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.

  • @cyborganism
    162•4 months ago

    Let the enshittification begin continue. Now that stockholders will be expecting increasing profits, I don’t see how Reddit can remain free to use.

    • LvxferreM
      74•4 months ago

      I feel like Greedy Pigboy and Reddit Inc. as a whole deserve to be punished, for all that “my precious data! No, it is not the users’, IT IS MINE! MY PRECIOUS!” fiasco. Enshittification will happen either way.

      • @cyborganism
        41•4 months ago

        Exactly. Reddit has been building this huge knowledge base for well over a decade. Built by the users themselves. He knows what he’s got.

        I think I’ll go ahead and log back in and delete all my old posts and comments. Fuck him.

        • @[email protected]
          19•4 months ago

          I deleted all my comments barring one which was a reply to Spez himself calling him a spineless coward after lying about the Apollo dev.

          • @[email protected]
            4•4 months ago

            I editted all my comments, replacing whatever the text was for a message telling that greedy little pigboy to go fuck himself, and to train his AI on that. Every single one that I could find, because Reddit history sucks as much as its search.

        • @[email protected]
          1•4 months ago

          He knows what he’s got.

          No he doesn’t.

          They unlocked old comment editing some time ago, you can now edit comments even in “archived” posts. If you get a GDPR export, then you can “fix” the content of, let’s say, 30k comments spanning over a decade. There are some helpful tools on GitHub… but you may want to do it before he actually realizes and they lock you out.

    • MxM111
      7•4 months ago

      All other social media platforms are free.

      It is just there will be difference between users and customers (those who pays money to promote something or get data on users). And users are not customers.

      • @[email protected]
        18•4 months ago

        I mean, ignoring the balding neonazi dipshit for a moment:

        Twitter is more or less showing the path forward. They fucked up on the advertisement side, but it has clearly been demonstrated that there is a strong desire for users to be “power users”. Which is more or less what twitter ran on before. The idea that, because you have ten followers, you are just as important as Barack Obama.

        Reddit, coupled with Google fucking up their own shit, is rapidly losing the “best place on the internet to find user sourced information” badge. But there is definitely room for a subscription that either boosts user engagement (not sure how that would work) or provides corporate moderators so that individual people can have their own board about their Sonic OC or whatever.

        And then it becomes about converting those users into customers.

        • LvxferreM
          17•4 months ago

          But there is definitely room for a subscription that either boosts user engagement (not sure how that would work)

          Swap “subscription” for “multiple small transactions” and you have the new gold system. So Reddit is already doing what you (and me, and everyone else) was predicting them to, we just didn’t know “how”.

          It’ll likely fail hard though, at least in the long run. For similar reasons as Digg failed.

        • @[email protected]
          7•4 months ago

          I’ve had multiple comments on Reddit that were the first things or among the top results that popped up on Google regarding certain topics/issues/ect. Taking that away from Reddit even though my slice of the results pie was small, still felt so damn good.

          • DarkenLM
            6•4 months ago

            I’ve considered this, but knowing the pain that I had to go through because there was nothing, I’d rather that future developers don’t have to suffer through the same.

        • @[email protected]
          3•4 months ago

          I remember Reddit being the only place to find out which VLAN I needed to put my PVRs through to work with my personal router. Now it’s a struggle to find anything that specific or useful, and it’s getting worse.