In unsurprising news, Reddit prepares IPO

None. No innovation. Every update to the site has made it worse and less reliable. I could single-handedly code a better Reddit in a few months than that entire team has done in ten years. But they're not focusing their efforts on UI/UX improvements. They focus all their efforts on tracking, data harvesting, and circumventing the user safety protocols built into web browsers. We view the project as a cool public forum. They view it as a means to riches, and they don't give a shit if it's a pleasant experience for the users.

Well they control the mobile apps now, which is most of the userbase. The redesign is still terrible but nobody has much of a choice about image hosting since it’s built-in.

The only thing I can really think they “improved” is that the new gold system allows to be paid for your content:

If you’re eligible for the Contributor Program and your content meets the requirements for monetization, you can receive cash from Reddit for the gold and karma you earn on qualifying contributions.

But that’s definitely not going to help them be profitable lol

Look at a the way everything in tech is moving.

We are in the age of of surveillance capitalism. It will make itself profitable with our data. Maybe identifying people, creating profiles about beliefs and personality, etc.

What else could they possibly do? It’s proven profitable and that’s what they want.

Well recently more people have been using the official reddit app. No relation to anything going on, by the way, just the app getting better, obviously.

It's amazing to me that these internet billionaires have really cool, popular, useful websites that are unique, and used for their uniqueness. Then they spend all their time and money trying to make the site into a clone of some other popular site because they view them as competitors. What they actually end up doing is destroying what made their website special to begin with, and then we the users end up with a few sites that are desperately trying to clone each other, that don't actually work well for anything anymore.

CW that next time, sheesh.

They only have to be profitable long enough to sell their bags.

Users will stay no matter what. When was the last time you saw meaningful exodus off a major platform? The Reddit to Lemmy, or Twitter to Mastodon migrations were the largest in decades and they had almost zero impact on the number of visitors to the origin sites. The days of Digg to Reddit are gone. Average users don't have the patience or attention span to build communities anymore, especially not when whatever they build will eventually be heavily monetized, changed beyond recognition, and generally enshitified.

Exactly. Reddit has been building this huge knowledge base for well over a decade. Built by the users themselves. He knows what he's got.

I think I'll go ahead and log back in and delete all my old posts and comments. Fuck him.

I mean, ignoring the balding neonazi dipshit for a moment:

Twitter is more or less showing the path forward. They fucked up on the advertisement side, but it has clearly been demonstrated that there is a strong desire for users to be "power users". Which is more or less what twitter ran on before. The idea that, because you have ten followers, you are just as important as Barack Obama.

Reddit, coupled with Google fucking up their own shit, is rapidly losing the "best place on the internet to find user sourced information" badge. But there is definitely room for a subscription that either boosts user engagement (not sure how that would work) or provides corporate moderators so that individual people can have their own board about their Sonic OC or whatever.

And then it becomes about converting those users into customers.

As a public company, not disclosing that they manufacuter conversation and opinion with fake data and instead saying it's all natural would be fraud and they would face fines or go to jail if discovered.

Edit: reddit could turn a blind eye to others doing it, but they cant do it themselves and say otherwise.

Yea imagine for a small country like slovakia 🇸🇰 or some crap a few thousand dollars can go a long long way for a local election or whatever through reddit xitter facebook

It's scary how easy it is to just completely control the conversation with a few astroturf comments near yours. Suddenly people reading the astroturf start coming at you with the same talking points because every single individual on reddit is a free thinker.

My conspiracy theory is that this is half the reason they disabled the API. They want it to happen, but don't want to be on the hook for overtly deceiving investors, so as a workaround with plausible deniability they hobble the ability of users to do anything about third party spam.

I don't think that's ever actually stopped.

I don't know how far along they are but I know it's why they restricted API access for mobile web apps.

I get it, but like I said, that's ephemeral. Compare that to say Meta or alphabet with YouTube. They have distinct advantages in serving their content that prevents them from completely losing out. Then you've got Reddit, who pays hosts that could decide themselves to spin up a competing service pretty quickly and already isn't profitable due to those harsh hosting costs and isn't particularly stand out in its advertising business compared to those two.

Every single group you listed selfhosts and uses local data centers to reduce transit fees. It's very important because it's how you handle the costs on your business model. Ad revenue generally forces you to operate on tight operating margins. Compare that to another cloud hosting utilizing video provider that nearly sunk despite being quite popular: Vimeo. If you think this stuff is not important, see Twitch's exit from Korea over transit fees.

