Reddit Advised to Target at Least $5 Billion Valuation in IPO

Imo Reddit has been the winner of the 3rd party apps and fuck spez protests. The users came crawling back. A few of us went to lemmy and formed quality communities, but for the most part, a large majority are on there.

Did they? Other than /nfl most of the communities I followed went to shit very quickly and haven't recovered. They are mostly bots talking to bots or the same questions and post over and over with minimal new content
- For me, it was politics that sank Reddit. I was banned from a half dozen news forums for criticism of the IDF in Gaza at the beginning of what most people now acknowledge to be an ethnic cleansing. I reported every account calling for murder and genocide of Palestinians, which is against the Reddit TOS. They permanently banned me for "report abuse" for doing their jobs for them. They have obviously shown that there's no freedom of speech, even when you follow the rules, if it goes against the feelings of the administration and the unelected moderators. Fiefdoms ruled by angry internet trolls shouldn't get an IPO.
Similarly with twitter and mastodon. Generally, that's fine ... smaller niche online spaces are a good thing (as many who've remained have discovered I suspect).
But in the end, for those who see this fediverse project as a mission to "take back the web" ... so far only pretty minor movement has been made on that front. To the point that IMO I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter etc just "win" and the whole "alternative" social media thing stays "alternative" and relatively small. If there's a chance of this, I'd say to fediverse advocates that they should maybe rethink what the fediverse is and what it's good and not good for, because there's a real chance here that the fediverse kinda dropped the ball, especially mastodon which has been going strong for a while now.
- I've never used Mastodon, but from what I've heard it's an entirely different ballgame where you basically need to go where the people are. e.g. artists seeking commission work need more rather than less people, and if you want to follow a particular someone, you go to where they are not the other way around.
  And if their servers have anywhere close to the level of technical glitches that we do here on Lemmy... well it is quite off-putting, especially to non technically minded people.
meh.im happier as a member of the federation and honestly if we got all the reddit users it would lower the quality fast.
- Probably an unpopular opinion here, but honestly I'd rather just everyone migrate to lemmy and mastodon and leave reddit and twitter broke and empty husks. A low quality federated platform is still better than a mediocre centralized one.
I mean, that was never seriously in doubt. The days of massive site migrations happening overnight are long over.
What matters is the momentum.
- Every dumb move sends a wave of people over to the Lemmyverse, and some of those people stay, building on the community here
No we didn’t. I happily left reddit the day Apollo stopped. They also lost my premium subscription.
I also stopped Twitter when musk took over. I use Bluesky or Mastodon and find both platforms to be superior.
Sure, some folks may have, but many of us have not. Does that matter to Reddit? probably not. Do I care? not really.
Modern Reddit is unusable, and old reddit isn’t mobile friendly.
Lemmy's very nature killed it for me.
It's way too much work to try and cultivate the setup I built with ease on reddit.
I'm still here, but the site iddn't make it easy.
- No it does not indeed.:-|
  It's worth noting that Reddit changed too, permanently, both in terms of ease of use (not only 3rd-party apps, but also the mobile and desktop browser routes too) and in how many content creators simply left - who knows what they are even doing now (reading books, touching grass, some came here ofc). Even many niche subs over there are empty, dead, or one may consider them dying from lack of interesting content (though those people still there I expect would be resistant to admit that).
  And it will be interesting to see how that changes further, the moment they get their IPO and thus can finally kill off old-Reddit, which still allows you to block ads iirc? That will drive additional content creators away. Perhaps they will come here - despite how we are not ready for that.
  Anyway, the old Reddit is just flat gone, for many people, and there is no going "back", ever, even if you wanted to, it's not there to return to, especially after the IPO changes it still further.
- Really? It was more work to find and occasionally add communities than it was to spend months-years to accumulate subs for your frontpage and block subs for all? I browse all on lemmy and find new communities that way. Or by links and referrals for newer ones.
- Yeah, way better to stay on Facebook and Nextdoor and deal with actual literal fascists.
- 90% of the kind of content you’re talking about can be removed by blocking a couple of domains and a handful of users. I believe that they’ve been defederated from most of the larger instances. You will run into a lot of hot takes on lemmy but that’s not too different from reddit.
  I think there’s a few reasons why they may be more prominent on lemmy, though. Communities like r/politics took a while to stabilize and had a large and active moderation team that helped remove the most extreme material, and the community itself was large enough that it was representative of a large swath of the US population. Hot takes would often get downvoted into invisibility, which frustrates people who use forums for trolling, and karma could be used to restrict posting. AFAIK those are not qualities or capabilities currently found on lemmy. I haven’t really read the docs - I prefer to just be a user here - but I have seen discussions that indicate that downvotes don’t get tracked as well as suggestions they be removed altogether.
  Also, a new technology - especially one associated with sectors of the FOSS community and anti-centralization - are by their nature going to attract an initial user base that skews in certain directions. I think it was Eric Raymond who observed that hackers, politically, tend to be either socialists or libertarians with very little in between. ESR was being a bit tongue in cheek and the hacker culture back then was different than it is now - or rather computer culture as a whole has expanded so much that the old school hacker types form a much smaller percentage.
  I think the most problematic part about lemmy which will ultimately limit its adoption is the chaos that comes in from having dozens of communities across dozens of instances that all cover the same topics. It makes discovery much more challenging than it is on Reddit, and it doesn’t help that many of the clients can make it challenging to identify which topics are actually the most used. One of my favorite clients keeps defaulting to ordering by a most recently created timestamp or something - I’m not really sure. It doesn’t have the support to sort or filter by number of users (although it displays the metric).
  The other issue is that I end up having to remain on All rather than just my subscriptions because there’s so few users, so I end up with a ton of random anime, for instance, which I can’t effectively block because they’re all posted in new subs that crop up all the time, and I can’t block using wildcards (which would help a lot).
  I do hope that between the lemmy devs and the app devs, they can address those issues.
yeah similar case between X and mastodon like many migrate to Mastodon after Elon takeover. But, at the end they are going back
Sure, it's been the "winner" if you were expecting reddit to topple from top spot as best aggregator - but it was never really reasonable to expect that.
Even now, the perspective that Lemmy should strive to be some kind of new reddit is really daft.
What we actually want, is for Lemmy to grow in a sustainable and manageable way with real actual content enjoyed by real contributing users.
The quality of Lemmy has improved dramatically in the last 6 months. Way more users, servers, content, and third party apps. The quality of reddit has decreased dramatically in the last 6 months. User counts may not have suffered, but the content and the experience most certainly has.
To a degree. The large subreddits, like AskReddit, get far fewer upvotes on the top posts of the week than they used to get. I think there's a good chunk of folks who left for a replacement, then left their replacement without going back to Reddit.
Which is why I knew the only way it would work for me would be to
DNS Block it
Leechblock it
Block it from Search Results
And it works!
Nah I've had a reddit account since the dawn of time and I've now switched completely over to lemmy. Can't remember the last time I logged onto reddit
Now we can watch this place grow into the thick veiny caterpillar reddit always should have been
There's very little quality on Lemmy. It lacks diversity. It's quite authoritarian left. Tankies under every rock. Even in non-politics communities. I still use a forked version of Boost to lurk reddit. But as someone else said, if never recommend Lemmy to anyone I actually know.
- It lacks diversity.
  I think what you really mean is that you don't feel like you fit in here.

