Reddit Falls Short of Ad Growth Targets Ahead of Likely 2024 IPO

Well shucks, all they did was drive out their most active content makers and cut themselves off from hundreds of thousands of dollars in free moderation labor. Who could possibly have seen this coming?
- Don't be fooled. Most went back.
  
  Quantity is not quality.
  
  I was active nearly every day for 13 years, and I didn’t return. Granted, I don’t come here much either, but what Reddit did disgusted me too much.
  
  Did they? I had one of the top non-porn accounts actually run by a person (most high karma accounts use bots, I didn't out of ironic laziness) and I haven't posted or commented since whenever Day 0 was for rif is fun. I've been back a couple times for very specific things but not logged in or participating in any active way. Of course, I'm just one (high karma) data point, but I really don't think I'm unique in this. I also have no real desire to contribute to Reddit again in the future. Getting off of it has been pretty nice.
  Look, it's not that people aren't still posting, the site obviously still has content, but it really is just "content." The quality of discussion I've seen has gone down pretty steep. Modding appears to be almost nonexistent in big subs or very agenda-driven otherwise. I think a lot of contributors who treated Reddit like old school forums have left and it's slowly turning into a weird combo of Facebook and 4chan if that makes sense. If that's what the userbase wants, go for it, I guess. But that's not my jam.
  
  A lot of search results still take me to Reddit. It is still a source of knowledge.
  
  I'll be honest. I want to believe in the Fediverse and Lemmy, really really hard.
  It's ideals (rather, the gestalt of the best of what everyone says is the best of Federation) appeals strongly.
  But sometimes, it's instance after instance of complaining about this or that. Double points when it's all reddit complaining.
  I dunno if being a heavy content creator necessitates an air of misguided superiority but there's no more nuance here than anywhere else, and the content can't seem to form precisely because everyone decides to take their toys away and do their own thing at the smallest provocation.
  I don't use them on my phone because fuck their app, but I've found no choice but to join up with an alias and as much extensions to make their job harder as Firefox allows, just to have genuine discussions on hyper specific topics from a PC.
  
  As much as I hate to admit it, I’m considering it too - not instead, but also. I haven’t been back since Apollo died but Lemmy just doesn’t have the diversity of interests and niche communities yet. It feels really one dimensional sometimes.
  
  But after cementing lemmy as a viable alternative. I actually find fun content on lemmy. Reddit feed for me ends up turning into a left vs right garbage.
  
  When I’ve gone back for a look I’ve found just the opposite. It’s just bots and trolls.
  
  What's your basis for this statement? Any evidence to back it up?
  
  But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That's devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.
  
  I go back for a couple niche communities that haven’t escaped yet. And occasional search results for advice, but that tends to be 3-5+ years old on average.
  
  Never going back.
- What I've noticed is it became way more toxic over there since the API changes
  I still scurry over occasionally (a lot of communities didn't move over) but not nearly as much as I used to
  
  Same. It runs so badly now, and enough moderators left or cut back that it is not the same site it was at all. Some communities are still intact, but I've begun to see lemmy and even Mastodon results in searches alongside reddit. It's going to take a while to see if reddit can recover (it'll take some humility and leadership from the top which seems unlikely) or die slowly then all at once. Remember digg, etc? The internet is fickle and for every Facebook there are a hundred friendsters.
  
  Ironically way more bot now
  
  The only sub I still go there for is /r/zerocarb (a low carb diet sub), and that's now mostly deleted comments and posts. With the moderation tools unavailable on mobile the mods have made automod very strict. Heaven help a person new to the diet, they'll have a hard time asking their questions
  
  I still occasionally browse the smaller subs when I need help on things like /r/unraid.
- This became an instant classic lol, do we know who the artist is?
- That was one of the reasons they killed the api: to support ad growth. Unfortunately they failed to realize the combination of ad-blocking browsers and users just quitting the site from losing client access means they were never going to hit pre-IPO revenue targets.
  Had they instead focused on affordable API pricing and driving subscriber revenues up, they would have exceeded revenue targets.
  source: I was in a somewhat similar position (not quite the same, no third party client), but chose different and found myself making more subscription revenue than ad revenue thanks to a viewer base more than happy to pay more.
- Do you have any data to support that? My feeling is that not much changed after that. I feel like there is business as usual there. At least when I talk to my peers.
  
