11mo ago

Reddit IPO: Company's biggest risk is its reliance on unpredictable users

www.moneycontrol.com Reddit IPO: Company's biggest risk is its reliance on unpredictable users

Where Reddit differs among its tech peers is in its striking dependence on its user base to keep things operational. Reddit must keep its users satisfied and its efforts to expand its limited (and already unpopular) advertising formats could send users packing. 98% of Reddit’s revenue is made up of ...

36 comments

No, its biggest risk is its CEO.
- The CEO who got paid $193,000,000 last year?
  
  Did any CEO do 193 million dollars worth of work last year? Almost certainly not, but who definitely did not? Spez. I think I'll redirect my Internet traffic. I want to make sure I never, ever accidentally give that asshole any more unearned power, money, and fame...

If you are in the EU file a complaint with your supervisory authority as reddit is illegally processing and selling data of children to be trained with by Google, not to mention all other users who weren't properly informed, nor consent retrieved. This one is going to be fun.
- How would one go about this?
  
  I posted an extensive write up over here: https://kbin.social/m/reddit@lemmy.world/t/854162/Any-EU-based-users-of-reddit-should-immediately-file-a
  Scroll down to the last section for tl;dr instructions :)

The wild thing about last summer was it revealing how remarkably stable their unpaid labor pool is. Take away their tools, mock them in the national press and on the site, and the worst most of them will do is participate in a perfunctory protest. They weren't willing to go to war or even organize in a meaningful manner.
It makes me think of how nationalism has sent millions to their deaths. Who needs money? People will put themselves through hell just to protect an identity.
- The users haven't left, that's for sure, but didn't the mods of most of the larger subs (something like 48/50 I thought?) leave? Some unwillingly actually...
  But if you mean the enormously long tail of smaller subs, then yeah, that happened, fo sho.
  
  Yeah, mostly in terms of the day-to-day operations of the site remaining largely business as usual, at least in terms of what matters to corporate. Plenty of impotent response abounded, too. For example, one of the largest subreddits, /r/games, never even joined the 48-hour blackout.
  There's an argument to be made that content quality is down, but that's a subjective measure, and I'm not even going to try to unpack my own personal bias on that front given I moved here because of this in the first place.
- I'm not sure how much moderators could even do.
  I was actually there so my view of events is pretty biased, but watching mods get removed from their position and replaced with more complying people made me think that the power dynamic was insurmountable. Regardless of how much free labor they perform, moderators don't actually get bargaining power in return, Reddit employees untimately are above them to defend the company's interests. Realistically, the function of a Reddit mod is to spare admins the grunt work of ground-level moderation decisions.

And of that, 26% came from just 10 ad clients in 2023.
That's interesting. Does anyone know which are those ad clients? It would be a shame if users were to shame them in public for advertising in a site full of nasty shit, like Reddit...
The going rate for a content moderator around the world varies greatly, but for the sake of expedience, let’s say it might average around $50,000 a year. That’s $3 billion worth of free labor.
...or if users publicly mocked Reddit jannies, oopsie moderators, working for free for a company that ridicules them as "landed gentry"...
Reddit has a highly intriguing plan for counterbalancing these risks.
"Intriguing" sounds like an euphemism for "experimental and with high chance to fail".
- "Intriguing" sounds like an euphemism for "experimental and with high chance to fail". The flip side of the AI deal with google?
  They train on the dataset, reddit gets a free/cheap AI moderation system?
  
  Sounds like a bad deal.
  AI-only moderation simply doesn't work - any sort of automated system can be easily circumvented, as users reverse engineer how it works. So you'd still need to rely on the fleshy jannies to not have the place imploding, except that those jannies already abuse the automod, so you'd have yet another system for them to abuse.

Jfc, I got the "invitation" for the IPO.
If they're sending it to me, the whole fucking thing is a bigger joke than I thought it was.
- I didn't get one... What does that say about me haha
- I realized I hadn't deleted my account when they said that. Thanks for the reminder Spez!

I predict an initial IPO spike upwards (for maybe 2 weeks) to bait suckers.
That will likely be followed by 2 years or more of bag holding 📉
<Cue sad trombone music>
- But from a CEO perspective it doesn't matter. Highly successful IPO, huge bonus, retirement. Sadly that's how modern gambling works, hike share prices, cash out.
  
  Dude reportedly made 193 million $ last year. By this point he must have enough money safed up, that he could spend a million every year for the rest of his life.
- The new Robinhood
- Oh no, the IPO starts off ridiculously inflated, and it'll crash on day 2
- Whoever stacks up on shorts during the fire sale peak in the first three days after IPO is gonna be a very happy sailor.
- Last couple IPOs I watched didn’t even make it a couple days before tanking.

Relax everyone. Reddit has been "in the works of an IPO" for like eight years.
- If it hasn't happened yet, it's never going to happen.
  
  https://www.npr.org/2024/02/22/1233245941/meet-rddt-popular-social-platform-reddit-to-sell-stock-in-an-unusual-ipo
  I don't know if you saw this. They are filing on the NYSE to do an IPO, seems like it's actually happening this time?

36 comments