Reddit hires its first chief financial officer as it prepares for an IPO | Hacker News Reader

Reddit hires its first chief financial officer as it prepares for an IPO

nytimes.com

69 pointsnwotnagrom97 comments

If/when Reddit IPOs I look forward to the shenanigans /r/wsb and friends will play. Given that reddit primary relies on the free labour of moderators, I can see co-ordinated mod strikes occurring with the purpose of hurting the share price as a way of making reddit hq pay attention.

I suspect r/wsb will run afoul of some not-quite-applicable rule before the S-1 is filed.

Can you expand on what you mean by that?

GP is implying that the admins will find a way to take down WSB if it does in fact ever threaten Reddit's IPO, whether or not any actual rule breaking occurs. Which wouldn't be completely unheard of for Reddit.

Exactly. They've done it before and if the SEC starts asking pointed questions or even a bad NY Times article that threatens the IPO, WSB will be gone super fast.

I agree with what is implied, Reddit is provided quite a bit of cover in this area, they could simply say they did it to prevent possible legal issues that they would be liable for. Of course this does not stop them from using their Discord to effect any action they want.

I am still waiting to see how Congress acts overall to the likes of WSB and trading apps in general. I am betting they will have some wonderful sounding law with all sorts of wording claiming it is to protect the unwitting amateurs while in fact simply protecting their wall street donors from these amateurs upsetting their apple cart.

> wouldn't be completely unheard of

I'd phrase that as "is standard operating procedure", actually.

It's standard operating procedure for admins to take down subs which threaten their IPO? It's standard operating procedure for admins to take down subs? Since there are subs, it clearly isn't. Downvoted for being obviously wrong flamebait. Reddit gets comments on HN like StackOverflow does - "I went there once and something I posted wasn't popular, the whole site is garbage filled with $people_I_hate and the admins are terrible and delete everything!"

How's reddit going to handle 500 mods going awol?

Reddit replaces moderators on popular subs all the time.

There are thousands of people who would accept the position.

Not to mention the supermods who are thinly veiled employees / contractors of Reddit.

Are they truly as fungible as the parent comment suggests? If they are indeed "thinly veiled employees / contractors of Reddit" that would imply some not immediately replaceable value in their work, stemming from informal training, donation of time, tolerance for redditors, etc.

If so, indeed they may strike and indeed they may be in the right demanding some part of an IPO's value.

I doubt this, reddit seems to have embraced the attention wsb has gotten them (see their super bowl ad).

While I can see shenanigans with replacing mods, I don't see them shutting down the subreddit.

>I can see co-ordinated mod strikes occurring with the purpose of hurting the share price as a way of making reddit hq pay attention.

For every mod that goes on strike, many more people will step up to take over.

Most of the mod work in the high volume subs are through automod anyway.

If it comes to Reddit Inc replacing the mods, that will likely be a relatively unpopular move for at least the short term until people forget.

The stock price harm is less from the site disruption but more for continuing the site's reputation as hard to monetise.

In my experience, automod ruins subs. Post something.. get notification.. removed by automod

Depends on how it is used.

There are options beyond removal and a notice.

I for one don't believe a company's politics - public or otherwise - have a significant impact on share prices.

Rich or many people buying and selling though.

Reddit influence is long-only without exception.

I miss the reddit of 15 years ago. Such an exciting place. Can we recreate it?

Small, dominated by techies. Isn't that pretty much what HN has become, minus the porn that was on Reddit from early on? It's hard to argue that HN is still really focused on startups. They get an outsized influence because of who runs it and where it came from, but they're still a small percentage of the content.

Reddit was only founded 15 years ago, but I'm pretty sure HN is actually larger than the reddit of 12 years ago, when I joined.

/u/Deimorz (former Reddit admin, prior to that foudner of r/Games, which was one of the more successful attempts at doing a "same topic but more serious" competitor to a sub that ended up meme filled) is also trying his own competitor at tildes.net for more general purpose. Notably it's not a "free speech zone" like Voat and other attempted alternatives, so shouldn't be full of nazis when more reasonable users are looking for somewhere to migrate to.

> It's hard to argue that HN is still really focused on startups.

I hope so! That was the intention behind its name change in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.

HN feels more like a single subreddit than reddit as a whole. There is far greater cultural diversity on reddit.

