Losing third-party tools "could harm our moderators’ ability to review content..."
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Reddit failing to support third-party apps could hurt business, IPO filing says
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Reddit and its consequences were always the risk of online community centralization
Retvrn.... Retvrn to BB forums.
Retvrn.... Retvrn to BB forums.
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The number of accounts has grown, but how many unique IPs/users are there actually?
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Couldn't all that simply have been summarized as "Our CEO is a threat to our future business" ? It'd be more accurate and comprehensive.
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Those pre-IPO SEC warnings are a bit silly. Basically, you have to list anything you can think of that may realistically happen. That way, if it does happen, it's much harder to sue you and win.
The vast majority do not come to pass, but journalists love to find and report on them breathlessly. "Facebook said people may fall out of love with hate speech!"
The vast majority do not come to pass, but journalists love to find and report on them breathlessly. "Facebook said people may fall out of love with hate speech!"
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Fuck Spez.
Of course reddit got "bad public relations", it was found out that he tried to fake a blackmail from the dev of the most popular reddit app on iOS because Apollo was your competitor.
I hope this IPO fails or something happens where the investors lose money so they sue him and ruin his life. He certainly doesn't care about harvesting data and selling ads from the millions of users on his site.
Of course reddit got "bad public relations", it was found out that he tried to fake a blackmail from the dev of the most popular reddit app on iOS because Apollo was your competitor.
I hope this IPO fails or something happens where the investors lose money so they sue him and ruin his life. He certainly doesn't care about harvesting data and selling ads from the millions of users on his site.
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Of course not - CEOs are never wrong, it's always the employees, the rogue engineer, the current economic climate, or even the customers that are wrong for not knowing what they want. Now give the CEO his many million dollar bonus and move on.
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Huffman is going to get out of this the same way Bobby Kotick did - with a giant pile of cash, and a problem left for someone else.
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How many of those increased DAUs are just bots, and not actually people? Comment-sparm/karma farming by reposting other users' comments and outright content is extremely common now in a number of subreddits
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I feel like the article totally misses the point that all these CYA disclosures are typical of ANY company going public .. to list all the bad things that could happen so that people can’t sue them later . The fact that all the stuff is listed really means nothing.
The whole matter is of no consequence other than the real hidden bottom line: the number of users grew, nobody will care about anything else
The whole matter is of no consequence other than the real hidden bottom line: the number of users grew, nobody will care about anything else
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I feel like you totally missed the point of the article. Reddit had to make this particular CYA disclosure because of very public self-sabotage. This was a risk that never needed to exist.
It also demonstrates that, unlike many other social media platforms, Redditors have a lot of power to materially impact the company's financials and future stock price. Even if only for a moment.
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Yup, and in spite of what their POS CEO (obligatory fuck u/Spez) has said in the past about the potential for protests to hurt reddit's bottom line.
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eh, these SEC filings listings of risks really shouldn't be read into too deeply. They're just trying to cover all their bases (legally) defensively , they don't actually signify a real thing that the company is worried about.
ISTR that for one major IPO, they listed as one of their risks that their employees getting so rich from the IPO that they won't work as hard or they'll quit. these are not "serious" concerns.
ISTR that for one major IPO, they listed as one of their risks that their employees getting so rich from the IPO that they won't work as hard or they'll quit. these are not "serious" concerns.
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Gern Blaanston
Ars Scholae Palatinae
If Reddit had $804 Million in revenue but lost $69 Million, that means it spent a total of $873 Million. On what?
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And frankly, did they start counting users in a different manner? Given how many of their new users are counted despite not having accounts, they're relying on the accuracy of fingerprinting users despite a clear reluctance for those users to be identified voluntarily.
They have every incentive to mistakenly double-count anonymous users given the upcoming IPO and how heavily weighted their continuing growth will be despite all the controversy. I think it's very telling that they saw a growth of 12.7M users globally from Q2 2023 to Q4 2023, while also seeing an 8.5M anonymous user growth in the same period.
Given the incredible growth of bot activity in the past year, it seems like they've largely let go of the reins on automated posting and farming. It feels like an implicit acknowledgment of stalling growth - 36.4M users with accounts in Q4 2023 vs 32M in Q2 2023, but the bot growth has been far more dramatic IMO (though obviously we'll never learn of those figures).
I wouldn't bet the farm on Reddit's IPO. I just wish there was a standby platform genuinely ready to replace them with better guarantees for openness and community control - they aren't trustworthy stewards of all the communities they host now.
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Just asking, how can Apollo be a competitor to the actual company? If anything Apollo was at the discretion of Reddit.
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There is no way the increased DAUs aren't purely bots.
It's currently an overwhelming and, for mods, insurmountable problem.
Very soon half of the posts will be fake, AI generated nonsense, that is posted by bots, upvoted by bots, commented on by bots, and all to get the 10% of actual humans to look at something and, maybe, sign up to some fake person's OnlyFans account.
It's currently an overwhelming and, for mods, insurmountable problem.
