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.

  • Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social
    121·
    10 months ago

    And what could they use the money to do? How much innovation has there been on Reddit since it was written? Fancier Reddit gold? A shitty redesign? Video hosting that doesn’t work? Image hosting so bad someone had to make totally separate website for it?

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
      28·
      10 months ago

      None. No innovation. Every update to the site has made it worse and less reliable. I could single-handedly code a better Reddit in a few months than that entire team has done in ten years. But they’re not focusing their efforts on UI/UX improvements. They focus all their efforts on tracking, data harvesting, and circumventing the user safety protocols built into web browsers. We view the project as a cool public forum. They view it as a means to riches, and they don’t give a shit if it’s a pleasant experience for the users.

    • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
      23·
      10 months ago

      Well they control the mobile apps now, which is most of the userbase. The redesign is still terrible but nobody has much of a choice about image hosting since it’s built-in.

      The only thing I can really think they “improved” is that the new gold system allows to be paid for your content:

      If you’re eligible for the Contributor Program and your content meets the requirements for monetization, you can receive cash from Reddit for the gold and karma you earn on qualifying contributions.

      But that’s definitely not going to help them be profitable lol

      • Ech@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        10 months ago

        if your content meets requirements for monetization

        “Requirements” being key there. The vast majority of even power users won’t end up getting paid with the system as it stands. If anything, it’s just there for people to give them credit for making it “possible”.

        • survivalmachine@beehaw.org
          3·
          10 months ago

          Which requirements are difficult to meet? The highest hurdles I see is receiving 10 gold in a 12-month period and making sure your content isn’t porn/gore/drugs. I think reddit blows, but this doesn’t seem like difficult-to-obtain goals for somebody trying to make some extra scratch.

          • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
            3·
            10 months ago

            Yeah, I went through a few pages and they don’t seem unattainable. The hardest would probably be living in a country that isn’t included

            • survivalmachine@beehaw.org
              4·
              10 months ago

              Yeah, and while the country thing sucks, it’s at least a quick “yes/no” answer before you even start trying. This isn’t a deceptive lure like roblox, where they entice millions of kids to try to monetize their content, but make it exceptionally hard to actually make a profit or to even cash out (and even if you meet their ridiculous requirements, there is a huge imbalance of exchange rates when converting to and from a real currency to robux).

    • TheFriar@lemm.ee
      2·
      10 months ago

      Look at a the way everything in tech is moving.

      We are in the age of of surveillance capitalism. It will make itself profitable with our data. Maybe identifying people, creating profiles about beliefs and personality, etc.

      What else could they possibly do? It’s proven profitable and that’s what they want.

    • RBG@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      10 months ago

      Well recently more people have been using the official reddit app. No relation to anything going on, by the way, just the app getting better, obviously.