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This is one of those rare cases where what is being said is less interesting than who says it.
What: Reddit stock is junk, the IPO will fail hard, and anyone investing on it is begging to lose money. I believe that most people discussing this in Lemmy already know that, so the info isn’t new here.
Who: Forbes. Forbes’ target audience is investors; greedy vulture capitalists love it. So if Forbes says “it’ll sink!”, investors are less eager to buy stock, and that sinks the stonks even further. So what Forbes says is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I’m glad that Forbes is doing it. I want to see Reddit die.
EDIT: as other posters are correctly highlighting, I derped - the article is from a “contributor”, and it has basically no impact or visibility.
Damn - now I want Forbes shitting on the IPO!
Note that this is a “contributor” post, which is essentially their sneaky wording for editorial. It isn’t a real Forbes article and anyone that knows the Forbes website won’t pay any attention to the article.
When I look at those numbers I think “Apollo was made by 1 dude with some occasional help from another person. Reddit is throwing half its budget and 200+ bodies at its app and site, and it’s a fucking disaster.”
Different goals. The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.
I guarantee you a good chunk of that R&D money is for making ads more profitable and other monetization.
To be fair, the point of Apollo was to also make money. But it was to make money by selling you things that made a nice experience nicer. Reddit makes money by selling you stuff that makes a shitty experience slightly less shitty.
I said it before on Reddit and I will say it again here—
If Reddit has asked me for a premium subscription to use my favourite third-party app, I would have fucking paid.
Just bad business all around
Recently I stumbled on Relay, still going strong with a subscription model (because API fees).
That said, I refuse to return to that platform.
You can patch old third-party apps with ReVanced. That being said, they are unmaintained and will still eventually break.
Yeah, but the Apollo dev didn’t have the huge server costs that Reddit has. I’m not defending Reddit at all, but this is just comparing apples to oranges.
So the reason reddit struggled to develop a decent app is… because of server costs?
Seriously. They still don’t have a way to increase the font size on the default app last I checked. How is such a basic feature STILL lacking?
Im a way, yeah. They clearly they made a shitty app to extract as much value from their users as possible. But my point was that Reddit has significantly higher costs than third party app developers (because they host the content), so the business model that works for third party app developers doesn’t work for them.
Looking at a third party app - made by someone who doesn’t have to bear the costs of running the site and can therefore make decent money on an ad-free experience - and a first party one which does have to recoup those expenses doesn’t really work. The financial models are just fundamentally different.
I don’t say that to defend Reddit. They’re clearly a shitty company headed by shitty people, and I’m sure they could’ve found different ways to make money. But yeah, their financial incentives for making an app are fundamentally different than those of other devs.
The goal of Apollo was to make a good app. The goal of the official reddit app is to show you ads and siphon money off you.
Spot fucking on.
Ever have a good app? Something you like using but it’s by a corporation but that’s ok, because it’s a good app and does what you want? And then they start adding more features to it, and it slows down, and it’s more annoying and it keeps offering services you don’t want, and it changes and it morphs and it becomes a shit app.
Hell I’ve watched Whisk become something I liked using to something worthless now it’s Samsung food… Switched to using CopyMeThat which actually also gets me recipes from sites that you can’t just read the recipes from, and that’s ALL it does (well recipe book/shopping cart/meal planning, which is what it’s designed for.)
I’m just sick of “How do we make more money” instead of just being an app that does what it says. Gaming is going down the same hole, sadly.
What could have been done to increase the valuation higher and maintain goodwill with the community:
- Cut CEO pay by 90%
- Pay mods as employees, think of the GM/guide structure of early mmos where you start as a volunteer for a free sub but can work your way up
- Subscriptions to remove ads
- Push ads in API for third party apps to host your ads, remove for subscribed users
- Profit sharing from ads and subs with top content creators
Just imagine having a website that makes no money, and you get paid so much to run it that if you got a 90% pay cut and quit after a year you’d still be set for life.
Capitalism.
Basically entities flush with wealth do not make their decisions out of a sense of economic survival.
Capitalism is all about brutal survival for the lower classes and for the upstarts without any background.
At the same time capitalism is all about a decision making process that is leisurely, capricious, and forgiving for the aristocratic upper classes.
If the company is sufficiently large (don’t know if reddit qualifies, but my past employers have, so speaking from experience here), their own upper management is robbing the company on the inside every day when they make deals with contractors by taking kickbacks as opposed to what benefits the company. Make no mistake, all the upper management that is sufficiently aristocratic are looking out for their personal interests instead of the company’s. In other words the same mentality of personal gain at all costs that supposedly drives the creation of some of the companies is also their undoing. “Greed is good” capitalism eats itself. Large ultra consolidated/merged corps are every bit as bureaucratic and internally Machiavellian as any government can hope to be. Their very existence is a tax we all pay and we don’t get a vote about how these corporate fiefdoms run both themselves and us.
Reddit at this point is a very important and well backed propaganda tool, the backers can afford to pay their CEO and there is no hurry to make profits, and they have plenty of time and resources for every manner of business mistake.
Is Reddit a crypto?
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It’s crazy. Used to be almost a lifestyle. Now it is just another failed social media project.
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Lemny is cool, but it is kind of a circle jerk. 30-50 year old middle class tech-job left-leaning males are probably 2/3 of most servers atm.
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