Very soon half of the posts will be fake, AI generated nonsense, that is posted by bots, upvoted by bots, commented on by bots, and all to get the 10% of actual humans to look at something and, maybe, sign up to some fake person's OnlyFans account.
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That's because reddit didn't have a first party mobile app ecosystem until I think 2016, and Apollo had been around since at least 2013.
Third-party apps on Apple and Android is what allowed reddit to grow as it did; otherwise people may not have bothered using the site on their phones.
With respect to Apollo specifically, and other third-party tools generally, the apps had better features for use and moderation than compared to both the first-party options on iOS and Android. But reddit decided that Apollo was a competitor, because it was the #1 reddit app on iOS completely outperforming the official app. So when reddit announced their API changes and the resultant pricing against app developers directly and not on the user, it was pretty obvious that reddit wanted third-party apps to disappear after the third-party apps did all the heavy lifting in organic growth for the site. The failed blackmail statement by Spez was just icing on the cake.
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The investors ARE going to lose money. That's the game.
Reddit reported a loss of $90 million in revenue last year, while compensating their exectuives way more than that. (Fuck) spez alone received $200 million in compensation last year.
This is to make it seem like they are an unprofitable company with a good product who only needs investors to really succeed. After IPO, exec compensation will change so they are suddenly super profitable. Spez's stock value skyrockets. He sells all his stock to make hundreds of millions and fucks off to retirement while reddit gets enshittified by the new investors.
This should be considered fraud and should be illegal.
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hear hear! Order! phpBB in the house!
RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Last year, it laid off 5% of its workforce. And "Huffman owns 3.1% of the company’s outstanding shares and Reddit COO Jen Wong holds 1.5%, per the filing. Huffman’s compensation package for 2023 was worth $193.2 million, which included salary of $341,346, stock awards worth $98.3 million and stock options valued at $93.8 million. Wong’s total comp of $92.5 million included a base salary of $583,820, stock awards of $45.7 million and stock options worth $45.7 million."
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Is Huffman the closet fascist? Or is that the other founder? I always forget.
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So here's a question, preferably to be answered by people with the domain knowledge to answer it:
If Reddit makes provably false statements in its pre-IPO filings and prospectus (due either to malfeasance or incompetence), including false assignment of blame and cause for what happened and what might happen with these protests, can the SEC and other similar regulators block the IPO? And how might a complaint about such false statements be made? Basically, what remedies are available when companies lie in their pre-IPO and prospectus filings?
If Reddit makes provably false statements in its pre-IPO filings and prospectus (due either to malfeasance or incompetence), including false assignment of blame and cause for what happened and what might happen with these protests, can the SEC and other similar regulators block the IPO? And how might a complaint about such false statements be made? Basically, what remedies are available when companies lie in their pre-IPO and prospectus filings?
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This risk has already come to fruition.
Moderation is way worse than it was before reddit's made a mess of things. Made worse by the general AI bot deluge happening all around the internet.
It is all bots talking to bots now. I find myself barely using reddit anymore. I don't need their website to read AI generated content, I go just go to chatgpt directly if I want that.
Moderation is way worse than it was before reddit's made a mess of things. Made worse by the general AI bot deluge happening all around the internet.
It is all bots talking to bots now. I find myself barely using reddit anymore. I don't need their website to read AI generated content, I go just go to chatgpt directly if I want that.
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Mungus the Unhyphenated
Ars Tribunus Militum
Just a side observation... the recent slightly 3D re-work of Reddit's "Snoo" character icon as part of the branding refresh associated with the IPO really strikes me as lacking some attention to detail. Since it's slightly 3D, there's shadowing on the lower half of the image -- like a 5-o'clock shadow. Or worse, a neckbeard. Which really doesn't help their branding one bit.
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Used to be on reddit non-stop (too much, frankly), but after Apollo shut down, I only wind up there if a search takes me there. So I use reddit exclusively through Google, and on a browser with Ublock Origin for maximum fuck u/spez.
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I didn't quit reddit because of the whole revoking API/App access. It didn't really bother me, true it's community created content, but it's their database it's stored in, whatever. I knew that posting there for 10 years. What got me to delete all my content and my accounts was Spez's complete disregard for the reddit community. The responses he put out during the App fiasco were absolutely dripping with contempt for the community and really turned me off.
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Huffman is a doomsday prepper, so yes.
Ohanian is the cryptocultist who will some day have to explain to his mixed race daughter how daddy got rich by promoting his website to people who either wanted to kill her for her skin colour or abuse her for her age.
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The un-age-checked porn, not the mods, is the biggest risk to Reddit. They may be legally able to hide behind 230, but no household name is going to want to advertise on a domain that might contain sexual images of the underaged or trafficked.
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Same. I'm on Threads these days, but that isn't quite as much of a time sink (yet?).
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I tried Lemmy but it's just not there. I'd happily switch to something else but I'm not going to lead a revolution. After the protest nothing changed though. Reddit is more active that it was before and there's finally numbers to show it. Reddit has the momentum and it's difficult to change. Fuck Spez.
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This is still a risk whether the mods love them or hate them though isn't it? People not being paid leaving an unpaid position because of any number of reasons is a risk.
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