into the calculation of gross (i.e. before tax) profits, unlike with EBITDA
EBITDA is used moreso in internal quarterly and monthly management accounts, which don’t follow the exact same structure as an annual report which companies have to publish annually by law and follow GAAP and IFRS guidelinss when preparing.
I made a comment below about which of my old accounts were receiving the buy-shares offer. I don’t know if what they’re doing raises any speculation to someone with your background, but I’d be interested in hearing if it does.
Vonage did something similar where they let users get in on the IPO. Then got sued in a class action lawsuit because the stock tanked.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121104141751/http://news.cnet.com/2100-1036_3-6079765.html
Reading through that article you could probably find/replace with Reddit.
The complaint alleges that Vonage’s officers decided to offer shares to customers because they knew institutional investors who normally buy IPOs would be reluctant to buy Vonage stock. Vonage has consistently lost money and has never been profitable.
Oh, ouch! If this is similar, it’s a bit ironic that they’ve pissed off the people who would’ve been most likely to invest in the IPO.
I would have totally been one of those IPO investors. I’m seriously considering shorting the shit out of it now.
Their R&D costs seem alarmingly high, when the most ‘innovative’ things we’ve seen come out of Reddit in recent years have been canned features like their own cryptocurrency and RPAN.
Other than that and Spez being paid a buttload in stock options…
I’d be really interested to see their R&D costs for 2022. I’m wondering how much of 2023’s R&D was spurred by restricting the API code, and then allowing certain applications access; having to finally take seriously their decade-old promise to develop mod tools with no planning or preparation; their total surprise at having to provide access to disabled people; and having to update their app. Those are all areas where they were extremely happy to let languish, and which they suddenly had to provide expedited support for after the protests.
And from what I understand they haven’t even gotten close to what third party apps had done for mod tools or accessibility.
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Good.
As much as I dislike their recent choices, a lot of knowledge would be lost if Reddit went down.
This is not the first time a platform goes bad and knowledge is lost. People used to think stack overflow was impossible to replace. Now we don’t even use it anymore, most of us.
It will be fine.
What? Stack overflow is still very relevant. I don’t even know what bubble you’re in if you think it isn’t.
Honestly confused by your comment.
I guess I’m in the chat gpt bubble. Since that came along, it has replaced stack overflow almost completely for me.
It’s still valuable when I Google on error messages though, that’s true…
Where do you think GPT got this data?
Honest question: what happened to Stack Overflow? I still get answers from it. Have I missed some incident??
I mostly use chat gpt now, but I guess stack overflow is still there if you don’t use chat gpt. And it can be helpful for finding error messages from apps and figuring out what they mean.
Ohh, I see! Thanks for replying. I often forget about ChatGPT as an alternative
But what about the poop knife story?
Broken arms, jolly rancher…
Stupid long horse.
Stackoverflow is still very much impossible to replace. The amount of knowledge that it contains is simply too great to fall easily. And LLMs like ChatGPT aren’t even close to being as helpful as SO answers, specially on archaic libraries.
You know the very credible sounding theory that Musk bought Twitter to drown it. He used Middle Eastern funds etc. and those people owning these gigantic funds had nightmares because Twitter made it so easy to organise mass unrest. I want to believe this crazy sounding theory since other option would be someone having such a capital, know how and influence is that dumb.
What if this is just a plot to kill Reddit? While crypto bros polluted it a lot, it was very similar with Twitter. Freedom of speech, diversity. It may have bugged people.
I receiced one of those special offer emails to buy stocks on Monday. Weren’t those supposed to go only to power users? I haven’t done anything with my account since the API debacle and wasn’t a power user before.
I feel like their rug pull before the ipo doesn’t work that good. I hope the gme bros will short reddit to the ground, that would be the best end to Reddit I can imagine. Fuck spez.
I got it on an email address linked to an account that was banned in 2020.
