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Reddit hires its first chief financial officer as it prepares for an IPO
- teruakohatu 6y agoIf/when Reddit IPOs I look forward to the shenanigans /r/wsb and friends will play. Given that reddit primary relies on the free labour of moderators, I can see co-ordinated mod strikes occurring with the purpose of hurting the share price as a way of making reddit hq pay attention.
- bombcar 6y agoI suspect r/wsb will run afoul of some not-quite-applicable rule before the S-1 is filed.
- slap_shot 6y agoCan you expand on what you mean by that?
- maxfurman 6y agoGP is implying that the admins will find a way to take down WSB if it does in fact ever threaten Reddit's IPO, whether or not any actual rule breaking occurs. Which wouldn't be completely unheard of for Reddit.
- bombcar 6y agoExactly. They've done it before and if the SEC starts asking pointed questions or even a bad NY Times article that threatens the IPO, WSB will be gone super fast.
- Shivetya 6y agoI agree with what is implied, Reddit is provided quite a bit of cover in this area, they could simply say they did it to prevent possible legal issues that they would be liable for. Of course this does not stop them from using their Discord to effect any action they want. I am still waiting to see how Congress acts overall to the likes of WSB and trading apps in general. I am betting they will have some wonderful sounding law with all sorts of wording claiming it is to protect the unwitting amateurs while in fact simply protecting their wall street donors from these amateurs upsetting their apple cart.
- commandlinefan 6y ago> wouldn't be completely unheard of I'd phrase that as "is standard operating procedure", actually.
- jodrellblank 6y agoIt's standard operating procedure for admins to take down subs which threaten their IPO? It's standard operating procedure for admins to take down subs? Since there are subs, it clearly isn't. Downvoted for being obviously wrong flamebait. Reddit gets comments on HN like StackOverflow does - "I went there once and something I posted wasn't popular, the whole site is garbage filled with $people_I_hate and the admins are terrible and delete everything!"
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y agoHow's reddit going to handle 500 mods going awol?
- optimalsolver 6y agoReddit replaces moderators on popular subs all the time. There are thousands of people who would accept the position.
- madamelic 6y agoNot to mention the supermods who are thinly veiled employees / contractors of Reddit.
- w0de0 6y agoAre they truly as fungible as the parent comment suggests? If they are indeed "thinly veiled employees / contractors of Reddit" that would imply some not immediately replaceable value in their work, stemming from informal training, donation of time, tolerance for redditors, etc. If so, indeed they may strike and indeed they may be in the right demanding some part of an IPO's value.
- penagwin 6y agoI doubt this, reddit seems to have embraced the attention wsb has gotten them (see their super bowl ad). While I can see shenanigans with replacing mods, I don't see them shutting down the subreddit.
- nojito 6y ago>I can see co-ordinated mod strikes occurring with the purpose of hurting the share price as a way of making reddit hq pay attention. For every mod that goes on strike, many more people will step up to take over. Most of the mod work in the high volume subs are through automod anyway.
- Macha 6y agoIf it comes to Reddit Inc replacing the mods, that will likely be a relatively unpopular move for at least the short term until people forget. The stock price harm is less from the site disruption but more for continuing the site's reputation as hard to monetise.
- Graffur 6y agoIn my experience, automod ruins subs. Post something.. get notification.. removed by automod
- ddingus 6y agoDepends on how it is used. There are options beyond removal and a notice.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI for one don't believe a company's politics - public or otherwise - have a significant impact on share prices. Rich or many people buying and selling though.
- hntrader 6y agoReddit influence is long-only without exception.
- sjg007 6y agoWill mods get stock options?
- virgil_disgr4ce 6y agoAnyone have a good run-down of how Reddit makes money? (Or does it?)
- peanut_worm 6y agoReddit Gold and Advertising
- arkitaip 6y agoAds and Reddit gold (its own currency). I think that various membership related monetization is the future of Reddit and far more stable than ads. Just look at what Twitch is doing with subscriptions, bits, emotes and donations.
- Dracophoenix 6y agoIt used to be just Ads and Reddit Gold. Now it's mostly investment funding from China (via Tenecent) and the Middle East.
- CallMeMarc 6y agoAds and reddit coins afaik. Coins can be used to buy either their premium subscription (no ads and a few other things) or can be used to "award" posts/comments. You can select which award you want to give, there are multiple that are by reddit and there are awards that are subreddit specific. An award can also give the awardee some coins (e.g. you pay 200 coins and the awardee gets 100).
- nwotnagrom 6y agoWould be interested to see the numbers. Assuming no one has ever seen these?
- CallMeMarc 6y agoWould definitely love to see the numbers, but I suspect Tencent is paying their bills mostly
- pibechorro 6y agoReddit is no longer a place of free expression and community. The censorship and negative echo chambers there are out of control. Its only going to get worse. R/wsb do your magic here..