Part of the problem is that all of us who have Reddit nostalgia are also 15 years older, largely set in our careers, and oftentimes have families and other demands on our attention.

Reddit was founded at a specific moment in history, and a lot of what made it special was what was going on in that moment of history. It was right when the web became useful and mainstream and it became possible for a few guys to put together a website and change the world. A lot of the excitement of that time period was around "What else is about to change in the near future that we could take advantage of?" The early Reddit userbase was often 20-somethings and a few late teens, right around the age range when peoples' futures are most fluid and eager to jump on the next thing.

There are a bunch of similar exciting developments happening right now, with similar exciting communities. DeFi, drones, self-driving cars, robotics, EVs, a lot of climate tech. Curiously, most of them get dismissed when they're posted on Hacker News, much like how most 40-somethings dismissed Web 2.0 when it happened. Maybe it's more a function of the age than the community or tech.

You’re one of the people on HN whose comments I follow. I’d be curious to hear your opinions on

DeFi: Sounds really interesting but feels like something really niche not like the next Reddit.

Drones: Drones are really cool and programmable. Fully agreed.

Self driving: Potentially transformative in 10-15 years. There’s not much most of us can do to be a part of it. It will be dominated by Tesla, Waymo.

Robotics: The eternal dream. But right now it’s hard to even make a robot that prepares Amazon packages. Might definitely change at some point.

EVs and climate tech: Very important work but it’s hard to get rich quickly off of it. That reduces interest.

DeFi: Very interesting long-term, but the infrastructure isn't there yet - Ethereum (or alternative) needs to scale, and there need to be better ways of representing real-world things on the blockchain. I'd say at least a decade off, and could go the way of the 2000-2005 P2P boom (note though that that boom had some very lasting effects: Bittorrent, Skype & VC, DVCSs like git, and Bitcoin). We'll probably have periodic bubbles and busts until then. May get some help from Fed policy. If it succeeds it will revolutionize everything - the financial sector is 25% of American GDP and our primary export, features a lot of moral hazard and grift, and smart contracts enable some forms of commerce we haven't seen before.

Drones: My 3-year-old will ask me "Daddy can you fly the drone now?" and absolutely loves chasing it. Great toy now, starting to find some industrial uses with insurance/forestry/firefighting/etc. Will absolutely revolutionize warfare when the next war happens.

Self-driving: Another wartime technology. I think this will limp along in niche markets until then, and then explode (no pun intended) when we need to maintain logistics networks under armed threat. Likely to be a cornerstone of post-war transportation networks, but not in the form they are now. Rather than struggle with sensor algorithms, we'll likely build the sensors & coordination into the road infrastructure and ban manual driving.

Robotics: This is like AI in that when it succeeds, it's no longer called "robotics". It's already used very extensively in manufacturing and logistics (have you ever looked up airport baggage handling systems on YouTube?). We aren't going to get general-purpose robots, but we might see a wave of micro-manufacturing appliances a la 3D printing (put in raw materials, get back a product made to your specifications, distribute products digitally) as well as descendants of today's household appliances (we already have this with Roombas, robotic lawn mowers, robotic tractors, etc).

EVs: Will probably go mainstream around 2023-2024. If you're already a top-notch electrical engineer you can likely get very rich on this right now by founding a company and letting a SPAC take you public next year. For the rest of it the excitement will be in buying one and upgrading our solar panels, power wall, power grid to support it.

Climate tech: Will likely ultimately fail in stopping global warming but will invent lots of useful innovations that might be applied to other industries in the future (sort of like how microwave ovens came out of radar and computers came out of artillery guidance). If you have good skills and a long time horizon, the play is to go work for one of these companies, learn everything you can, spend your time researching, and then ride it until it goes bankrupt and then apply the technologies toward something more mundane.

I'd agree that we're not in 2005 now - it feels more like 2002-03, where you can tell that there's interesting stuff going on but nothing's really ready for primetime yet. We had stuff like Friendster, Kazaa, LiveJournal, BaseCamp, then - all precursors to really important stuff, but the specific successes hadn't yet happened.

Drones: Haven't drones already been used in wars? Like I remember a huge furor about drone strikes during the Obama presidency?

Self-driving: Can you elaborate on this a little more? You mean having self driving trucks on supply routes makes it much harder to break supply lines?

