Reddit

Reddit kind of anticipates this critique in its investor docs, and argues that it didn't really start operating as a serious business until 2018 when it finally started "meaningful monetization efforts" — that is, trying to make money for real.

But that's still six years ago. What has Reddit been doing since then?

One big, obvious answer: It has been hiring a lot of engineers and spending a lot of money on their salaries...

...What am I missing? I asked Reddit comms for comment but they declined, citing the company's quiet period before the IPO.

Internet Archive capture

Sure, spez, tell us again how reddit's just never managed to make a profit ...

Reddit made an initial public offering filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday ahead of its highly-anticipated stock market debut.

The social network plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “RDDT.” Its listing – expected in March – would be the largest IPO by a social media company since Pinterest went public in 2019.

How social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit

The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined, Reddit said in a statement.

The IPO filing revealed that Reddit sustained $90.8m in losses in 2023, as its revenue grew by roughly 21%. The business estimated that its US average revenue per user or ARPU, was $3.42 for the last quarter of 2023 – a decrease of 2% year over year...

Hello, my name is loaExMachina and I'm a redditor.

Jk, I've almost completely stopped browsing reddit, tho so far I hadn't committed to deleting my account, because all I've written was of such high quality that it'd be the worst loss of wisdom since the library of Alexandria burnt down. But now that I saw the deal they cut to train the Google AI on their content, I'm thinking "better erase it than let it fall in the hands of evil."

I recall seing on reddit many comments replaced by something about moving to lemmy and how much better it was, apparently some software had been used to bulk-edit all of the accounts content into this. Is it possible to learn that power ?

No API required. Kinda slow, but just leave it running overnight if you have a lot. Make sure you run it from https://old.reddit.com/u/me/overview

However, I will keep you guys around, for now ...

[...] a dearth of profit this late into its existence portends the lack of a real business model, suggesting it’s still not ready for public company life.

Interestingly, Narwhal remained open ahead of Narwhal 2's release without users having to pay anything. I asked Harrison in June how that was possible, but he said he couldn't explain due to a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with Reddit. I asked again for this story, and Harrison said he couldn't provide full details but noted, "Reddit was willing to work with me so that I could transition the app to subscriptions in a reasonable timeframe, especially considering it's not my full-time job."

A group of scammers is retaliating against me for exposing them and the Reddit admins and legal department completely ignore it.

I consulted with lawyers who told me that my only option is to spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to pursue each individual reddit account that's doing it.

Though Reddit's leadership claims to be 'leaning into its humanity,' it seems the company is more committed to leaving humanity in the dark.

Reddit promised that it would maintain a free-tier API, but researchers and moderators repeatedly stressed that the new access was too limited and would cut off many tools, projects, and archives that their work depended on. Finally, Reddit’s olive branch came in the form of an online application for moderators and researchers to request increased access to the API and (for moderators only) access to Reddit archives that the updates took offline.

The mistake seemed to have taught Huffman that ignoring the needs of communities that the platform had long relied on posed a greater risk than benefit to the profitability of the company in the long run. Yet six months later, many of us working in public interest research fields have heard nothing back from Reddit in response to our applications, and key archives of historical data remain inaccessible to researchers.

Can you guess what it is?

It's mentioned in this really good Verge article about SEO. I don't think it's a good sign for Reddit to just allow such blatant spam and makes me think how much subtler spam is out there too.

I've personally noticed more a few times in old threads you'll find a comment made months later that's recommending a product.

Year-end recap from The Guardian.

1. mobile. avoid using the main reddit app fatbird and atom are still working and free but relay is paid and still also works. and mabye joey.

2. computers. avoid using new.reddit.com, use libreddit when possible but if unable to use libreddit use old.reddit.com with ublock or host your own libreddit instance

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