I was a semi-power user before leaving (13k link karma, 134k comments) and also received the IPO offer per email and per notification. I reported the notification as spam :)
It’s so obvious that they want to squeeze some money out before everything goes down the drain.
Please don’t forget to fill in the form anyway, with fake data. This will let them believe there are more interested users than reality
Same here. I don’t even live in the states.
FWIW you don’t have to live in the USA to participate in the US stock market. Not that I’d recommend doing so in this instance…
Edit: the Reddit Directed Share Program does appear to require USA residency https://www.reddit.com/dsp
the message they’ve sent indicates that you have to be a US resident.
What is the term for people who do buy things on your behalf and get their cut no matter what happens? Market manipulators have such connections.
Obviously these people providing the service are crooks and criminals so they can do anything. It isn’t like you will call the police :-)
You need to be for this.
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Gme bros don’t short shit
As long as it’s reverse Cramer, anything goes, including shorting.
buy/hold/drs/shop/vote
They are going out in stages based on # of mod actions or karma. I think the lowest Karma threshold in the final batch was 25k. Which seems like a lot, but isn’t really, at least for the users they alienated in the API debacle.
This is just for the sign-up for information, though. Once they get the whole list they will start going down the list of sign-ups from the top, and start asking for money. Because this isn’t a free share offering, it’s a chance to buy at the IPO price. So even out of the list of Redditors who signed up, a bunch will pass, because if they had a few extra $10k sitting around, they would put anywhere else except Reddit.
And I don’t think they have broken out how many shares are part of this program. (To be fair I haven’t looked that closely). I predict that no matter how many people sign up, they will reject 90% just for the optics. They are only doing this for the free publicity, and rhe fact that they think Redditors will have emotional attachment to the shares for being let into the “club”. So they will only give out enough for the press to write stories about it.
The whole point is getting real names. Most of the people who got the email will be wait listed but reddit will have their valuable data forever.
I got one, too, which is hilarious because not only was I not a “power user,” but I torched all of my comments and posts with Redacted 7 months ago and have not touched the site since. I even avoid it when it comes up in Google results for something I’m looking into.
But they still sent me one of these stupid IPO emails.
I mean, obviously there is no human oversight or thought process behind these whatsoever. We all knew that. Probably anyone who has an existing account and a positive karma score got one, and I’m not even sure the threshold is that high.
But I guess we’re all here doing their work for them anyway, because here we are talking about – even if it is to ridicule – and generating “buzz.” I’m sure that’s what they want, somehow.
They likely just sent it to anyone above a relatively low karma threshold desperate to get any sorry fool to buy their stock.
Jokes on them, I never associated email addresses with any of my reddit accounts.
Seems like a smart strategy would be to especially send it to those with a low karma threshold
but I torched all of my comments and posts with Redacted 7 months ago
I did exactly the same thing lmao
Someone redo this, but as an ad trying to get people to short reddit to the ground: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImgMfJ2Lt2E
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=ImgMfJ2Lt2E
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I got it as well. My accounts were banned… and then all the sudden an IPO comes along and the are unsuspended… i went back in and redacted my accounts that got the email.
Your comment made me go back and check, and I definitely got unbanned at some point. I was site-banned for mass edit>deleting my comments on all my accounts during the API evacuation. One sub saw me doing it, and banned that first account. Whatever, no big loss cuz I’m scorching things on my way out the door anyways. When I did the same with the second account, both accounts were banned site-wide for ban evasion, (because that second account also had comments on that same sub.) And that same pattern happened with every account I had.
But now they’re all unbanned. I wonder if Reddit went back and unbanned old accounts, to try and boost their user numbers prior to the IPO.
Yes, also to fluff up the dataset for the AI sale.
I got one, too. I haven’t used my account since the debacle as well, and I nuked my account, overwriting and deleting every comment lmao.
I deleted the email I got. I rarely if ever delete emails. Let that set in. I hope it had a return receipt!
I reported it as harassment lol
I did not get one and my account has a shit ton of karma. But the bio says that Reddit can go down in flames and to go to Lemmy, so that’s probably why.
