• Pons_Aelius
    74•4 months ago

    They are about 2 years too late.

    The rise in interest rates and the end of easy VC money has swung the dial back to: Companies actually need to generate profit and not just show user growth to be attractive to investors.

    The IPO will not go as spez dreamed for so long.

    • @TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
      42•4 months ago

      They rise in interest rates and the end of easy VC money has swung the dial back to: Companies actually to generate profit and not just show user growth to be attractive to investors.

      Yep, but also, I think spez is done. He’s just cashing out and fuck you etc… etc…

      He’ll catch enough to successfully eject and thats that for him. Reddit will die. But we’ll have survived, and the open web will continue.

      • Pons_Aelius
        26•4 months ago

        Yes, he will cash out but I feel it will only be a fraction of what he hoped to get.

        He will be comfortably rich but to someone who expected to be obscenely rich, he will see it as a failure.

        • TWeaKEnglish
          19•4 months ago

          Serves him right for pissing on Aaron Swartz’s grave. In fact, it’s hardly justice.

          • Pons_Aelius
            16•4 months ago

            it’s hardly justice.

            To quote that great late 20th century philosopher, Terry Pratchett:

            There is no justice in the world, there is Just Us. (and many of us are not nice people.)

      • @proudblond@lemmy.worldEnglish
        20•4 months ago

        I’m not convinced Reddit will die. I think it will continue to limp along in its zombie state. But I kind of wish you were right, just because I’m still a bit mad about it.

            • @davidgro@lemmy.world
              7•4 months ago

              Your chain is missing at least BBSs, slashdot, and fark. My own is missing Usenet and IRC (I played with them, but didn’t spend time there)

            • Pons_Aelius
              4•4 months ago

              Depends, I went from BBSes to slashdot to koro5hin to reddit to kbin and do not feel old.

              To me old-age begins when you feel you are past the time when you can learn/experience something new and/or new tech no longer feels exciting/interesting but scary.

              I have met people in their 80s who have a younger outlook on life than some people in their 40s.

      • Bonehead
        14•4 months ago

        Of course spez is cashing out. That was the whole point of returning as CEO after Ellen Pao was sacrificed to cleanse the site and make it investor friendly. He just wants to cash out more than the $6 million he got the first time.

    • @linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15•4 months ago

      He’ll only get to buy three yachts instead of 5. Seriously, he’s going to have a s’ton of the highest rank shares, all they have to do is hold the lie together long enough to sell.

      • Pons_Aelius
        9•4 months ago

        all they have to do is hold the lie together long enough to sell.

        That last phrase is really doing a lot of heavy lifting. When you own a large chuck of stock in a post IPO company, trying to cash out large ownership stakes has the effect of crashing the price.

        My expectation is that what ever the IPO price is, one year from then (the usual minimum time to be able to sell a stake like spez will have) it will be lucky to be 5% of the launch price.

    • @jol@discuss.tchncs.de
      2•4 months ago

      Not just that but the golden era of social media is probably over. With the advent of free access to powerful AI, user content is about to become hot garbage. And with 30% of the Internet using adblockers, I wouldn’t touch reddit with a long stick.

        • @OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
          17•4 months ago

          Suit yourself, I guess! :-P

          I often up-vote people that disagree with me, most especially when they are right and I am wrong.:-)

          But I can’t stand trolls - even when they speak the truth they do so in such an offensive manner.

          • @thantik@lemmy.worldEnglish
            8•4 months ago

            Speaking in an offensive manner is not trolling. Trolling is low-effort posts designed to elicit a response. Reddit and Lemmy both have a huge problem with everyone thinking that because someone disagrees with them, and they’re not being “nice about it”, that it means they’re a troll.

            That’s not what a troll is. Being nice isn’t a requirement for discussion.

            • @OpenStars@startrek.websiteEnglish
              3•4 months ago

              Upvoting! I have been known to be quite offensive myself, when the situation calls for it. Although I think you are slightly incorrect - what you described seems to me to be more of a “shitpost”:

              a deliberately provocative or off-topic comment posted on social media, typically in order to upset others or distract from the main conversation.

              Shitposting can be great fun, if everyone recognizes it for what it is, e.g. if it is literally in the name of the community, which importantly can be blocked if the user does not want to see it. It seems mostly harmless to me? Well, within reason - it has no place in a community meant for serious discussions, and I routinely block people who do not read the room and interrupt what was intended to be a more thoughtful discussion (typically I have gone through their recent post histories and only do so when it is a repeated pattern, i.e. distinguishing b/t people who never add value to any discussion vs. a one-off comment that happens to be irrelevant) - but in a meme community it can be light-hearted, good-natured fun?

              Whereas trolling absolutely crosses a line, getting into territory of intentionally wanting to cause emotional harm, examples include outright insults (“you are stpupid” (sic) rather than “I believe that you might be missing some facts and here is why…”) and other forms of literal abusiveness. I suppose there are exceptions - like that RoastMe sub where people would literally ask for it - but you know what I mean: consent should matter? Except to them, it does not:-(.

              it just wastes all of our time. I’m not here on Lemmy to engage with babies that need a spanking - or… want one I guess? - I am here to enjoy myself! :-P So I block them, at which point they make new alt accounts to get around all the people blocking them, and the cycle continues. Though if there is an influx of like a hundred thousand of them, even if buried amidst a million non-trolls, it would radically change the very identity of the Fediverse, making it much more like Reddit (gag), and we would lose the ability to have conversations like… well, this one!:-D

              I agree that not everything has to be “nice”, though we do need to presume that the other side is willing to engage respectfully, or else there is no basis for a conversation. On that note, I am guessing that you have not been to Reddit lately - it really is full of actual, full-on trolls there now, after the protests. Ironically the situation is reversed 100% from what it was in the past: instead of the mods blocking the trolls, now the troll-scabs block the former mods who have been booted from their subs:-(.

            • Bleeping LobsterEnglish
              2•4 months ago

              I got banned from a… what are we calling them… sublemmy?.. on here for being ‘aggressively negative’. I voiced my disapproval of a character that I didn’t like in a TV show, which included one F-bomb. Some people on here are way too sensitive.

  • @supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    23•4 months ago

    Can we make an enshittification graphic that you can put a website/product on and track it as it goes through the enshittification cycle? We gotta move Reddit from stage 1 enshittification to stage 2 enshittification (going for an IPO).

    Stage 2 involves a disorienting attempt to portray everything as fine with the website/product when in actuality enshittification is aggressively accelerating.

    • SeedyOne
      8•4 months ago

      That’s a pretty cool idea for a website, tracking the enshittification of major sites and products. I’d read it but I’m sure it’d be a lot of depressing, hard to monetize work for those involved to run.

      • @prongs@lemm.ee
        4•4 months ago

        And I’m sure inevitably, the site will become harder to run as more and more companies enter the shit list. Over time - features will be cut to save effort. List entry will be out sourced. The company itself, of course, will not see the irony. Finally - a new website emerges to track the enshittification of enshittification tracking websites. And the prophecy continues.

  • TWeaKEnglish
    16•4 months ago

    Reddit, which filed confidentially for its IPO in December 2021, is planning to make its public filing in late February, launch its roadshow in early March, and complete the IPO by the end of March, two of the sources said.

    Should be interesting to see people pick apart the filing. I think it’s obvious why they left such a narrow window from reading the filing (which was 2 years ago, before the API change and all the backlash) to the actually offering. However, I don’t think it will be short enough for them to not be held over the fire.

    Just wait, they will be heavily moderating the discussion about the filing on their platform.