Changing the lives of Reddits: What a bull market can tell us about the future of the Reddit community and what investors should do about it
Steve Huffman, the CEO and co-founder of the website, has said that he’d like to see contributors to the unique community become owners. It’s possible that the new ticker could cause prices to go up, which would cause less cash for Reddit and investors who put in over a billion dollars over the past decade. Advance Publications is a parent company of Condé Nast.
“Reddit has a very rocky history,” says Alex Cook, a volunteer moderator (or “mod” in the community’s lingo) for several gaming subreddits. I do not believe it to be a very risky investment.
Some users are still angry over the company’s decision last year to begin charging for access to its API, an interface used by software developers to draw on user posts and other Reddit content. The fees led to several popular independent Reddit mobile apps shutting down, and protesting users temporarily closed some forums on the service for weeks in a failed effort to pressure the company into reversing course.
Does IPO Shares Help the Video Game Community? The Case of a Reddit User who Goes By Rat: Is There a Poincare at the Pizza Party?
IPO shares won’t help the video game community, according to a user who goes by Rat. This could be their attempt at the pizza party. Rat referred to the conciliatory gesture commonly offered to children.
The S-1 is an important document before a company goes public. It discloses all sorts of things: revenue figures, risk factors, key data about the business. And it sends certain signals. In this case: I see some meme stock shit.
The person said that loads put into the put-cannon with malicious intent. (For those not up on the parlance, they’re intending to bet the stock goes down. I assume they are betting a lot on the use of a put-cannon. I am trying to imagine a situation where one loads the put-cannon without malicious intent, but it hasn’t sprung to mind.)
Shares in Reddit IPO: Implications for Repetitions, Users and the User-Risk of a Community of Modified Discussions
Many revolts have made clear that the users of Reddit are more vulnerable than other users of the site. The model of moderation has upsides because it shows that 60,000 mod’s are more familiar with their community than contractors are. They don’t get paid by Reddit and so have a harder time controlling them.
If you squint, you can see that the risk is mitigated by offering shares to power users. They want to keep their own shares valuable, because they are shareholders. That means they’d be less likely to do things that would cut off advertising revenue, like abruptly shutting down a subreddit in protest.
If you are one of the qualified users who received an email from the company that asked for personal information, then you will be able to pre-register for the program. After about three weeks, everyone who signed up will get an email telling them whether they qualified. (Depending on how many people sign up, there may be a waitlist.) The people who did qualify will get “further instructions,” though Reddit’s FAQ is not clear about what those instructions will entail.
Source: A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO
A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO: What kind of content do you buy? Why you should take a risk, but what does it have to cost?
Kevon feels that it is a nice thank you to people who have contributed. Would you say that you sunk your entire life into being a mod on Reddit and have bought shares? There’s a possibility you’ll lose money — and effectively pay for the privilege of content moderation. It was fun!
The share program “seems like a gimmick to me honestly,” says Dan M., who also received the offer. He says that the shares aren’t being given away for free.
All of the Redditors I spoke to for this story enthused about Reddit as a community. It’s one of the bright spots in an internet era of social media engagement bait. It’s a place where there are still enthusiasts and experts, where people can still learn things, says Dan. “While the rest of the internet is all a giant mess, Reddit still feels like a place where you can learn things and have fun,” says u/itsreallyreallytrue, who also received an invitation and is considering buying into the share program.
A viable business and a good community are completely different things. The S-1 states that there is no assurance that the business will scale for future growth, even though it was founded in 2005. Most of Reddit’s revenue comes from advertising, but it hasn’t been very good at making money. That might be because of its laissez-faire approach to moderation; hate speech wasn’t banned from the site until 2020.
Plus, user engagement isn’t regular. Events such as the war in Ukraine and the release of the video game Elden Ring — these are Reddit’s own examples — lead to spikes in user engagement. A lot of users don’t log in. So targeting is a little trickier than it might be on, say, Instagram.
Source: A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO
How Did Huffman Siphon off Reddit? The Case of Sam Altman: The CEO of Open AI and the Silicon Valley of Social Media
And while Huffman now thinks that Reddit as a corpus of training data for AI is valuable, he let his board member Sam Altman siphon off Reddit data for free; Altman was, and still is, the CEO of OpenAI. He owns twice as many shares as the second-largest shareholder. Altman was the CEO of Reddit for eight days.
The fact that web3 has holdings beyond Bitcoins and ether made me suspicious about the amount of shares being offered to users. The Community Points were a waste of money, is it a waste of money to own shares?
We can lay the blame for these gimmicks on CEO Steve “u/spez” Huffman. They aren’t the only bizarre decisions he’s made. He has said that the price increase last year that led to protests was partly due to Elon Musk. (How’s Twitter — sorry, I mean X — doing with advertisers, spez?) His PR tour during the Reddit rebellion was frankly disastrous.
There is a risk factor in the S-1 that may not have been listed properly. “Huffman is critical to the management of our company and instrumental in the development of our technology and our strategic direction” and thus hard to replace, the S-1 says. The actual risk factor is the number of people who think “fuck spez” is a great catchphrase, because his job depends more than any other social media CEO’s job on keeping the users happy.
“I think he was overpaid,” says Kevon, who told me he was thinking of investing. In the filing, he is listed as making $193 million in five years. While the company was operating at a loss, he was surprised that Huffman made so much.