EVs: I think this one is already mainstream. Not in the sense that most people already have or are buying EVs but everyone from car manufacturers to bureaucrats are on the train already and it is only a matter of time.

Drones: They have, but this is like how in WW1 the role of aircraft was to spot targets for the army & navy, while in WW2 air power was the decisive factor in the war and the army / surface ships would come mop up after your bombers had flattened the enemy forces. Right now we use drones as support craft for reconnaissance & assassinations. It's likely that the next "big" war will be fought almost entirely between drones & robots and humans will come in afterwards to mop up after one side has a decisive advantage (or get hunted down by a rogue AI gone wild - personally I think that outcome is more sci-fi than real though). Armenia/Azerbaijan gives us a taste but the drones in use there are still largely manually-controlled consumer craft rather than fully autonomous swarms.

Self-driving: Right now, the biggest problem with self-driving car adoption is that when anyone dies at the hands of a self-driving car, there's a huge press outcry and the whole program gets shut down. That calculus changes dramatically if the other side is actively trying to kill you. Then, it becomes a huge advantage to not even send drivers into the war zone, and resupply with automated logistics lines. Instead of becoming an invention that potentially kills people, it becomes an invention that saves lots of people, because the baseline shifts from "nobody ever dies young" to "young people are actively trying to kill each other". It also gives a huge advantage to the side that adopts it, because they can resupply as quickly as they can build materials instead of losing costly human lives in the effort, and the vehicles themselves can often follow evasive routes that wouldn't be practical for a human crew.

Drones: Interesting. But I think the very nature of drone warfare precludes any sort of big war. I think drone warfare, like nuclear warfare becomes an arms race and countries will quickly realize its futility. Adversaries will continue to use more mundane techniques like propaganda, misinformation etc like we have seen in the past decade. Autonomous drones will be useful in guerrilla-style warfare though because of their suitability to reconnaissance.

Drones (like nuclear weapons before them) make war a lot more expensive. I guess only the top 5-7 armies in the world will have the technology and expertise to maintain drones. So a conflict like the one in Iraq will have a swift conclusion, but the calculus among the big nations will remain mostly unchanged IMHO.

Self-driving: I think the biggest problem with self-driving in this scenario is the very moniker "self-driving". But it is very likely there are vehicles being tested today that are programmed to avoid minefields, use sophisticated path planning algorithms to avoid detection, minimize fuel consumption etc. Sort of a jeep-sized roomba that traverses a region instead of your living room.

> Drones: My 3-year-old will ask me "Daddy can you fly the drone now?" and absolutely loves chasing it. Great toy now, starting to find some industrial uses with insurance/forestry/firefighting/etc. Will absolutely revolutionize warfare when the next war happens.

The next war already happened btw. The Azerbaijani government used a large number of Turkish-supplied attack drones (self-destruction drones too iirc) against the Armenian forces.

I find it is constantly being recreated in different subs, though they do tend to get more specific.

Unfortunately, in many small subs that become popular and then become victims of success, the entire lifecycle of Reddit is recapitulated, and not just the fun early days.

Reminds me of the eternal September effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Agree, my time spent in r/worldnews way way back was an influence in building Sqwok, as I wanted a Slack-like public app for discussing the news. There are many options out there these days but I believe there's still room for that vision & actively building it. https://sqwok.im/p/Q4KowEDMcpY9iw

Of course they won't mention how it's the most astroturfed platform on the internet with some of the worst communities.

And some of the best. I've recently started reading /r/peloton and it's really impressive how it remains friendly, fun and well-informed, despite covering a sport that attracts conspiracy theories and accusations (mostly around doping).

Anyone have a recommendation for a reddit clone open source project?

Edit: an open source project where you can quickly roll out your own reddit style, link agg, site.

Lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

How mature would you say the project is (obviously a very subjective question)?

Not quite a clone but a decentralized version: https://getaether.net/ has been slowly improving since it was posted here a while back. Still not a lot of users, I think, but that could easily change with events like this.

Gab? Voat?

lol.

https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes

Tildes will never surpass reddit, as it makes the same capital mistake: try shoehorn multiple communities on the same platform under the same rules. I think the federated alternatives - even though less time tested - will prove better in the long run. Communities can better police their own content, but still be able to interact with other communities through a federation mechanism.

If you don't care much for fédération, Hexbear, a fork of lemmy, is by far the best option I know of, and the one with the most real world use : https://git.chapo.chat/chapo-collective/lemmy-hexbear

I thought Reddit source code was already open source.