I redacted every message into something shit-talking reddit and got the email, so that can’t be it.
I guess they just don’t like me. 🤷
Research and development, at $438.3 million
What in the fuck has Reddit developed in the last year that cost half a billion fucking dollars?
The executive payroll
Hey, it’s not easy to make a shitty new redesign of a site. That stuff costs money.
Twice
Remember when they killed API access claiming it cost the 10s of millions each year? Turns out they could have just not spent so much on reddit avatars and we’d all still be there today.
They could have just paid the CEO a little less to cover it too. It was just greed so they could sell the data at a pittance, even though the cat is already out of the bag.
I haven’t seen that “you broke reddit” message in a while. Maybe they bought more servers?
Because I haven’t been back since the API Debacle…
FTFY
The two options to fix that are either buy more servers or make enough idiotic decisions to drive your user base away that traffic is no longer an issue anymore.
I wonder which one reddit opted for?
An ugly new logo, continued development on world’s shittiest mobile app, and a terrible brand new UI for the website (not to be confused with the previous terrible new UI)
Oh yeah, they also did some NFT bullshit, almost forgot about that one.
3d probably shouldn’t be in logo’s except mabye for the apple photos app because coloured glass
Skeumorphism has entered the chat
they’re selling the ability to harvest data, not provide a platform for anything particularly useful… they are developing data harvesting tools, including for AI…
Those stupid fkn icons or smth
Let‘s see, almost 200 million to their CEO, almost 100 million to their COO. They also got a new logo!
Jokes aside I‘m as floored as you.
Monetization and adware.
Maybe they’re bankrolling theDonald’s NYC fines.
They are paying lots of programmers. 99% of which are unneccessary, to enshitify the site with new features that subtract value for users.
They were giving reddit gold to everyone
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you think ‘place’ was free?
They gotta sell access to AI companies somehow.
Why don’t company’s pay their CEOs in exposure and sense of pride? If it’s good enough for moderators and artists it should be good for CEOs.
There are 54 pages of risk factors, which, after reading many S-1 filings over the years, seems pretty long. One of the most notable is the sentence, “We have incurred substantial losses during our history and may never achieve profitability.”
Well that doesn’t sound very promising for them.
may never achieve profitability.
I’m not an expert or anything, but that doesn’t sound like a very good investment.
You could short it…
I think that’s Spez’s plan
My understanding is on these fillings you’re supposed to give a full accounting of all the risks so investors can’t sue you later. It’s like going for surgery where they say you could die - not saying it’s likely, but tries to get them off the hook.
Because spez insists on chasing the newest tech shiny - but only after it’s peaked - NFTs, crypto, RPAN, etc. And although it may yet turn around for him and for reddit, notice that he only jumped onto the AI boom three months after last spring’s series of AI announcements, showing that he’s once again way behind the times.
Edit: one thing has always struck me since his interview last summer. spez said something like “reddit will continue to be profit-driven until the profits arrive”. Like the arrival of profits was inevitable. Like he didn’t need to do anything except wait. Just be patient and the profits will arrive in their own time, not like things have to be envisioned and planned and put in place to get profits, just … they’ll arrive. Some day.
It seems a remarkably lackadaisical attitude for a CEO to have.
Didn’t spez also say that Reddit was a side project that just got out of hand?
Being a tech nerd does not mean you have what it takes to lead a company to profitability.
spez said something like “reddit will continue to be profit-driven until the profits arrive”. Like the arrival of profits was inevitable. Like he didn’t need to do anything except wait.
“It’s easy to sit there and say you’d like to have more money. And I guess that’s what I like about it. It’s easy… Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.” Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey, Saturday Night Live
Probably doesn’t help that Reddit has spent years cultivating some of the most advertiser unfriendly content available (out of the top 100 visited sites). I doubt anyone’s chomping at the bit to advertise on pages like r/jailbait, r/piracy, and r/fatpeoplehate. Even if the worst of the worst have been banned the overall “culture” can’t be erased as quickly
r/jailbait
Oh ho ho, I’ve heard spez is quite familiar with this one
Rpan was pretty cool. Saw a lot of talented musicians and cute cats.
