Reddit's cofounder said that at first the company felt like 'a homework assignment that got out of hand' rather than a business
www.businessinsider.com
Reddit's cofounder Steve Huffman said in its early days he filled up most of the site with content using different accounts until it got more users.

Now the social media platform is aiming for an IPO in the first quarter of 2024 with a valuation of $15 billion, and has been in talks with potential investors like Goldman Sachs and and Morgan Stanley, per Bloomberg.

    • 018118055@sopuli.xyz
      23·
      1 year ago

      You can short it at open and hope you have enough collateral to withstand a lot of volatility through the hype cycle. Long term I expect you’d win but it wouldn’t be comfy getting there.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, rather certain they’ll come out of the gate at least lukewarm if not hot. There will be reports on how much money they can make in advertisement and how many millions of paid views they have and how much money that’s worth on paper. They’ll hide the bot numbers in the fake account numbers as long as they need to to get out of the gate. Then their investors will be in charge. Every bad decision is an opening for a lawsuit. Investors will kick out the scumbags the c-staff will deploy their golden parachutes.

        Communities will still struggle to work around the advertisers and trolls.

        Same bull, just another brick in the wall

        • greenskye@lemm.eeEnglish
          10·
          1 year ago

          This stuff always feels like rich people scamming other rich people. Both sides know reddit isn’t worth nearly as much as they claim, but they play this song and dance with it and the one who actually ends up with the company at the end (usually) loses out while everyone else manages to make billions.

          • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
            31·
            1 year ago

            You know, it could be. Most of Wall Street is a needlessly complex game of making money out of nothing.

            But imagine if you took reddit and gave it over to someone trustworthy. Some kind of actual business genius that could navigate the investors and the communities and make them benefit each other in symbiosis. That many eyes is worth a hell of a lot of money. Get that marketing data out of there quietly, get those ads in there tucked in the streams in a way that they could be teased out of the stream and open the API back up to everyone. (even google? especially google) Push the advertisers to make relevant shill posts instead of ads.

            There’s little damage there that couldn’t be undone, but the bar to finding a person that investors would allow them to fix it is damn high.