Reddit’s IPO Filing Shows Lots Of Losses After Nearly 20 Years

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.

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.

One would imagine the chief asshole would reduce his 190m payday by 100m to make the balance beautiful before an IPO.

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!^^

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.

Good.

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 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.

Gme bros don't short shit

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 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.

Someone redo this, but as an ad trying to get people to short reddit to the ground: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImgMfJ2Lt2E

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.

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 deleted the email I got. I rarely if ever delete emails. Let that set in. I hope it had a return receipt!

The executive payroll

Hey, it's not easy to make a shitty new redesign of a site. That stuff costs money.

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.

I haven't seen that "you broke reddit" message in a while. Maybe they bought more servers?

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.

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

you think 'place' was free?

They gotta sell access to AI companies somehow.

may never achieve profitability.

I'm not an expert or anything, but that doesn't sound like a very good investment.

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.

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

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.

And thats why theyre trying to sucker the users themselves to invest first, so they can pump and dump.

Twitter silently backing into the bushes

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

Iirc it was $600k as actual payroll, the rest in private stock. But still, fuck the greedy little pig boy.

For being a complete douche.

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.

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.

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.

Coke. Lots and lots of coke.

Ich bin ein kbinner?

What the heck are they doing‽

Enshitifying the site with new features that subtract value.

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.

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.

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.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Improve the official Reddit app to the point where it's on-par with previous third party offerings.

4. 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.

5. Change content and moderator guidelines to curb power users.

6. Pivot towards short-form video content as a separate section of the site to compete with the likes of TikTok.

Make mods actually pay for the privilege of modding.

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.

Can't help but feel like we're getting there already with most sites having the exact same problem. I think Facebook might be the only site that actually makes money due to always prioritising money, everyone else has dominated the market by operating at a loss for the past 2 decades and now suddenly oops we decided we need money.

I could see a Wikipedia-style donation model working to keep lots of different servers up. But I can't see it happening for servers hosting exclusively news + memes + whatever random communities people want to add.

I _could _ see it happening for dedicated broad-topic or semi-niche instances (instances for gaming, investing, Linux, music production, etc.) each hosting a collection of related and maybe more niche communities (for CSGO, Bitcoin, Arch, EDM production).

As they become more popular, server hosting costs increase, and at some point they might need to ask for donations to keep afloat. People are willing to throw a little money towards something they enjoy, especially if it's their choice to do so. And they feel good about it. And instances that stay around longer gain more users, more usability, more credibility (assuming a non-toxic community).

I could definitely see it leading down a path of growth and prosperity for the platform. However, now that I typed this out, I could see it both working positively, and being abused and exploited, so 🤷