  Subs I followed (and still rarely visit) became much harsher with moderation, to the point of being very difficult for new visitors to use; in a sub that is mostly for helping people adopt a very low carb diet
  
  Some communities were unaffected. Some are still shut down. Some replaced mods who wouldn't play by spez's rules.
  I'm not sure what the data would look like or how one would obtain it. Number of active moderators per day? Moderator satisfaction survey? Change in posting habits of top 1% posters?
  I am speaking purely anecdotally from communities I know that shut down entirely and moderators who left. I have no way to estimate the scale of the exodus.

Reddit's value as a social media platform drops as it's value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that's was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.
Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.
In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.
- Yes, I agree. In the end, Reddit lives off its reputation, just like every social media platform. Seriously, is there an effect that when you're long enough the CEO of a company, you begin making decisions where it is obvious that they will negatively impact the user base and thus long-term survivability of a company? Is there a term for that?
  
  I imagine your priorities become different.
  You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you're one of them.
  Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don't understand because they aren't privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they're probably more understanding than your users who don't have a lot of stake in these choices.
  Then your platform grows and it's not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It's open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.
  Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, "You know what? Fuck em. I'm a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren't even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly."
  I assume at that point you're just trying to cash out. And you've listened to the MBAs for long enough that you're thinking like them now. It's even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don't understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.
  I'm not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.
  
  Sounds like Enshittification.
  
  You mean hubris?
- When having a bacon and egg breakfast the hen participants the pig is committed.
  
  You had me at bacon...
- I deleted my reddit account and joined lemmy during the subreddit blackout, but there's still a few authors I follow on reddit. Most I've followed to other sites, and just recently one was suspended for what sounds like a fuck up on reddit's end.
  Reddit lost most of their quality content creators and I can't see the few remaining staying long term.
- I reached the same conclusion and posted it to reddit over a decade ago, asking people to try to come up with a better solution, long before I even knew open source software was a thing.
  Well, took 15 years, but lemmy exists now so hooray!
- Honestly feels like a scam for rich people. Spez just has to convince some suckers that Reddit would be profitable as he cashes out. Then they're left with a dead platform as they kill it with ads and astroturfing.
  This is honestly what I feel like most businesses are these days, just scams to convince other rich people to invest, so they can cash out early on. Basically the same stuff all the crypto currencies were doing.
- as its* value to advertisers rises

- It's kinda funny on Reddit, you would have had to pay for your picture comment. I'm happy to donate to lemmy, but putting features like this behind paywalls is silly.
  
  You have to pay to post pics? When did that happen?
  
  I will say, though, anything that disincentives people to spam useless images and gifs in the comments, kind of like the next comment down, has its merits.
  If there's one thing I miss about Reddit, it's that there was a lot less of this Discord-esc image spam over there than there is over here
  
  Dear fucking god, THAT explains why I couldn't do that.
  Its always the same with online services/platforms looking to make money. Offer a free or cheap online service/platform, then advertisements, then more advertisements, then start removing features and hiding them behind paywalls, then more advertisements, then death.
  Or, like Facebook and Insta, you get so big that the world itself warps around your platform because no one can remember the before times.
  
  Sounds very familiar. I think I’ve heard pretty much the same thing before when discussing paying for streaming services as opposed to sailing the high seas.

Anyone else posted this yet?
- Nope and I really wish nobody had still.
- This reminds me... we need an "I'm sorry Garfield" community on Lemmy.
  
  You mean "I'm sorry John"?
  
  Be the change you want to see in the world, TacoButtPlug.
  
  He took one for the community with spez, I’m surprised there isn’t one yet. Guess you can have the honors, TacoButtPlug.
  
  !imsorryjon@lemmy.world seems to exist
  Edit: not exactly active, though
- why does garfield have preposterously large bazongas
  
  Too much lasagna.
  
