- cross-posted to:
- internet@lemmy.eco.br
Now the social media platform is aiming for an IPO in the first quarter of 2024 with a valuation of $15 billion, and has been in talks with potential investors like Goldman Sachs and and Morgan Stanley, per Bloomberg.
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Reddit Crypto and Reddit NFTs were good ideas… to get revenue from 3rd-party app users. Then they killed 3rd-party apps instead 🤦
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
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.