I see that people already recommended lemmy, but if you're looking for something closer to old reddit and hacker news I am working on https://github.com/mariusor/go-littr. An example instance is at https://littr.me

Will mods get stock options?

Reddit is no longer a place of free expression and community. The censorship and negative echo chambers there are out of control. Its only going to get worse. R/wsb do your magic here..

Of course it isn't, because the libertarian ideal is impossible on the internet.

Gab / Parler are self-proclaimed bastions of free speech, but they boot left-leaning opinions and have no privacy protection (because they were hacked).

Voat gained popularity when Reddit got rid of the hate subreddits, and it shut down late last year because nobody wants to invest in or advertise on a platform where everything goes.

Sorry for zooming in on your 'censorship' comment, but it's something that just rubs me up the wrong way. No community can do without censorship (or I prefer "content moderation", censorship is mainly used for governments and e.g. journalists; you won't get put in jail for being a prick on the internets) and be sustainable at the same time.

/u/spezymandus is partial only to his own views regarding what content should be permitted to present itself on Reddit to the point of hypocrisy. At the end of the day the only reason that r/wsb and it's 4chanesque shenanigans haven't been banned is because it's onboarded so many new users. But at some point it's going to become as clamped down as all the other subreddits if not thoroughly eviscerated. Especially as they start onboarding advertisers post-IPO. It's goodbye Usenet 2.0, hello New Facebook!

I remember when there was that big leak of celebrity nudes (the Fappening) and the reddit CEO at the time, yishan, posted that they wouldn't take down any of them because "Every man is responsible for his own soul." Then the well-deserved backlash made him backpedal at supersonic speeds.

Anyway, my point is that that incident wasn't even out of the norm for reddit administration. Their standard for objectionable content is based on whether something gets negative media attention. Spez is nothing new.

While that's true, at some point, the rule changes went from reactive to to peremptory. Now one can be banned just for upvoting content that is considered "rule-breaking". The crime is no longer posting the wrong content, it's expressing the wrong thoughts/reactions. I wouldn't be surprised if, in the near future, reddit started ip-blocking users based on what sites they linked from or started using an Elo-based profile rating system to remove profiles or whole subreddits en masse.

I agree, one of the worse offenders that I've found is r/DebateCommunism. That subreddit is strangely similar to the now defunct r/theDonald and I would go as far as calling it a brainwashing academy for the débil mind.

You can't have a "community" at the size reddit has grown to.

It has always been like this, since about when it stopped being a little community for programmers. r/politics, for example, has never been any better than it is currently.

I really hate what Reddit has become, so I will probably buy the IPO. That way if they are successful, I won't feel as bad since at least I made money from it. And if they fail, I won't feel bad about losing money since I get to see something ugly get destroyed.

Nothing in this post constitutes professional and/or financial advice.

If Reddit successfully executes its plan [1] to expand its tokenized community points project to its whole site, I believe its market valuation could potentially rival the FAANGs'.

The market caps of the existing community tokens are as follows:

/r/EthTrader - $1.6 million https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/donut

/r/CryptoCurrency - $19.75 million https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/moon

/r/FortNiteBR - $5 million (based on expected issuance of 250 million BRICK tokens) https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/brick

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/l6c3kx/reddit_ann...

Advertisers HATE unmoderated user-generated content. The UGC on Reddit is probably the most extreme for any mainstream website. How are they going to make money? No advertisers will touch them in the current state.

But advertisers do touch them? Everytime I go on reddit I see dozens of ads.

Advertisers on Reddit are small boutique businesses. Fortune 500 type companies won't touch them.

To test this out, I fired up reddit.com in a private browsing session. The first four ads I saw were: a Windows 10 HP laptop, an AAA game from Square Enix, coronavirus messaging from the UK government, and a small indie game.

I don't think what you're saying is true at all.

I don't either. My theory is people grew up and now have AD influence.

Companies willing to run ADS in a non curated venue get traction the others do not.

People talking freely will say thing the company may not like. That is no big, unless they make it so.

They will also say a lot of other things, including stuff the company likes.

And that is where the traction comes from.

The Internet natives hate corporate bland and prefer real discussion.

I've seen a lot of Accenture adverts.