  You spelled "magnificently" wrong.
  
  The origin story:
  https://nitter.net/silkentine/status/1406050689009262600
  
  basagnas
- Does this represent some higher meaning or is it just Garfield fucking spez?
  
  Yes
  
  Why not both?
- What a terrible day to have eyes
- Looks like someone's got a case of the Mondays
- Looks like yours went up first lol, but as long as it’s up. 🫡
- So many questions about this
  
  It’s referencing this meme.

Weren’t these assholes supposed to IPO like 6 months ago? lol
- They were totally lined up to IPO. I think somebody told him to go all musk on it. I'm still not exactly sure how taking a big fat shit on the user communities face was supposed to impress the investors.

Well yeah, I'm probably not the only daily active user who stopped visiting all together... after 10+ years of daily active use. They brought this on themselves.
- Same, but only a few years user. Sync for lemmy is so much better.
  
  I loved Sync for Reddit as an app. But I already was seeing Reddit go downhill even before they killed the apps, that just sealed the deal for me. I was a digg refugee so sadly I've been through this before already.

Came from using it daily to only going there only when google forces me to use it
Many of such cases I assume
- Me too. It was the constant popups making me download their app that did it for me.
  
  tHiS cOmmUnIty MiGhT hAvE sEnSiTiVe CONTENT, dOwNlOaD OuR ApP pLeAsE!

Nothing to celebrate.
Reddit revenue is still up, just not as much as they had hoped.
- That's still enough to tank an IPO.
  
  Yep, in the face of the infinite growth monster, anything other than exceeding expectations is seen as a failure
  
  Yup it's all about expected growth.
  
  Can you buy puts on an IPO?
- Reddit, as a concept, can't make more money without destroying it's value. The more advertising is injected into it, the less useful it becomes, and the less people will want to use it.
  So yes, it's up, but they've hurt themselves drastically to get it up by hurting so much of Reddit's usefulness, and even then, they fell short. People who remained are already low on patience with it.
  To drive it even higher, they will have to cripple it even more.
  It's possible to make money with Reddit while leaving it unmolested, but it's not possible to make ALL the money that way. Investors want ALL the money.

Nothing says you care to advertisers like single handedly blowing up your website by cutting off 25% or more of its userbase.
- They feel like they get shorted because many of those users don't contribute to ad revenue from 3rd party apps but instead of improving their app to lure users in they instead tell those users to fuck off.
  A user is a user, even if they don't contribute directly to ad revenue they contribute content to make the site more alluring for those who will contribute to ad revenue. As well they help spread the word about reddit to those who don't use it regularly yet by sharing that content outside of reddit.
  They were pretty short sighted by doing what they did.
  
  It's just many power users and mods were power users and mods thanks to tools in these apps, and Reddit still didn't provide anything comparable. Many small communities I still care about have a lot less posts if they don't have bots. It's not like Fediverse won Reddit, but something changed in them. NSFW OC subs are still good, but idk if they make the image spez wants from that platfom. The only thing we def should do is to stay online and be welcome for stray redditors to join.
  
  I would have been happy to pay to get API access for 3rd party apps on my account. Maybe 1 or 2 dollars per account and month would have been reasonable to cover the costs without ad revenue. Double it to please greedy shareholders.
  Instead they asked for such ludicrous amounts from 3rd party developers, basically telling them to fuck off.
  Either they were mad for control or got greedy over their „golden data“ for AI training. Or both. In any case, they never were interested in finding a user friendly solution so fuck them.
  
  The phrase "cutting off your nose to spite your face" comes to mind.
  
  Some app dev mentioned they wanted to work with them to introduce ads that Reddit would have made profit from in the free version of the app and it's Reddit that said "Nah it's ok"...
- Do you have a citation on that 25% figure?
  
  Source: my bias

- Critical hit to my self esteem.
  
