This valuation is actually only as of May 31st, released a month later. If we want to see the impact of their shenanigans, we wait another month to see what they value it today.
Reddit burned through their funds raised in two years and aren’t profitable. Protest or not that’s going to drop a valuation. Going public has been mandated, but it’s probably not going to bring the payout investors were hoping for, the market isn’t excited about tech companies that are advertising focused and can’t make a profit.
…and instead of rallying around a sense of shared community (as false as that ultimately may have been) to make an IPO “interesting” to future investors, the reddit royalty decided to sh!t on the userbase like the vessels they are always believed us to be.
Third party apps were always probably going to be killed as they couldn’t monetize those users and it’s likely a large chunk of their heavy users. Reddit’s ad revenue is garbage compared to it’s reported users. They definitely could have tried to be a bit more diplomatic about it though.
yeah, agreed - but this is why I call into question the whole business proposition of “corporate centralized social”. it just reeks a chaotic and disproportionate power imbalance between users (who are both product and producer) and the business interests looking for maximum extracted value.
these structures seem doomed to almost certain failure when the product/producer…
- retains some level of critical thinking
- experiences a black swan event
- has an attractive alternative platform
perhaps reddit execs had already evaluated everything and decided “this is fine”… I am just personally happy to be rid of one more abusive corporate relationship in my life.
FTA:
The updated share value suggests a $5.5 billion valuation for Reddit. […]
[…] currently grappling a revolt from moderators of some popular subreddits over API cost changes, was valued at $10 billion when the social media giant attracted funds in August 2021.
Now just imagine for a moment, the same company in the last 2000s taking a completely different path. Imagine they offered the moderators to become worker-owners and Reddit became a cooperative rather than investor owned.
Imagine how much better the world would have been, and weep for the timeline capitalism just extracted from everyone.