I checked on a computer with no ad blocker, and I see adverts from the UK Government for their job seeking help site, SquareSpace[1], Toyota[2], Sky[3], HP / Microsoft, BT[4]. You signed up a new account here to post politically divisive and trolling views on Reddit, apparently based on fantasy.

[1] Squarespace isn't in the Fortune 500 because they're 575th, so it's close - https://fortune.com/company/square/fortune500/

[2] Toyota isn't in the Fortune 500, but they're 10th in the Fortune Global 500 - https://fortune.com/company/toyota-motor/global500/

[3] BSkyB is not in the Fortune 500 size, but would be about 180th by revenue if it was.

[4] British Telecom, which is not in the Fortune 500, but would be about 100th by revenue if it was.

> Advertisers HATE unmoderated user-generated content.

Why?

Is it because if the public sees their ad next to some gross content they'll do boycotts?

I'm curious if anyone has numbers available to see the extent to which businesses are impacted by all these "don't buy X" 'cause they advertised on Y and I don't like Y.

Great. I like reddit.

https://archive.is/CUSnI

Anyone have a good run-down of how Reddit makes money? (Or does it?)

Reddit Gold and Advertising

Ads and Reddit gold (its own currency). I think that various membership related monetization is the future of Reddit and far more stable than ads. Just look at what Twitch is doing with subscriptions, bits, emotes and donations.

It used to be just Ads and Reddit Gold. Now it's mostly investment funding from China (via Tenecent) and the Middle East.

Ads and reddit coins afaik.

Coins can be used to buy either their premium subscription (no ads and a few other things) or can be used to "award" posts/comments. You can select which award you want to give, there are multiple that are by reddit and there are awards that are subreddit specific. An award can also give the awardee some coins (e.g. you pay 200 coins and the awardee gets 100).

Would be interested to see the numbers. Assuming no one has ever seen these?

Would definitely love to see the numbers, but I suspect Tencent is paying their bills mostly

Yeah, my understanding is they were pretty much breaking even after the original introduction of gold when they had a skeleton crew of ops people, a ceo and a couple of backroom staff. They've massively expanded and even yishan forced the company to SF since then, so I'm pretty sure there's no way the extra award types have kept up with that expenditure.

Like I think Reddit of ~2015 was a relatively sustainable lifestyle business, but the traffic numbers were way higher than that so there's the big push to turn it into another facebook/twitter.

ouch, they'll probably have their pornhub moment at some point when credit card companies will notice that they have a lot of unmoderated adult UGC content.

That's a massive risk for their business. My guess is that they are going to get rid of the nsfw subreddits like tumblr did.

If they file to go public, they'll have to provide information on how and how much money they make. It'll be interesting to see, because on the one side the public opinion on the awards is pretty bad, but on the other they are being handed out left and right often enough.

Maybe it's one of those whale markets like with in-app purchases, where <2% of the users are responsible for >80% of income.

That said, Reddit has also been giving out free awards that users can hand out, probably to try and get them hooked into the award system.

I know some redditors who buy packs and hand them out fairly regularly.

> public opinion on the awards is pretty bad

Huh, I haven't seen that. Do you have any examples? Everything I've seen seems to indicate that most people are at least vaguely entertained by awards, while acknowledging that they're pretty frivolous.

But yeah, I would definitely expect it would be a whale market.

Most startups make their money selling stock.

A company that is nowhere near being profitable (on top of virtually no cash flow) is going public?

That seems extremely common. For a stretch there every tech S1 I saw said "we don't make money, we've never made money, we have no idea how we're going to make money in the future".

I recommend shorting it. Reddit today is an absolute ghetto compared to 5 years ago. All of the interesting content and free thinking users have been banned.

Which communities do you mean?

I don't think he's talking about a specific subreddit, but rather reddit as a whole. I tend to agree, but I don't see how that hurts advertisers.

IIRC you used to very rarely see actual celebrities in the ama subreddit because it was a weird place where they'd ask you how many toddlers you thought you could fight at once, or maybe someone would get accused of trying to bang a highschooler. Now it's just your standard softball interview space where you go plug a movie, someone asks you what it was like to work with (other famous person), and then you're off to go do the exact same thing on kimmel.

It's advertiser friendly but it's about as exciting as a bowl of oatmeal and as thought provoking as the number eight. The only reason people stick around on reddit is because they're addicted to the skinner box content feed.

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