Reddit seeks to launch IPO in March | Hacker News Reader

Reddit seeks to launch IPO in March

reuters.com

32 pointsmarban30 comments

this is not a great time to IPO at all. At all.

Additionally, Reddit equity is a seedy investment in the very best of market enviroments. Reddits content AND audience is the antithesis of what makes a user base valuable for advertisers. Piracy, NSFW, tech-savy enough to block ads, notoriously stingy etc. pp. Its user base also has a long history of revolting against any sort of attempt to change this set of facts.

Reddit sharply declined in quality over the past years. the neverending attempts to change its nature, in an attempt of ad-friendly sanitation; executed with unrivalled heavy-handedness, nipped any chance of revival in the bud. This is in addition to the feefdom-ness of moderators and a long history of mismanagement by spez himself. Sometimes mismanagement as in censorship. I finally gave up on making myself miserable with Reddit and its echochambers on a daily basis after they priced their APIs to death. That is one stupid decision on a long list of similarly misguided attempts at trying to sweeten the rancid Reddit equity deal.

Reminder that volunteering to moderate a site, on its way to a IPO, is a "community service" to the community...Of shareholders...

"Do you get paid for being a moderator on Reddit?" - https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/14345mi/...

> Its user base also has a long history of revolting

The Reddit userbase is consistently revolting.

revolts

The Reddit recommendation algorithm is appallingly bad (non existent or negative value), with zero insight into who I am as a person (yet).

Their "don't show posts like this" button does nothing, I believe.

If I click into a subreddit out of interest, decide it isn't for me and mute the subreddit: Reddit thinks I like the muted subreddit and suggests similar. In the last 6 months, after turning on recommendations out of interest:

- I have muted ~100 sports subreddits (I do not like watching sport, reddit! Please hear me, please take this information for free!)

- I have muted ~30 soccer subreddits.

- I have muted ~30 Aussie rules subreddits.

- I have muted ~20 pop subreddits, ~10 death metal subreddits.

- I have muted ~30 celebrity-person subreddits.

- I have muted ~30 "let's laugh at this unfortunate person" subreddits.

- I have muted ~10 outwardly racist subreddits.

- I have muted ~10 "let's be so frugal as to not enjoy life / here's some online work for <$5/hr" subreddits.

But still, next week reddit will try to get me to sub to r/astonvilla or something.

If I accidentally click on something though, I won't hear the end of it.

I have no faith in reddit ever being turned around. The data may be worth something. But the codebase is a liability in every sense of the word, not an asset. Neither new nor old.reddit are salvageable at this point. Perhaps they have some valuable internal tools. I wouldn't bet money on it.

I'm sure their engineers are talented, but their bosses have blindfolded, handcuffed and toxified them. I have seen nothing of value given by them to the community. I have seen nothing but leaching, dark patterns, bugs, memory problems, jittering, unethical business models and poor Personnel choices.

Maybe I've missed something and I have a very unfair lens here.

The IP is worth nothing. The data will not be used for anything good. Deleting comments etc. will, of course, just be a boolean/flag column rather than true row deletion.

Am I unfair or mistaken? And am I incorrect in saying 'The IPO will do nothing of good for consumers or the industry'?.

Not so much that you’ve missed something or are mistaken, but Reddit is likely promoting those subs because they’re some of the only active high quality (I.e. not bots/astroturfing) ones left.

Not going to go through every example you gave, but the specific sport and team subreddits represent live and ongoing content rather than reposts from a decade ago, with many fans, strong communities, and nowhere else really to go. Consider the decline of traditional, non-steaming live TV networks, where at least here in the US, 98/100 of the top rated events people are still watching the old fashioned way are sports. Same thing.

I agree that's a big part of it.

Although to play devil's advocate a little: There are plenty of great subreddits that I had to find on my own that are thriving. Smaller subreddits, but I suggest that's partly because the people that would be interested in them aren't offered them, so it's a self fulfilling prophecy to some extent.

> great subreddits [...] that are thriving

The issue is, however, that the managers of that community, the ones that make it thrive, have basically no comeback if reddit decides to arbitrarily step in and alter how it's run, which has been done many many times with the admins clearly not operating in a good faith manner.

Subreddit mods are told 'add more mods' and they add more mods. They're then told 'no, add some of _these_ mods.' The mods that are added then immediately go full wrecker and destroy the community.

Alternatively, subreddit mods are told 'you have too many unanswered modqueue messages' - they reply in public 'we have no unanswered modqueue messages' - reddit replies by banning them.

Seen it happen many times. Not a viable platform. The admins simply enjoy fucking with the userbase too much. The contempt they have for the users is so obvious.

> Bouts of market volatility that shut down the IPO market for much of the last two years also contributed to it delaying its plans.

Also probably the API changes and the related mass exodus briefly mentioned two paragraphs later.

Yeah, I'd say about half the posts I find via google are deleted, it really is a shell of its former self.

Aside from recent missteps, I think Discord took a lot their user base/traffic.

I have noticed a serious decline in the quality and quantity of good posts to the front page since the API changes; I wonder if that's noticiable from the internal numbers, or if the remaining people are engaging with the system in a more monetisable fashion and so it doesn't matter.

I'm slowly using it less and less; don't think that will change.

The Guardian's recent follow-up suggests it's not something they track at all:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/30/reddit-mo...

> While traffic has not changed substantially, many users report the quality of content and the kinds of posts that are surfaced on user homepages now seem different. RamsesThePigeon said the content on some of Reddit’s most-followed pages, which he moderates, had “gone sharply downhill”.

>Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota who has studied Reddit for years, echoed these sentiments.

