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In unsurprising news, Reddit prepares IPO
(www.businessinsider.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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As of 7 months ago, spez claimed that the company still wasn’t profitable. If, after 18 years, a social media link aggregator still isn’t profitable, then what are they going to do with the IPO capital other than burn through it as well?
And what could they use the money to do? How much innovation has there been on Reddit since it was written? Fancier Reddit gold? A shitty redesign? Video hosting that doesn’t work? Image hosting so bad someone had to make totally separate website for it?
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.
This is true for almost every social media. They get popular for one thing and one things only and it’s mostly just content formatting. The rest is ads that make very little and they can’t diversify.
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:
But that’s definitely not going to help them be profitable lol
"Requirements" being key there. The vast majority of even power users won't end up getting paid with the system as it stands. If anything, it's just there for people to give them credit for making it "possible".
Which requirements are difficult to meet? The highest hurdles I see is receiving 10 gold in a 12-month period and making sure your content isn't porn/gore/drugs. I think reddit blows, but this doesn't seem like difficult-to-obtain goals for somebody trying to make some extra scratch.
Yeah, I went through a few pages and they don’t seem unattainable. The hardest would probably be living in a country that isn’t included
Yeah, and while the country thing sucks, it's at least a quick "yes/no" answer before you even start trying. This isn't a deceptive lure like roblox, where they entice millions of kids to try to monetize their content, but make it exceptionally hard to actually make a profit or to even cash out (and even if you meet their ridiculous requirements, there is a huge imbalance of exchange rates when converting to and from a real currency to robux).
“What’s your business model?”
“We pay people to post on our site.”
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.
Rexxit had over $500,000,000 in revenue in 2022. It wasn't profitable because spez spent money paying for all the infrastructure and bandwidth for multiple AI companies to harvest all of rexxit's data, and because he's constantly distracted by trying to incorporate the latest tech-bro trends into rexxit - rexxit crypto, rexxit NFTs, now he's trying to figure out rexxit AI. He's a breathtakingly incompetent CEO.
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.
I think there are a lot of extreme measures that would theoretically increase its profitability that they have not yet taken, most of which I have to assume are in the cards in the foreseeable future.
Most of them are, of course, measures that would severely impact user experience in a very negative way, but it's clear at this point that they are drunk on hubris and believe users will stay no matter what.
They only have to be profitable long enough to sell their bags.
That's true, I have to imagine a significant amount of the people driving the push for the IPO are only doing so to drive value up, cash out and vanish
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.
Also less tech savvy, people in the internet in the 2000s I think still had more of a hacker mentality compared to 2010 where everything moved towards apps with simplified UIs and can't look under the hood.
It's mind boggling to me that Gen Z doesn't know anything about computers or the Internet, despite growing up using both their entire lives. All they know how to do is use simplified apps to browse social media, send text messages, and take pictures. Apparently Gen X is the only generation that had a large portion of the generation that understands the inter-workings of the internet and computers. We've had to constantly help both our parents and our kids with computer problems.
There will be a nice and seemingly articulate PowerPoint presentation that explains the monetization strategy.
The user data on hand, the rise of reddit data in search engines, all factor prominently.
I don't want to sound stupid but every time I hear this I don't understand what they mean. If I don't make enough money then I lose my possessions and house and certainly wouldn't be able to afford servers. If it's not profitable then why keep doing it? Does he just mean he doesn't get massive bonuses? Clearly this word means something different to me.