10mo ago

Report: 75K loyal Redditors can snag shares before Reddit goes public

arstechnica.com Report: 75K loyal Redditors can snag shares before Reddit goes public

Reddit is expected to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange in March.

This is one of the more scathing pieces to come out on Ars about Reddit. As the site did not respond to inquiries, all that was available to report on was profoundly negative statements that Advance is unlikely to enjoy seeing.

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The Journal reported that 75,000 of the “most prolific” Redditors will have an opportunity to buy “an as-yet-undetermined number of shares” before trading starts.
Emphasis own. So, basically, they're fishing for buy-in from people still addicted to Reddit. I wouldn't be surprised if the offered price is actually really bad.
- They saw the wsb ape mentality and hope to leverage it.
- Is this an attempt at locking in users because now they have financial incentive to prop up the platform?
  
  The most charitable read is that it's an attempt to build hype among powerusers by letting them own a piece of it.
  In a vacuum, that's actually kind of nice.
  A less charitable reading is that they're targeting the users who have flukes and blowholes to try and get even more money from them as part of a media campaign to make it seem like they truly value those users.
  
  I kind of doubt they expect it to make that much of a difference in whether people stay. Rather, I suspect it's mainly an attempt to make a buck selling overvalued shares, and maybe drive up their stock price a bit in the process. They can also try and spin it as a gift, which they clearly are already.
  It's actually a pretty good evil idea.
- Fishing for coverage for the people who pump and dump their shares after IPO day. Anyone internal with big holdings is going to just unload at first opportunity. This is their desperate attempt to provide coverage for it.
  Hope some of the mods I ran into over the years are amongst the schmucks holding the bag with these shares for their first earnings report. It ain't gonna be good.
  Fucking reddit, good riddance. Toxic shit hole needs to die, but now this is a golden opportunity for your grandma and her pension fund to be amongst its victims too.
  
  Hope some of the mods I ran into over the years are amongst the schmucks holding the bag with these shares for their first earnings report. It ain’t gonna be good.
  They would be a great target, at least. Big mods aren't driven by enjoyment or compensation, because they get neither. Users are dicks and everyone hates you no matter what. Either they really care about whatever sub, or they're big enough schmucks to do all that purely for imaginary authority and status (like this offer is presented as). Maybe 90% were in the latter category before I left in the exodus.

Gross, no thanks. The whole point of the IPO is so Huffman and all the other schmucks there with piles of equity can finally get their big pay day. Fuck the lot of them.
- Yeah the fact they're deliberately targeting individual investors instead of institutional investors kind of underscores that this is a cashout.
- Fully agreed, except that I would amend "get their big pay day" to "manage to unload their worthless-but-not-everyone-sees-it-yet equity before it tanks."
  They'd planned to do that during or shortly after the IPO itself, but now that it's clear that whatever price they set for the IPO will merely form the high-water mark for the drubbing that follows, they need a new way to find some suckers. They will probably find a few. I think it's telling that they mentioned wallstreetbets as part of what justified this being a good idea in their minds.
  
  I take some solace in the fact that they really mistimed the market for tech stocks. And it doesn't look like the interest rate money printer is cutting back on this year, so that should majorly kneecap them on this.
- I.P.O. = come hold our bags 💼
  Just look at the 5-year chart of Robin(the)hood $HOOD for a succinct preview
- They're literally going to suck as much money off these schmucks as they can: First by selling their 'content' to AI, and then by just letting them give them money for shares that will pitfall.