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoOf course it isn't, because the libertarian ideal is impossible on the internet. Gab / Parler are self-proclaimed bastions of free speech, but they boot left-leaning opinions and have no privacy protection (because they were hacked). Voat gained popularity when Reddit got rid of the hate subreddits, and it shut down late last year because nobody wants to invest in or advertise on a platform where everything goes. Sorry for zooming in on your 'censorship' comment, but it's something that just rubs me up the wrong way. No community can do without censorship (or I prefer "content moderation", censorship is mainly used for governments and e.g. journalists; you won't get put in jail for being a prick on the internets) and be sustainable at the same time.
- Dracophoenix 6y ago/u/spezymandus is partial only to his own views regarding what content should be permitted to present itself on Reddit to the point of hypocrisy. At the end of the day the only reason that r/wsb and it's 4chanesque shenanigans haven't been banned is because it's onboarded so many new users. But at some point it's going to become as clamped down as all the other subreddits if not thoroughly eviscerated. Especially as they start onboarding advertisers post-IPO. It's goodbye Usenet 2.0, hello New Facebook!
- fuzxi 6y agoI remember when there was that big leak of celebrity nudes (the Fappening) and the reddit CEO at the time, yishan, posted that they wouldn't take down any of them because "Every man is responsible for his own soul." Then the well-deserved backlash made him backpedal at supersonic speeds. Anyway, my point is that that incident wasn't even out of the norm for reddit administration. Their standard for objectionable content is based on whether something gets negative media attention. Spez is nothing new.
- JamesDeepDown 6y agoReddit is a catastrophe of anti-US and anti-capitalist propaganda. The propagandists are: -Russians, trying to weaken the UK/EU politically -Chinese, trying to weaken the US financially -Extreme-leftists, trying to destroy the capitalist framework of western society Clearly these 3 groups despise each other, but they all have a common goal. Therefore the propaganda is EVERYWHERE and has infected almost every corner of Reddit. Every day the front page is filled with clownishly fake and divisive stories. Reddit does NOTHING to stop this. I say this because, once they are a public company, they may find the tolerance for such propaganda is VERY different to how it is today. EDIT: I would also say that Reddit as a moral or ethical company is amongst the worst corporations that the US has ever seen. By making money from divisive fake propaganda, they are up there with Enron, tobacco companies in the 1960s, those who sold Thalidomide is the 1950s, Cambridge Analytica etc etc. History will be brutally harsh on this company, and those who worked there and enabled it. I wish them luck finding a financial officer who is willing to ignore all their problems.
- taylorlapeyre 6y agoWithout evidence to support these claims, I feel like what you’ve said just sounds like more fear-stoking. It’s also likely that Reddit has become more international, and the world at large leans more left than the current US. Couple that with mostly-US news stories, and it’s not surprising to me that Reddit is often quite angry. Without evidence to support accusations to widespread government propaganda, I’m going to have to go with the simpler of the two options.
- pjmorris 6y agoAre you familiar with the 'Powell Memo' [0] To over simplify, it makes the 1971 version of your arguments against Reddit, but against the prevailing culture of the time. It then argues that a deliberate campaign of responding to those challenges is called for. I would argue that it was successful in its aims. There is a robust culture of promoting US financial interests that seems to be able to deal with e.g. social websites. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_Memorandum,_1971 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_Mem...
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- Dirlewanger 6y agoA company that is nowhere near being profitable (on top of virtually no cash flow) is going public?
- f69281c 6y agoThat seems extremely common. For a stretch there every tech S1 I saw said "we don't make money, we've never made money, we have no idea how we're going to make money in the future".
- NoOneNew 6y agoAnyone have a recommendation for a reddit clone open source project? Edit: an open source project where you can quickly roll out your own reddit style, link agg, site.
- kowlo 6y agoLemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
- NoOneNew 6y agoHow mature would you say the project is (obviously a very subjective question)?
- kowlo 6y agoIt works, but it's a little awkward to customise at the moment... an example at https://lemmy.ml https://lemmy.ml and https://www.chapo.chat https://www.chapo.chat (although chapo are supposedly moving away from Lemmy)
- NoOneNew 6y agoHoly ballsack, chapo is a leftist cesspool like parler is a rightist cesspool. It's just one big death to america ISIS wonderland. Lemmy looks interesting all the same... but maybe a different example site that's not politically extremist would be better to convince folks to try it lol.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kowlo 6y agoI won't pass any judgement on either community, but to clarify, I was linking them as "popular" Lemmy instances as a demonstration of the technology
- 6y ago
- mrfusion 6y agoI miss the reddit of 15 years ago. Such an exciting place. Can we recreate it?