  Ya do realize that internet access is pretty much universal, dudes well within the acceptable posting amout id expect. It aint 20010 no more, everyone has a pocket computer and can do it damn near everywhere. Fuck the mountains near me are now scattershot on signal rather than completely worthless like they were back in 2014.

Fuck spez

Let's for a second take stock of what's happening here.
The ad revenue is falling short of the projected prediction of what it was supposed to be. As in the profit from ad revenue did not reach that arbitrary number.
Reddit is still grossly profitable.
This is the same kind of headline that says Facebook lost 11 bagillion dollars but in reality they didn't lose a dime they just didn't make as much as they wanted to.

We did it, Lemmy!

Remember, the reason I ditched Reddit wasn't the ads per se, it was the constant data selling, and the official app just getting worse and worse with unwanted "features" pushed on everyone. They kept getting greedier and greedier so when they disabled 3rd party apps I ditched Reddit.
- It seems they also recently started requiring you to login if it notices you are on VPN. At least for me it's being doing that recently. And it seems they use browser fingerprinting, which tracks with the data selling.
  
  Yep. I tried to lookup something on it yesterday and I had my VPN on. Wouldn't let me onto the site unless I logged in, when I turned the VPN off it let me onto the site ok. So glad I don't use it often. The only times I check Reddit is for info for Kodi add-ons and old stuff, in the case of yesterday it was about a TV.
  
  Not on old thankfully. Although who knows how much longer it'll be around
- Same
- fatbird still exists
- I mainly lurked on the art and fanfic forums, and considered getting an account when I had the time/had created something worth sharing on there. But when I learned about the disabling of apps to improve accessibility...I started looking for alternatives.
  Plus, I don't like the idea of the karma system on there. Supposedly, it reduces the number of trolls and low effort posts, but I've seen it cause people to post ragebait to karma farm on subreddits that reward you with upvotes for making up outrageous stories. I've also seen "debate" subreddits where people downvote people who make good points, but disagree with. Then those people leave, not wanting to be punished on other subreddits that require a high amount of karma to post, leading to "debate" subreddits that are laughably one-sided.
  
  I actively participated in Reddit before the killing of the Third Party Apps, because I really liked the content and the platform was a superb experience on a third party app.
- eh ill still oen their stock

Reddit who?
If I can't browse my way, I simply don't use the site.
If reddit pops up in a search result on my browser, wellll best believe I have multiple adblockers making sure their ads don't load.
- And every time a Reddit results show up, I'm immediately reminded why I don't want to go there by an error telling me that I can't use the site without logging in.
  Fortunately, just changing the link to old.reddit.com still works even through VPN, but fuck this behavior. I do that only for questions I really need an answer and couldn't find anywhere else, and most of the time the replies are shit anyway.
  
  Hate any results from Twitter as well.
  Log in, log in, tell us who you are!
  Fuck you. I never made an account when it wasn't run by a thin-skinned narcissistic man-child, and I'm not about to start now.
  
  I honestly can’t believe they haven’t killed old.reddit yet.
  
  God, I hate infantile, "quirky" messages. Same shit with discord, but at least discord is useful.
  
  It's probably more to do with using a VPN than not being logged in. If I'm searching for something on a search engine and Reddit comes up in the results with potentially useful information, then I'll go there (the only time I go there now). I don't use a VPN and I'm never logged in, and I've never seen that page come up.
  Which makes sense, because those greedy bastards are trying to hyper-monetize the content. And pesky VPNs make it difficult for them to harvest useful visitors info and/or throw tons of partially targeted ads on the poor user's screen.
  Still good info on how to avoid it for the people who do encounter that annoying error page. So thanks for comparing that tidbit of knowledge.
  
  If you use Firefox, get the Redirector extension and add a rule that automatically redirects reddit.com/* to old.reddit.com/$1.
  
  Thanks for the tip I didn't know that 🙂
  
  I just use a browser addon to always use old reddit.
- Right?
  In-between comments are ads.
  Under every post is a recommendation for other subreddits where the last update was 2-3 weeks ago.
  Subreddits with clear bait clog up the front page, and no filters to remove them.
  Top comments are jokes and memes.
  It's a real shit experience on Reddit right now.
  
