I don't know how in the hell they let it go as wrong as they did. They had all the eyeballs of the internet. They had all the Google search traffic. They had an API that encouraged tons of other people to make applications that link with them to display their content.

All they had to do was light touch monetization, and slightly stroke the egos of the mods. Every new phone, car, light bulb that ever came out had a place where it could be directed right at the people they want to sell it to. All they had to do was disguise it as an unboxing or a slightly pithy review. Hell, they could have gotten competitors to bid against each other. Chevy could have been on there dissing forward, Ford could have been on their dissing Dodge. They're so many opportunities there for monetization. They have control over their own algorithm.

Seeing a report like that, that they did all these things to raise funds and are still not profitable, is there any reason why anyone would invest? Surely the price can only go down from initial offering, right? Unless the price started very low.

One would imagine the chief asshole would reduce his 190m payday by 100m to make the balance beautiful before an IPO.

I don't work in financial reporting, and I have no clue what even EBITDA is...

But even me, I come to the same conclusion!^^

I got it on an email address linked to an account that was banned in 2020.

I was a semi-power user before leaving (13k link karma, 134k comments) and also received the IPO offer per email and per notification. I reported the notification as spam :)

It's so obvious that they want to squeeze some money out before everything goes down the drain.

Please don't forget to fill in the form anyway, with fake data. This will let them believe there are more interested users than reality

The executive payroll

Hey, it's not easy to make a shitty new redesign of a site. That stuff costs money.

Remember when they killed API access claiming it cost the 10s of millions each year? Turns out they could have just not spent so much on reddit avatars and we'd all still be there today.

I haven't seen that "you broke reddit" message in a while. Maybe they bought more servers?

may never achieve profitability.

I'm not an expert or anything, but that doesn't sound like a very good investment.

Because spez insists on chasing the newest tech shiny - but only after it's peaked - NFTs, crypto, RPAN, etc. And although it may yet turn around for him and for reddit, notice that he only jumped onto the AI boom three months after last spring's series of AI announcements, showing that he's once again way behind the times.

Edit: one thing has always struck me since his interview last summer. spez said something like "reddit will continue to be profit-driven until the profits arrive". Like the arrival of profits was inevitable. Like he didn't need to do anything except wait. Just be patient and the profits will arrive in their own time, not like things have to be envisioned and planned and put in place to get profits, just ... they'll arrive. Some day.

It seems a remarkably lackadaisical attitude for a CEO to have.

Dumb people are going to see headlines about “AI” and “the first social media IPO in a long time,” and they’re going fork over money. Also speculators are going to buy after they speculate that other speculators are going to buy speculatively.

And thats why theyre trying to sucker the users themselves to invest first, so they can pump and dump.

Iirc it was $600k as actual payroll, the rest in private stock. But still, fuck the greedy little pig boy.

For being a complete douche.

So, three of my old accounts apparently qualified for the buy-shares offer. Two of them were over the 200k karma threshold to get the offer. Interestingly, the third account had only 191k karma and got the message a day or two later.

Even more interestingly, yesterday a fourth account that I haven't posted to in over a decade received the offer, and this one only had 50k karma. Admittedly, several accounts were mods, but they were mods of extremely small, very inactive subs, and I had de-modded myself after deleting my data. They also sent an email to the my registered email address for the fourth account (but I don't know if that's relevant because none of my other accounts had emails registered).

I'm not sure what's going on. Did they get so little response from the early offers that they're going to the accounts of former mods or lowering the karma requirements? I know a couple of my accounts ended up connected by IP information; did they try to contact my old fourth account by PM and email because it was somehow connected to the higher-level accounts, or because they're getting desperate? Maybe they're just trying to get lots of numbers to show that redditors are eager to participate, to gin up an ignorant public's enthusiasm prior to the IPO?

I have to think that, at some level, they're getting desperate, because it seems so much effort to go to, to dig up an account that hasn't posted in a decade and then send PMs and emails to it.

The premise of the question is flawed in my opinion. It only needs to be profitable because they put themselves in that situation by going public.

A social platform run by users should only need to break even. I have no idea why a web forum needs to be on the stock market.

Now it's another example of Enshittification of the internet.

There has never been a profitable social media company.

Facebook might have started out as a social media company, but it's only profitable now because it's part of an advertising duopoly that has almost all online ads completely locked up. Their actual business is renting eyeballs to advertisers. The social media part of it is just data collection for their advertising.

Reddit can't compete with the big 2 as an ad platform. They don't have the reach of the other two, and never will. So, it's not going to be a good money making platform, but it might be able to have a niche and cover its costs. There are ways it could do that and not be awful for users.

They could partner with Hollywood studios to promote shows and movies, provide forums to discuss them that are safe for those brands. They could work with local governments to be a place to release important information. Governments used to do that on Twitter, but Twitter has gone to shit. This isn't stuff that will send Reddit shares to the moon like their VC backers want. But, it could survive.

Instead, they're going to follow the Elon Musk playbook and it will die.