- Macha 6y agoSmall, dominated by techies. Isn't that pretty much what HN has become, minus the porn that was on Reddit from early on? It's hard to argue that HN is still really focused on startups. They get an outsized influence because of who runs it and where it came from, but they're still a small percentage of the content. Reddit was only founded 15 years ago, but I'm pretty sure HN is actually larger than the reddit of 12 years ago, when I joined. /u/Deimorz (former Reddit admin, prior to that foudner of r/Games, which was one of the more successful attempts at doing a "same topic but more serious" competitor to a sub that ended up meme filled) is also trying his own competitor at tildes.net for more general purpose. Notably it's not a "free speech zone" like Voat and other attempted alternatives, so shouldn't be full of nazis when more reasonable users are looking for somewhere to migrate to.
- dang 6y ago> It's hard to argue that HN is still really focused on startups. I hope so! That was the intention behind its name change in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.
- echlebek 6y agoHN feels more like a single subreddit than reddit as a whole. There is far greater cultural diversity on reddit.
- nostrademons 6y agoPart of the problem is that all of us who have Reddit nostalgia are also 15 years older, largely set in our careers, and oftentimes have families and other demands on our attention. Reddit was founded at a specific moment in history, and a lot of what made it special was what was going on in that moment of history. It was right when the web became useful and mainstream and it became possible for a few guys to put together a website and change the world. A lot of the excitement of that time period was around "What else is about to change in the near future that we could take advantage of?" The early Reddit userbase was often 20-somethings and a few late teens, right around the age range when peoples' futures are most fluid and eager to jump on the next thing. There are a bunch of similar exciting developments happening right now, with similar exciting communities. DeFi, drones, self-driving cars, robotics, EVs, a lot of climate tech. Curiously, most of them get dismissed when they're posted on Hacker News, much like how most 40-somethings dismissed Web 2.0 when it happened. Maybe it's more a function of the age than the community or tech.
- EasyTiger_ 6y agoOf course they won't mention how it's the most astroturfed platform on the internet with some of the worst communities.
- Doctor_Fegg 6y agoAnd some of the best. I've recently started reading /r/peloton and it's really impressive how it remains friendly, fun and well-informed, despite covering a sport that attracts conspiracy theories and accusations (mostly around doping).
- JamesDeepDown 6y agoAdvertisers HATE unmoderated user-generated content. The UGC on Reddit is probably the most extreme for any mainstream website. How are they going to make money? No advertisers will touch them in the current state.
- bidirectional 6y agoBut advertisers do touch them? Everytime I go on reddit I see dozens of ads.
- JamesDeepDown 6y agoAdvertisers on Reddit are small boutique businesses. Fortune 500 type companies won't touch them.
- bidirectional 6y agoTo test this out, I fired up reddit.com in a private browsing session. The first four ads I saw were: a Windows 10 HP laptop, an AAA game from Square Enix, coronavirus messaging from the UK government, and a small indie game. I don't think what you're saying is true at all.
- ddingus 6y agoI don't either. My theory is people grew up and now have AD influence. Companies willing to run ADS in a non curated venue get traction the others do not. People talking freely will say thing the company may not like. That is no big, unless they make it so. They will also say a lot of other things, including stuff the company likes. And that is where the traction comes from. The Internet natives hate corporate bland and prefer real discussion.
- cecja 6y agoI suggest you disable your ad blocker and visit some of the major subreddits instead of talking out of your ass.
- cecja 6y agoWell at least we know why they censored porn from /r/all.
- mandown2308 6y agoGreat. I like reddit.
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/CUSnI https://archive.is/CUSnI
- symlinkk 6y agoI recommend shorting it. Reddit today is an absolute ghetto compared to 5 years ago. All of the interesting content and free thinking users have been banned.
- pradn 6y agoWhich communities do you mean?
- f69281c 6y agoI don't think he's talking about a specific subreddit, but rather reddit as a whole. I tend to agree, but I don't see how that hurts advertisers. IIRC you used to very rarely see actual celebrities in the ama subreddit because it was a weird place where they'd ask you how many toddlers you thought you could fight at once, or maybe someone would get accused of trying to bang a highschooler. Now it's just your standard softball interview space where you go plug a movie, someone asks you what it was like to work with (other famous person), and then you're off to go do the exact same thing on kimmel. It's advertiser friendly but it's about as exciting as a bowl of oatmeal and as thought provoking as the number eight. The only reason people stick around on reddit is because they're addicted to the skinner box content feed.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoIf Reddit successfully executes its plan [1] to expand its tokenized community points project to its whole site, I believe its market valuation could potentially rival the FAANGs'. The market caps of the existing community tokens are as follows: /r/EthTrader - $1.6 million https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/donut https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/donut /r/CryptoCurrency - $19.75 million https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/moon https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/moon /r/FortNiteBR - $5 million (based on expected issuance of 250 million BRICK tokens) https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/brick https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/brick [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/l6c3kx/reddit_announces_partnership_with_the_ethereum/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/l6c3kx/reddit_ann...
- rufus_foreman 6y agoI really hate what Reddit has become, so I will probably buy the IPO. That way if they are successful, I won't feel as bad since at least I made money from it. And if they fail, I won't feel bad about losing money since I get to see something ugly get destroyed. Nothing in this post constitutes professional and/or financial advice.