  They really leaned hard into the fraud strategy, hoping to IPO in 2023 and run with the money.
  It got to the point where the entire front page was just bots reposting the greatest hits, with the comments section literally being bots reposting comments from the first time it was posted. There were entire comment chains of bots just having reposted conversations with each other.
  The release of LLM APIs was the last straw, now even the conservatives are jumping ship because it was just a bunch of fascist liars lying to each other. And if there is one thing conservatives hate, it’s being around other conservatives.
  
  Obligatory recommendation for uBlock Origin and Firefox :)
  
  Some of those issues went over here pretty quick too.
  I feel we have a lot of the faux intellectual crowd who thought 5-10 years ago they were better than other for using reddit.
  
  IFunny is unironically better

I'm doing my part, fuck spez
- Just make sure to use protection. He fucked so many people that you never know what he might carry.
- Do you want to know more?
- Yes

It's such bullshit, Reddit could have been so much more. Researching my latest purchase/obsession, and the only way to find anything that isn't corporate sponsored reviews or AI content farming is to add the word "Reddit" to the end of the search.
As someone with an 11 year old account that I deleted during the TPA debacle, I fully recognise that there's a huge problem here. Reddit created a place where people wanted to put their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, and now that they are cashing out TOO FUCKING BAD LAME EBD USER.
Edit: /oblig fuck you spez. Slimy little arsehole sold everyone out and thinks he deserves to be rich because his shitty site isn't absolutely irredeemable.
- Reddit was like the StackOverflow for life
  ..sometimes coding too We're like regressing to friend's or known in person people's opinions, because Internet will be full of bot and sponsored content and opinions. Either way, double money for corporations, sponsored content ->more sales; people not trusting reviews and trying out stuff just to find out it's rubbish ->more sales
- 11 year old account on Reddit too and I left it during TPA too. Had nearly 2 million karma. Same username as this one.
- I wish Elon would scare away Reddit’s advertisers instead of twitter’s.

Fuck Zuckerberg, Fuck Spez!! 🖕🖕

As someone has had their accounts shadow banned across of wide swaths of reddit, despite being one of its first users... good fucking riddance.
- "Thanks for years of feeding our site, now fuck off without any appeal."
- Your fault for having an opinion slightly deviating from one of the mods :/
  
  Fuck man, I've had this happen to me multiple times:
  I make a relatively long and detailed comment.
  Someone replies with a vehement argument against a /misreading/ of many of the things I said in my comment.
  I point out that the replier is misunderstanding or misreading my original comment
  My original comment /is then edited not by myself/ to make it seem like the replier was correct the whole time, and then the same or other repliers dogpile on the thread claiming I am insane.
  It is truly unfortunate that so many reddit mods seemingly have no problem using alt accounts and abusing their powers exist governing very interesting niche subject matter communities that you will just never realistically find a group of like minded people in the real, not online.
  People used to think the internet could be used to the mass benefit of humanity by sharing information and having lively discussions about it.
  It is now clear that the vast majority of people basically just use it to consume mediocre entertainment content and basically have one kind or another of popularity contest.
- That isn't really a flex, even though you think it is.

The last time I have logged in to Reddit was the day they ended the apps, July 1 I think it was. I haven't been back since. I thought I would miss it more than I do but honestly I never even think about it anymore and am much happier with my new Lemmy life.
- Yeah I just moved over this week because a recent change started shoveling recommend stuff that just cluttered the feed and broke my browsing setup with ad block and no script. This feels nicer, definitely a cleaner ui. They are just trashing the experience over there
- Me too! It's bizzare how big it was in my life and now nothing. I miss the old reddit, but it hasn't been that for a long time.

Enough about my ex
- the S part of the DENNIS system: Separate entirely

So they did $800M when they wanted to do $1B. Okay that’s disappointing.
But the eye opener for me in this article is that they did $800M in 2023 up from $350M in 2021. That’s insane revenue growth. This is the first time I’ve seen any inkling that their IPO might have some chance.
Still, you’d have to believe they can get to multiple billions. I think it’s much more likely that they will fall flat and actually help kill whatever optimism there might be about IPOs in the market.
- Hey they gotta keep up with this 200% growth for next year
  
  Isn't that 100% growth?

