Reddit Inc. is weighing feedback from early meetings with potential investors in its initial public offering that it should consider a valuation of at least $5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, even as it is estimated below that figure in the volatile market for shares of private companies.
  •  nicetriangle   ( @nicetriangle@kbin.social ) 
    57•5 months ago

    Sure feels like they timed this IPO pretty badly. I think the ideal time to strike on this would have been a few years ago… Based on market conditions anyway. Reddit itself may just not have had their ducks lined up enough, but that’s their problem, not the stock market’s.

    • Tech stocks trading sideways for the last year or two
    • The interest rate money printer got shut off and cash is not cheap anymore
    • Seemingly all the major new tech stock investment interest is circling around stuff like AI
    • Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
    • The pandemic is more or less over and people have pulled back from being chronically online somewhat (this is my guess, I don’t have data to back it up)

    Also what exactly is the monetization strategy? Ads I guess? More catering towards creating corporate “synergy” with the Reddit community? Selling user data/content? So basically making the place suck considerably worse for users is what it looks like to me.

    •  JillyB   ( @JillyB@beehaw.org ) 
      7•5 months ago

      Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media

      I think you’re overselling the importance of this one. When I’ve talked to friends about federated alternatives, they really aren’t interested. Even if they hated Twitter/reddit and think they’ve gotten worse, they just don’t really care about a federated alternative. I’ve heard some interest in threads, so maybe we count that?

        •  Moira_Mayhem   ( @Moira_Mayhem@beehaw.org ) 
          4•5 months ago

          If they really understood the phrase ‘too many cooks spoil the soup’, then they’d realize the advantage of smaller online communities.

          Reddit was at its best when it had a low count but engaged userbase, and became actively worse as it grew.

          I think this is because trolling and response isn’t a 1 to 1 ratio. All it takes is 1 toxic person to make an entire subforum rancid and takes the effort of several mods to mitigate it.

          The more people you have, the more chance you will have these trolls organize, the more likely they will either overwhelm or infiltrate the mods.

      •  nicetriangle   ( @nicetriangle@kbin.social ) 
        2•5 months ago

        Regular people didn’t know or care wtf reddit was for quite a while also and there absolutely is a building friction between people and corporate social media. We’re in the early stages for now, but stuff like Activitypub is not going away.