Not related to topic but that was my first wild lackadaisical on lemmy.
Worth it 💪🏻
This does not stop companies being successful in IPOs and giving share holders lucrative gains. Take Atlassian as an example of a company seen as successful but is not profitable.
Atlassian has not yet posted a full-year profit in its 20+ years
What does that mean? Who pays the shortfalls?
I am not a CFO but I believe essentially by eating into cash reserves and accumulating debt. Also there is some wizardry when you work out operating profit / EBIT.
Someone more financially competent may want to offer a more accurate answer.
Why would anyone give money to a business who has never ran in the black after 20 years? Just set your money on fire instead
Dumb people are going to see headlines about “AI” and “the first social media IPO in a long time,” and they’re going fork over money. Also speculators are going to buy after they speculate that other speculators are going to buy speculatively.
Yeah, this IPO will probably go just fine and a bunch of wankers will make a bunch of money. That’s what it’s all about, after all.
And where does that money come from?
Honest question, I hate finances.
Mostly from small people either tricked into buying the "new bitcoin/Nvidia/apple/… before it’s to late or dumb people hyped by other dumb people into buying it. And if enough small people invested and the stock rises the big player collect the profit.
Yeah that was my expectation … Thanks for the explanation
Wait for dat citation… before accepting that rationalization
Yea, no I don’t have time for anything besides confirmation bias
And thats why theyre trying to sucker the users themselves to invest first, so they can pump and dump.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they manipulated the discussion around the stock as well. Bot army or admin downvotes on critical discussions, and lots of upvotes on the hype.
Twitter silently backing into the bushes
Hey, I think Twitter made money at least one year of their operations.
Better, buy a lottery ticket with it. That way it might be worth as much as the ash you’d have anyway, but there’s a chance you’ll become a millionaire.
Or Bitcoin, but fair warning: you might find yourself tempted to start a rap career, and that’s almost never advisable.
Hope springs eternal
Lots of losses but still paid spez a cool $193 million.
Iirc it was $600k as actual payroll, the rest in private stock. But still, fuck the greedy little pig boy.
600k for causing a mass migration. Fuck that and fuck CEO compensation in general
That 192M in private stock gonna be 192K soon
Yup, ain’t that some shit
Better yet, don’t fuck him.
Spez wouldn’t be into it anyway since I’m not a 15 year old girl.
True. Dude also looks like a textbook example of someone who would get their lunch money stolen.
We can get him a “present” as a “congratulatory” gesture on his ipo
For being a complete douche.
Whole thing is sketchy AF. I hope very few of its selected users falls for the scam invitation to buy early shares. They’re not only exploiting them for free content and free moderation, they want them to help pay for Spez’s ludicrous compensation.
So, three of my old accounts apparently qualified for the buy-shares offer. Two of them were over the 200k karma threshold to get the offer. Interestingly, the third account had only 191k karma and got the message a day or two later.
Even more interestingly, yesterday a fourth account that I haven’t posted to in over a decade received the offer, and this one only had 50k karma. Admittedly, several accounts were mods, but they were mods of extremely small, very inactive subs, and I had de-modded myself after deleting my data. They also sent an email to the my registered email address for the fourth account (but I don’t know if that’s relevant because none of my other accounts had emails registered).
I’m not sure what’s going on. Did they get so little response from the early offers that they’re going to the accounts of former mods or lowering the karma requirements? I know a couple of my accounts ended up connected by IP information; did they try to contact my old fourth account by PM and email because it was somehow connected to the higher-level accounts, or because they’re getting desperate? Maybe they’re just trying to get lots of numbers to show that redditors are eager to participate, to gin up an ignorant public’s enthusiasm prior to the IPO?