Reddit could have retained the public goodwill just by communicating things in a transparent manner... well 🤷

It’s a bet that a stock will go down. If you’ve heard people say a hedge fund is “shorting” a stock it means they’re making a bet, a short put, that the stock they are shorting will go down in value in the near term.

"Calls" and "puts" are types of contracts about buying/selling stocks (they aren't the stock themselves but are centered around a given stock and its trading price, so they are called "derivatives" as they are "derived" from the stock).

A put is a contract that allows the buyer of the contract to sell stock at an agreed upon price to the seller of the contract, regardless of the current trading price. They are used for a variety of reasons. In one usage, someone who is buying some of the stock at the current trading price may also buy a "put" on the stock at a slightly lower price. This way, they spend a little more money at the time of buying the stock, but if the trading price plummets, they can still sell it at that slightly lower "put" price and not lose too much money.

In this case, the idea would be to buy a "put" (without buying the stock at the same time) when the buyer thinks the stock's trading price is overvalued. Then when the price falls below the "puts" agreed upon value, buy the stock at the lower price and immediately invoke the contract to sell at the "put"s higher price.

Short selling is when you borrow a stock, then sell that stock, then buy it back in time to return it. The idea is that you think it will go down, so you can buy it back at a discount and make a profit.

A put is when you have the option of doing that -- i.e. if it doesn't go down you don't have to do anything with the stock, and you've only lost the fee you paid for the put contract. It's a way of hedging your bets.

A publicly traded stock option contract. Buying a Put allows you to bet on the share price dropping.

You get fronted 10 shares of X, based on the value it is today.

In Y amount of time, you need to pay back those X shares.

So if you think price will go down, you sell the shares immediately, and when you think the price is the lowest, you buy X shares again, and give them to who loaned them to you.

If you don't buy enough shares, the person you borrowed them from buys them at whatever the price is when the clock runs out. And gives you the bill.

It's also a way to lose insane amounts of money.

Like do it to 10 shares at $100/share. That's a grand.

If the price goes up to $200/share, you owe twice as much.

With GameStop, people paid crazy prices a share, because they knew the big investors were all shorting.

No matter how high the price was, they were going to have to pay it. But the only people that really made my net, were the ones who sold. A couple people convinced thousand (millions?) Of idiots to drive the price up and then they cashed out.

Where people fuck up is shorting "penny stocks". If it's $0.10/share and you think it'll go to $0.05/share, there's a chance it goes up to $1.10/share or even more.

A couple dollars increases in price, and people could owe millions.

Far-right twix.

Or x twitter. Get it, cause it used to be twitter.

Good point, it'll be good to see their public revenue sheets when they reach that point, 500 mil seems like a lot for the site but it is global so maybe there's more cash flow outside the US.

Not the company, the data. For training ML

Yeah, rather certain they'll come out of the gate at least lukewarm if not hot. There will be reports on how much money they can make in advertisement and how many millions of paid views they have and how much money that's worth on paper. They'll hide the bot numbers in the fake account numbers as long as they need to to get out of the gate. Then their investors will be in charge. Every bad decision is an opening for a lawsuit. Investors will kick out the scumbags the c-staff will deploy their golden parachutes.

Communities will still struggle to work around the advertisers and trolls.

Same bull, just another brick in the wall

Don’t get me wrong, fuckface, I can be a dick too. I’d just rather not, so have a pleasant fucking evening your foul smelling philanthropist.

THANK YOU FOR WRITING IN ALL CAPS, I ALWAYS FELT THE UPPERCASE LETTERS DESERVE MORE TIME IN THE SPOTLIGHT SINCE THEY ARE VASTLY UNDERREPRESENTED IN REGULAR FORMS OF TEXT. LET'S KEEP TALKING LIKE THIS!!

I've read that some of that problem with the mass delete was that some tools for that were sending requests too fast and reddit supposedly sent back an error message within a "succes" HTML code. Someone did some tweaking of such a tool to make it react correctly to those messages and the mass deletion took 2-3 days when it was rate limited to what reddit would allow. Don't know if that can help you now.

You might be able to do a naked short, though.

Does he even need to work now?

I'd say so to some extent, but some users are so anti-capitalist it's actually a problem

Does that mean now it will start generating profit?

Most people still aren't paying for it though.

Oh come on man my 2 stock will destoy reddit

Capitalists insider trade. They act like they don't, but all one has to do is look at the Nancy Pelosi index to see that's definitely not the case.

... isn't that the point of kidneys?

I miss when my biggest problem with online communities were phpBB badmins and troll-happy IRCops, honestly

Practically useless?

Don't be snarky

Worse than Bing as of late.

What is love ?