/r/theoryofreddit post asking why reddit seems dead

You're viewing a single thread.

324 comments

I'm sure it's nothing and everything is fine. Now, who wants to buy some of this Reddit stock? I'll cut you a special deal so you don't miss out! ... Anyone?
- I was interested in buying a share just to be in for the ride, but then they asked for my real name to be associated with my handle. It's like they never understood what reddit was about at all.
  
  Reddit has never been about privacy or anominity. Think of all the celebrity AMAs.
  
  Who were the specific individuals asking questions in those?
  
  AMAs weren't celebrities on Reddit originally my friend, they were real people with interesting jobs or in unusual situations at first.
  
  Some great posts back in the day, and definitely some not so great posts haha. I had to unsub after it turned into celebrities hocking their products.
  
  The vacuum cleaner guy was one of the all time greats. I miss that era.
  
  the time I broke both my hands...
  also the time I used a coconut
  
  Good god that broken arm kid. He played it completely straight too if i remembered right, sloowly getting worse and worse with each answer. Legend
  
  Can we please keep this about Rampart.
  
  You can post on 4chan as anon and prove your identity too
  Reddit is (or at least was) psuedo-anonymous. You can easily get identities, and they're not linked to you
  For a lot of people, I'd say most in the early years (at least in my experience), you didn't share usernames with your friends on the platform... Irl Redditors loved to identify themselves as a Redditor, we shared communities and memes, but only two of my closest friends ever knew my main account
  I kept a second account that could potentially be tied to me (more work related stuff), because on my main account I always had the freedom to discard it if I embarrassed myself enough. That knowledge makes me far more likely to hit post instead of discard
- I got a Message offering me to buy too. In the Message it says i need to be a permanent Resident of the US.
  Buddy, you had me enter my Country when i created the Account. You know full-well I'm from the EU. Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?
  
  Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?
  Because that would cost their time instead of yours
  
  Perhaps you moved from Europe to the States in the interim like I did.
  Edit to add: sorry if this came off as snarky, was not my intention. Just wanted to point out that it's not always so clear-cut. I created my Reddit account in 2008 when I lived in the Netherlands. Then I moved to the US in 2016 and became a citizen in 2019.
- "We have never made a profit and may never make a profit. Please buy our stock."
- A special deal? Doesn’t the message basically say “give us your data so you maybe have a chance at buying stock at full price, and be thankful we’re not marking it up”?
  
  Well, at IPO price. A couple of decades ago, that used to mean it was discounted. Nowadays, it doesn't, but not everybody knows that.
  
  Probably part of some side grift to sell more information to data brokers
  
  The whole idea is a grift. They are directly appealing to people who largely should not be buying shares due to their financial situation and are a lot less critical of the pretty poor numbers they published than professional ~~exploiters~~ investors will be.
  Obviously this is done in hopes of selling more shares and binding users long term, though that will probably just accelerate the enshittification because suddenly the last remaining power users are turned into shareholders instead
  
  Right but the whole "give us all your info and MAYBE you can buy stock" is the part that sounds like a secondary grift. If they wanted to pump they could just have some set amount and do a first come first serve right off the bat.
- Free shorts?
- Can I borrow some stock?
  
  that would be called "shorting" and it totally is a thing.
  
  Look, I’m not trying to short okay? I’m sure Reddit will do great. Just let me borrow your stock and I’ll make sure you have it back in like 6 months or so
  
  Yeah, the big short is even a movie! One positive i got from hanging around stonks, amc and gme subs was how much i learned about how fucked the stock market is.
  Waaaaay more fucked, gamified, and straight up broken than even the most cynical citizen thinks.
- They actually tweaked the upbote/down vote stuff back then to stop actually showing the true amount of upvotes and down votes, directly. They started fuzzing votes to supposedly help prevent manipulation.
- The timing DOES seem Auspicious...

324 comments