I have to think that, at some level, they’re getting desperate, because it seems so much effort to go to, to dig up an account that hasn’t posted in a decade and then send PMs and emails to it.
My reddit account has just shy of 100k comment karma and less than 2k link karma, and I still got the message.
I marked it as spam for “unsolicited messaging” lmao
Oh, lmao!
I have 56k of comment karma and only 792 post karma (no K there,only 792) but I got an email as well. Technically I guess I’m a mod because I started a sub with another guy but it never saw anything beyond the greetings post. However my account is over 13 years old so maybe that counts for something?
And yeah, I have no intention of wasting my money. They might see a slight profit initially as some might view this as the “new shiny”, but then I fully expect it to tank the moment the investors get a look at their records and start jumping ship.
36k karma on mine, haven’t logged in for months. Just did and I got the invite.
They’re desperate yo.
When it comes to the inevitable Renaissance and guillotines, I just hope spez is close to the front of the line.
This post will probably get automoderated to suicidesville. It’s sensitive to the fally blade decapitator thingy.
Every photo I’ve seen of Spez looks like a real life trollface.
I’ve known about shorting for a while but this might actually push me into learning the ins and outs of how. Because it would be nice to profit off this goin tits up.
In 2023, the company’s revenue was $804.0 million. Research and development, at $438.3 million, was more than half, an awfully big number for a company of this age.
What the heck are they doing‽
Edit: oops, Semi-Hemi-Demigod beat me to it. Hello, fellow binner!
Coke. Lots and lots of coke.
Ich bin ein kbinner?
Nein, du binst ein binner
What the heck are they doing‽
Enshitifying the site with new features that subtract value.
Don’t worry, the IPO will not stop the losses. It will just provide a pool for more bonus payments for the management.
Rest in pieces. Federated pieces.
I am curious. If you were a Chief officer or VP or something. What kind of changes would you do to make it profitable? Reduce server count? Roll back old.reddit? Just cut overhead? Get rid of Spez? How can they possibly make it profitable given where they are now?
The premise of the question is flawed in my opinion. It only needs to be profitable because they put themselves in that situation by going public.
A social platform run by users should only need to break even. I have no idea why a web forum needs to be on the stock market.
Now it’s another example of Enshittification of the internet.
That’s why I said given where they are now, how would it even be possible. What can they do outside of raise prices of reddit stickers or ad-free reddit.
Yeah that’s fair.
Merchandising is the only palatable idea I can think of.
More likely to happen:
-
Twitter’s verified user subscription strategy
-
More ad posts with paid-priority (priority hidden from users)
-
Layoffs with AI as miracle cure
-
Selling user data for AI training (check)
-
Paid API access (check)
But it’s really hard to ignore that its function isn’t really designed for profit and it’s wacky that we have to humor the idea.
Ironically, if they charged moderators to be moderators, theyd probably pay for it. Some of those people were nuts.
-
It needs to become profitable because it was unprofitable for 20 years. Would you dump millions into something that doesn’t even have the chance to make you money in the first place? Reddit wouldn’t even exist anymore.
And not follow the quest for unending profit no matter the consequences? That sounds like some socialism shit /s
There has never been a profitable social media company.
Facebook might have started out as a social media company, but it’s only profitable now because it’s part of an advertising duopoly that has almost all online ads completely locked up. Their actual business is renting eyeballs to advertisers. The social media part of it is just data collection for their advertising.
Reddit can’t compete with the big 2 as an ad platform. They don’t have the reach of the other two, and never will. So, it’s not going to be a good money making platform, but it might be able to have a niche and cover its costs. There are ways it could do that and not be awful for users.
They could partner with Hollywood studios to promote shows and movies, provide forums to discuss them that are safe for those brands. They could work with local governments to be a place to release important information. Governments used to do that on Twitter, but Twitter has gone to shit. This isn’t stuff that will send Reddit shares to the moon like their VC backers want. But, it could survive.
Instead, they’re going to follow the Elon Musk playbook and it will die.
