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.

  • BudgieMania
    12•4 months ago

    I think there are a lot of extreme measures that would theoretically increase its profitability that they have not yet taken, most of which I have to assume are in the cards in the foreseeable future.

    Most of them are, of course, measures that would severely impact user experience in a very negative way, but it’s clear at this point that they are drunk on hubris and believe users will stay no matter what.

    • Bipta
      27•4 months ago

      They only have to be profitable long enough to sell their bags.

      • BudgieMania
        3•4 months ago

        That’s true, I have to imagine a significant amount of the people driving the push for the IPO are only doing so to drive value up, cash out and vanish

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
      5•4 months ago

      Users will stay no matter what. When was the last time you saw meaningful exodus off a major platform? The Reddit to Lemmy, or Twitter to Mastodon migrations were the largest in decades and they had almost zero impact on the number of visitors to the origin sites. The days of Digg to Reddit are gone. Average users don’t have the patience or attention span to build communities anymore, especially not when whatever they build will eventually be heavily monetized, changed beyond recognition, and generally enshitified.

      • @[email protected]
        2•4 months ago

        Also less tech savvy, people in the internet in the 2000s I think still had more of a hacker mentality compared to 2010 where everything moved towards apps with simplified UIs and can’t look under the hood.

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
          3•4 months ago

          It’s mind boggling to me that Gen Z doesn’t know anything about computers or the Internet, despite growing up using both their entire lives. All they know how to do is use simplified apps to browse social media, send text messages, and take pictures. Apparently Gen X is the only generation that had a large portion of the generation that understands the inter-workings of the internet and computers. We’ve had to constantly help both our parents and our kids with computer problems.