>“A lot of people who made Reddit a place where people wanted to be are not there any more, and a lot of high-quality content that I went to Reddit for is gone,” she said. “There has been a noticeable decline in the quality of content, both in terms of what is posted and what people talk about.”

>In response to such critiques, Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”.

Anecdotally, while I no longer visit the site directly I do maintain an RSS feed to the front page to keep abreast of big stories. It has become absolutely lousy with reposts, rehosted TikToks, and Facebook-tier engagement bait (often using a title in the form of a question) that's clearly trying to exploit their new "contributor program". My sense is the bottom is falling out of their organic content creation base and they're leaning on repost bots (including reposted comments) and junky incentivized posting to hold their apparent traffic up long enough to IPO.

Same here. I visit it once a day skim a screenful or two and that's it. No comments, no up/down arrows. If they measure more than just pageviews it's not to count for much.

part of reddits failure IMO is the way in which shadow banning is used to encourage groupthink.

Its amazing how over the past 12-13 years Reddit feels like it has changed from random site you could get quite different and often difficult opinions about a matter which would challenge you, to now where you get blocked by users (not because of harassment, but just differing opinions), banned on subreddits (because you just don't agree with an often child like simplification/ narrative), mass organised down voting( which leads to further shadow banning across Reddit).

All these things have turned it into a playground of school bullies, and those who virtue signal seeking karma.

Then again, it could always have been that, and I just grew out of it.

> Then again, it could always have been that, and I just grew out of it.

Nah, reddit really did change dramatically. The last reddit account I had got a site wide ban, I commented on some post I saw on /r/all which had a "from the river to the sea" flair with "Wow reddit admins really letting anti semitisim run wild? That's insane". First got banned by that sub with some toxic remark and then a site wide ban for "moderator harrasment", all while I was asleep. That _finally_ pushed me to no longer visit reddit. A few days later that subreddit got geoblocked in germany for that exact flair.

And I agree with your reading that these people are just bullies, ever since I've started viewing them as that I've finally started to understand their weird behaviour a bit better.

I don't think you can blame this on Reddit alone, as basically all online spaces (and sadly, some offline spaces too) have become incredibly toxic in that they constantly push divisive topics even when many participants would much rather avoid them. It happens even here on HN (covid, twitter, Israel/Palestine) and definitely on Twitter, in any news org's comment section, etc.

The thing that changes is often the exact flavour of the groupthink, but even on Reddit itself, this depends heavily on the subreddit. r/worldnews, for example, skews mostly pro-Israel and is also one of the larger subs.

Isn't r/worldnews the one that Ghislaine Maxwell moderated for a long time? That makes me wonder where a lot of the "groupthink" really originates.

My point is simply that groupthink can vary a lot, from Pro-Israel to Pro-Palestine - it's just a hugely polarising topic.

maxwellhill hasn't posted in over 3 1/2 years...

Yeah but imagine who the other mods are.

To this day I still don't know what I was shadowbanned for. It got randomly removed a few months later.

And it's ridiculous when you make a very high effort long post but then get the whole thing hidden because of the use of retard. Without any indication that it's happening.

You can still find little subcommunities with interesting individuals and subject matter experts. Any default sub is entirely worthless.

You still have to share those communities with the same people who make default subs worthless. The all time low I've ever seen is a post about a very influential person in the modular music space coming out as trans and the top comment being someone grandstanding about how the community was very toxic, meanwhile there were 0 toxic comments in the thread (except that one). Only below that were comments celebrating her achievements and supporting her.

Reddit is perhaps the web's best example of enshittification. I've never seen such a level of self-sabotage before as seen with the old -> new reddit UX change. That is compounded by the growing dominance of state and corporate manipulation, now made all the easier by generative AI. This amounts to extremely stiff headwinds for reddit. I wouldn't touch that investment with a 10-foot pole. It's just a tottering corpse waiting to keel over.

At this point, Reddit is valuable as an astroturfing platform. If Reddit manages to get all those “social media marketers” to give them money, they might turn a profit.

> Reddit is perhaps the web's best example of enshittification. I've never seen such a level of self-sabotage before as seen with the old -> new reddit UX change

Browsing (new) reddit on a phone (or at least Safari on my device) is truly incredible:

- On first page load, the whole screen is obstructed by an obnoxious inducement to download the app.

- On subsequent page loads, a similar modal nags me to log in with a Google account.

- Routing is simply broken. Pressing back or refreshing a page rarely gets the desired effect.

- Most interactive UI elements – the dropdowns that sort posts, embedded video players, image galleries, expand/collapse toggles – either don't work at all, or have major visual bugs.

- Most times I view a post, comment vote counts are broken, showing 1 on every comment.

That's aside from the actual visual design (which I find terrible) and the state of Reddit's front page and communities, which (here echoing most other commenters here) seem more and more dominated by stupid, inflammatory political trash and other crap. This may be overdramatic, but seeing changes Reddit has made in the lead up to this IPO (and knowing how representative these changes are of general enshittification trends) have made me demoralized and almost ashamed to be a web developer.

Mostly I keep using it because I enjoy r/nba. Not exactly highbrow stuff, and not really exempt from the general Reddit community rot, but still mostly a fun way to follow the news of the NBA and share in the excitement of its goings on. I do wish there was a good alternative to it.

The way it developed is really sad. The core product is so good I still go there but it feels like they're actively trying to make everything as bad and slow as possible.

They want you to use their app so they can spy on you more intrusively. They obviously know they've been making their website bad. They've put a lot of effort into it.

> Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting "up" or "down" on the content posted by other members.

It really is a bizarre mechanic. We are so used to this that it's funny to see it described in this terms, with quotes.

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