- cross-posted to:
- technology
- cross-posted to:
- technology
This is one of the more scathing pieces to come out on Ars about Reddit. As the site did not respond to inquiries, all that was available to report on was profoundly negative statements that Advance is unlikely to enjoy seeing.
Go ahead and buy. Shares generally tank pretty quick after IPO for companies that don’t actually make anything, the dot bust ensured that. Only time will tell if Reddit shares improve or flounder around not going anywhere. An additional thought - Reddit would do well to do things like get rid of old.reddit, go after ad blockers, and maybe implement a “verified” fee program like Xwitter to boost their stock potential. And also ensure I’ll never return.
This is my thinking as well. IPOs are almost never profitable. If the stock lists at 50 a share, six months later it’ll probably be way closer to 20. And it’s not like Reddit is Facebook, either, if you want to compare it to another publicly traded social media website. Facebook, for all its faults, diversified its corporate enterprise years ago. It’s not just a social media company, but a legitimate tech conglomerate. It now handles payment processing, offer a functional storefront for small businesses, and also owns Oculus, Instagram, and a massive truckload of other shit. What does Reddit own? Well, it owns…Reddit. Its valuation is…maybe 15 billion dollars. What does it have to offer other companies? Well, it has user data. Which is not valueless, but also worth way less than it used to be since every single company you have an online account with collects and sells your data to someone else.
I remember a developer at Reddit telling me on a private Slack that old.reddit is so deeply embedded into the code it would be a removed to remove. I didn’t believe him, because that could easily be 301’d without pulling out old code.
He was let go in the recent layoffs.