AMA used to be a pretty big draw for lots of people who didn’t regularly use the site and often made international news, but they fucked that right up.
Yeah. You could see they were coordinating with the agents of celebrities. The celebs found it more interesting than the generic interviews they did with other media outlets. Upvoting and downvoting meant the best questions bubbled up to the top, although sometimes they were things the celebs didn’t want to talk about. But, with a good PR person in the room they did fine with it.
There’s a niche there, but it isn’t going to be a humongous one that will make Reddit a trillion dollar business.
Yep. Everyone thinks they are entitled to be Zuckerberg. Only one entitled person got away with it and he even stole the damned thing.
And, he only got away with it until he was able to pivot to advertising. Sure, small social media companies (even relatively large ones like Twitter) also want to sell ads, but the more user data you have, the more you can convince people that your ads are nearly mind control. Meta can do that because they control Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They got all the users because the users were hooked before they started selling the ads, and now network effects mean they don’t want to leave.
All of that sucks in user data which they can then sell ads against. Reddit would just be one text-based ad site where people use pseudonyms. It’s never going to be able to compete with Meta for ad dollars.
If reddit allowed third party apps again that would probably be enough to get me back. Maybe in another 5 years it won’t but right now Lemmy only wins cause the reddit app experience is bad enough to drive me away.
Yeah, turned out I was actually more loyal to the app I was using than I was to the platform. Though I was also pretty good to the platform, I contributed and interacted daily and often spent money buying gold. I tend to take the attitude that if I’m getting a lot of use out of something I don’t mind spending a little to support it. That’s all in the past now and I wonder how many other paying users they burned.
Reddits app was always bad. Even with all the hurdles and shitty stuff they do on mobile browser I still chose to be on browser
Boost for reddit was rhe only rzn I used reddit. But now, I switched over to tbis.
This seems tricky. If you see any ads in a 3rd party app, they’re going to support the developer instead of Reddit.
Cut my salary to only a silly amount like $200k/year.
Create paid accounts for like $5/year
Allow people to purchase annoyances/chaos like force non-members to use light mode only for a day.
Include bill-through services to grab a cut of any apps making money off the site.
Here’s what I’d do:
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VIP posts which you have to subscribe to a user to view. Reddit takes a cut of the subscription fee. With the sheer amount of OnlyFans models who astroturf the fuck out of the NSFW subs, it feels beyond stupid that Spez isn’t cutting out the middle man and competing with the likes of OF, Fansly, Patreon and Subscribestar.
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Add more incentives to subscribe to Reddit Premium, i.e. enhanced search functionality, the ability to time travel back to the frontpage from a previous date.
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Improve the official Reddit app to the point where it’s on-par with previous third party offerings.
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Bring back RPAN as a fully-fledged livestreaming platform with fewer restrictions. Introduce ads (Premium users get ad-free viewing) and revenue sharing for partnered creators.
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Change content and moderator guidelines to curb power users.
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Pivot towards short-form video content as a separate section of the site to compete with the likes of TikTok.
You are now hired as the post-IPO CEO
I agree with everything except 4 and 6
4 because video live streaming is stupid expensive. Twitch only survives cause they’re owed by Amazon who owns numerous data centers to support it. Same deal with yt.
6 because everyone’s already doing short form video and we don’t need another tiktok alternative. We already have Instagram and YouTube, and their server infrastructure likely far exceeds that of reddit.
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Make mods actually pay for the privilege of modding.
The corporations and political groups that employ them would pick up the tab.
We’ve all seen the news about spez salary, to yeah, fuck him and check if others are also getting such salaries.
Charge $1 month per account, $2 for access to NSFW subs.
I’m having fun watching it burn.
It can’t because it’s actively hostile to the users that make it its content in favor of recreating a more massive version of the Stanford prison experiment. Although that seems to be a fad to the people naturally attracted to acting out their power fantasies in any sort of reddit-like social network, particularly those who want to act out Minority Report.