If there's one thing that says "hot IPO," it's delaying 3 years and then sending invites to 75,000 random members of the general public inviting them to buy at pre-IPO prices.
I KNOW the stock is gonna take off like a rocket, but I just want cumguzzler1057 to be holding it instead, I have enough money already. He should share in the gain.
- They forgot to include the Nigerian prince in the story! Now nobody will believe it.
- It’s going to be a glorious disaster. Didn’t they slash the initial IPO estimate about six months after announcing it and shortly before the whole API thing? I haven’t cared enough to follow it closely, especially since abandoning the platform, but it really seems like the stakeholders wanting to cash in on a sinking ship before it finally goes down.
- Guarantee that the line of reasoning here is
  We can stop the inevitable fact that people aren't going to buy our shares by pushing them on the most chronically addicted users of our platform and disguising it as a premium exclusive offer
  I mean, who else is susceptible enough to the sunken cost fallacy that they would pour actual money into reddit? The answer is the demographic that's already put in a substantial amount of investment in the form of time spent on content creation.
  To those people, they might very well bite because it means their useless, time consuming hobby finally might become a source of income.
  It's honestly an intelligent business move by reddit, even if it's scummy as fuck and ultimately setting up their own best content creators to spectacularly fail and lose a ton of money when the shares tank.
  Reddit still goes public. Reddit still pays their CEOs obscenely before they jump ship. Only the creators lose.

Anyone who buys into this deserves the financial ruin that will so obviously happen to them.

Go ahead and buy. Shares generally tank pretty quick after IPO for companies that don't actually make anything, the dot bust ensured that. Only time will tell if Reddit shares improve or flounder around not going anywhere. An additional thought - Reddit would do well to do things like get rid of old.reddit, go after ad blockers, and maybe implement a "verified" fee program like Xwitter to boost their stock potential. And also ensure I'll never return.
- This is my thinking as well. IPOs are almost never profitable. If the stock lists at 50 a share, six months later it'll probably be way closer to 20. And it's not like Reddit is Facebook, either, if you want to compare it to another publicly traded social media website. Facebook, for all its faults, diversified its corporate enterprise years ago. It's not just a social media company, but a legitimate tech conglomerate. It now handles payment processing, offer a functional storefront for small businesses, and also owns Oculus, Instagram, and a massive truckload of other shit. What does Reddit own? Well, it owns...Reddit. Its valuation is...maybe 15 billion dollars. What does it have to offer other companies? Well, it has user data. Which is not valueless, but also worth way less than it used to be since every single company you have an online account with collects and sells your data to someone else.
- I remember a developer at Reddit telling me on a private Slack that old.reddit is so deeply embedded into the code it would be a removed to remove. I didn't believe him, because that could easily be 301'd without pulling out old code.
  He was let go in the recent layoffs.

I wonder how many bots get offers

I’ll be shorting this

I'd love to see another boycott on the day of the IPO.
- I honestly just don't fucking care about them. This fediverse thing is the real deal, and it's been kind of peaceful over here avoiding all the toxic shit a regular user of reddit was subjected to. I'm sure it's on its way here shortly, but for now, enjoy the solitude.
  
  I’ve run into a number of toxic asses on Lemmy, but I chalk it up to Reddit bleedover. I sincerely hope they all stay on the sinking Reddit ship, but inevitably the Fediverse will be inundated with them.
  
  I just want to watch the place burn.

Too bad I deleted my Reddit account of 13 years when found out they'd officially be using it to build AI.
- I deleted when they disabled APIs and my app stopped working. It was 13 or 14 years old at the time

I ask myself on the latest Reddit news if Aaron is rotating in his grave when he see what Reddit has become

Who would want to bankroll spez and Co. after all they did to screw over their users last year (and still continue to)?

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary Thousands of the most dedicated Reddit users will have a chance to snag shares when the company goes public in 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Citing people familiar with the matter, The Journal reported that 75,000 of the "most prolific" Redditors will have an opportunity to buy "an as-yet-undetermined number of shares" before trading starts.
While TechCrunch reported that Snap became a "laughing stock" of the NYSE within two years—"sinking to an all-time low" in December 2018—the company eventually bounced back after finding new ways to attract users.
The company also seemed encouraged by positive trends on its platform, confirming that its decision to go public came after the WallStreetBets forum brought in millions of new users and advertisers, the WSJ reported.
And at a tech conference that year, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman directly said that the company wanted to make it easy for users to become shareholders.
By inviting users to become shareholders, Reddit saw an opportunity to help drive change, Huffman said, at a time when "the market is evolving to be more fair" and accessible to individual traders buying and selling stock through platforms like Robinhood.
Saved 66% of original text. :::

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