I don't normally comment on reddit news, but... Lol.

I don't know if reddit ads provide a good roas. We tried a few campaigns and gave up because it was so far off what we see on other platforms. The community is super anti-advertising, the targeting is really limited by community and geo.
People go to reddit to veg out, not to shop. I think the only times I've made purchases based on things I've seen are when there's a discussion and numerous people make a recommendation for the same thing, or maybe a few cases when the op is showcasing something they had a personal part in creating.
- Back when Reddit was good the ads used to be like regular posts with a comment section, so you could actually talk about the product and exchange experiences, and the advertiser would sometimes respond. I found it to be a transparent and valuable way of advertising, and I actually liked the ads back then because there was a social and learning aspect to them. But of course they got rid of that, supposedly because what if somebody says something bad. They don't understand that the lack of honesty and dialogue is what makes people loathe ads.
  
  From my most recent memory, advertisers can still enable the option to allow comments. It was an interesting idea, and I too appreciate it when advertisers went in there to communicate about valid questions and concerns with their product.
  My suspicion is that the big advertisers are using marketing agencies who don't have the time or budget to go and moderate inauthentic conversations in those comment threads however.
  
  Sad but its true, also mqrketing ppl seens dont undestards diff between have buyers from ads to have buyers with engage other ppl to buy the product
- I agree and I also think companies will (or are) going to try more "organic" marketing by going into comments and pretending to be customers and recommend their products.
  I thought about that when I went to a new hair salon and in their new customer form one of the questions was "how did you hear about us" and one of the options was Reddit.
  I kind of would rather have ads if I had to because they are easier to identify. Now I can't trust people in the Reddit comments.
  
  If an advertiser figured out how to orchestrate that swarm of comments getting behind a recommendation that all seem very natural it would be difficult to tell that it's an ad and not just organic feedback.
  I share your worry as well that it may already be happening.
- Reddit doesn't allow targeting by community?! To me that seems like the most obvious feature.
  
  No it does, I think it's limited to only community and geo

Moved to Lemmy, best choice ever.

Reddit needs to go!
- MySpace is still around. Reddit won't simply "go". But I do agree and everyone should leave it as they left MySpace in 2008.
  
  Myspace is still around just like Bed Bath and Beyond are still around. The name was bought by another company.
- Spez needs to get the old Regina George vs. a bus treatment

Deleted Reddit because they blocked me from fetching subreddit RSS feeds which was the only reasonable interface left

Good. After killing all third party apps the site started to suck more.

I’m doing my part! thanks ublock!

The users, and only users, need to be the shareholders. A bunch of useless venture capitalist parasites should never again be allowed to own and destroy our public spaces.
- Then check out lemmy
  
  Never heard of it
  
  What the fuck's a Lemmy?
- "public"
  If y'all stop investing your time and energy into private companies as if they're the public interest, we wouldn't have these issues.
  
  The problem is the content being uploaded to these platforms serves a real and meaningful public, community purpose. Reddit has always been a knowledge base for a plethora of different subjects, YouTube has all sorts of content that has historical importance to the internet, as well as a trove of educational content that is unparalleled in size and quality.
  I take issue with that, because it's not the company's content, it's just their platform. The content is vastly more important than the platform, but the companies act as if it's theirs. They do everything based off what the community has built on their platforms, it's their true essence and what actually attracts people.
  In the specific case of YouTube, I'd say that content is irreplaceable and indispensable. While it's true that it is a privately owned platform and we don't have much of a say on its direction, I truly believe the content is so important that the only viable path forward to prevent its loss, is to take said platform off private hands. I don't believe it'll ever happen, but it is what should happen, as it's literally impossible to back up YouTube, just like it's currently impossible to compete with YouTube.
- Web 2.0 was a trojan horse

Good. fuck'em.

Spez, self styled content king, screwed by own outsized ego and underwhelming intellect.
- So typical rich tech bro.

Reddit is going to be a prime short opportunity on IPO.
- No way I'd take that risk. The last thing I need is to give the investors money, rewarding their awful decisions.
- Their IPO will be below valuation. I'm gonna guess 10% below.
- Biggest short squeeze since gamestop

2024 is literally a year of leaving Reddit for Lemmy.
- Because 2023 wasn't?
  To elaborate: what Reddit did this year wasn't enough for a (major) mass migration. I very much doubt even more ads will deter those that have stuck around so far. Perhaps there'll be a trickle, but I don't see anything happening like what was the case for Digg back in the day.
  
  This will trigger an enshittification cycle.
  Underperformance per-quarter resulting in anti-user actions to increase profits.
  Users leave because of anti-user actions.
  Profits will decrease as users leave until the end of quarter.
  Return to Step 1.
- i sure hope so, it's time for the next great migration!

Fuck Spez.

oh no! anyways...

Anyone here use reddit only for porn?
- The Internet is really really great...
  
  For porn
- Used tp use it tp voice porn (gonewildaudo).
  Obviously, spez fucked that up.
  
  I try to follow most asmr-nsfw content creators I enjoy on other platforms. But reddit is sadly where a lot of engagement happens.
  I absolutely avoid reddit at all costs, though.
- It’s not even good for that anymore. The only “source” that gets posted now is a preview link from the big studios. They’ve been fucking up NSFW Reddit for a while tho.
- No. There’s literally the whole rest of the internet out there

I’d rather not even see that cunts face

Will nobody think of the infinite growth!?

- It's in the article. They were aiming for 1B, grew 800m.
  
  Which is kind of funny because it's still a 4 out of 5 ratio.
- Bruh, are you putting a licence on every single comment? Lol.
  What do you hope that will accomplish?
  Btw, don't you actually have to say in the comment that the comment is licenced using "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0"? Just linking to it seems like it's not enough.
  
  Falling short of growth targets doesn't mean they made a negative. Hitting 4% growth instead of 5% is still pretty good for example.
  If you like this comment I made, feel free to tip me with PayPal.
- Is that a CC license for your comment? I wonder if it actually works, legally, because I do like the idea that (for example) commercial LLMs wouldn't be allowed to train on my comments.
- Falling short of growth means their going to take aggressive action.
  This is typical traded-company bullshit. You have to reach quarterly projections. Even if you're in the black, if you don't reach the projection the shareholders will react accordingly.
  So, to avoid missing their next quarter, they will enshittify to meet shareholder demands. And it may work, for a while. But it will continually drain their userbase to nothing.

Smoke a turd, spez. 😘

that's what they get for perma-banning all their human users.

Mandatory Fuck Spez comment

Remember when the IPO was supposed to be in 2021? Then it was 2022? 2023?
- Reddit IPO will always be next year, no matter which year we're in at the moment.

Since there's a paywall, I can't see the whole article but does this imply there was still positive ad growth and they just missed their goal or there was no or negative ad growth?
- 20% growth to $800M
  
  How unfortunate

Smoke a massive bag of dicks spez

Thoughts and prayers... ;-)
- Thots and players bb

Wow, they really spezzed up bad.

The company I work for spends ads on social media companies for ransomware protection and regularly spend is regularly negative. That means we spend more money on advertising than we do in income. We only do it to maintain some market share but otherwise it's just a pure loss on that platform.
- curious, ransomware insurance or what’s the product?
  
  Sorta both I guess. It's mostly designed for recovery protection but on the off chance we can't recover data, we pay out money if we can't. I don't think we would pay out if it's stolen but they will were able to recover the data.
- Lots of companies spend more on ads than they make. It's a growth strategy.
  
  Ya, the ROIs are terrible and when we stop our spend on reddit, our sales don't decrease when we cut spend. At least for enterprise level SaaS products, it's basically a donation to their company with no gains.

Good. Fuck em. Hasten their demise. So we build a new

Nobody saw this coming… /s

Lol

Good.