Sell it to musk, finish the job

Can't wait for him to rebrand it as Y
- Or 3
Can't they blow Musk up by accident or send him on a rocket to Mars that orbits forever there (oops)? Something like the submarine last year but better.

Sure feels like they timed this IPO pretty badly. I think the ideal time to strike on this would have been a few years ago... Based on market conditions anyway. Reddit itself may just not have had their ducks lined up enough, but that's their problem, not the stock market's.

Tech stocks trading sideways for the last year or two
The interest rate money printer got shut off and cash is not cheap anymore
Seemingly all the major new tech stock investment interest is circling around stuff like AI
Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
The pandemic is more or less over and people have pulled back from being chronically online somewhat (this is my guess, I don't have data to back it up)

Also what exactly is the monetization strategy? Ads I guess? More catering towards creating corporate "synergy" with the Reddit community? Selling user data/content? So basically making the place suck considerably worse for users is what it looks like to me.

Monetisation?
Licensing the site to AI when there's finally a ruling they can't just scrape the internet for training data while ignoring copyright.
- I was told reddit has already been scraped for AI and all sorts of stuff. There is very little new value to sell.
Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
I think you're overselling the importance of this one. When I've talked to friends about federated alternatives, they really aren't interested. Even if they hated Twitter/reddit and think they've gotten worse, they just don't really care about a federated alternative. I've heard some interest in threads, so maybe we count that?
- Yeah, people don’t really care about decentralisation nor federation. People want an easy experience where everyone is
- Regular people didn't know or care wtf reddit was for quite a while also and there absolutely is a building friction between people and corporate social media. We're in the early stages for now, but stuff like Activitypub is not going away.
- Even my most alternative, vegan, communist friends agree with me when I pitch the fediverse and then flock to capitalist social media like moths anyway. It's disheartening.
They already make money with ads. Killing third party apps was part of this, now they can control exactly how you see ads. It's the same as any other social media now, they recommend you content, which is exactly not the point of reddit.
- Reddit's been running ads for a while and has never turned a profit

I've already left, but seeing them marching towards an IPO makes me even happier with my decision. I just fear that the mountains of helpful troubleshooting and advice on Reddit will be locked away forever soon, while the rest of the web falls to SEO and AI-generated nonsense text...

Reddit Was the only site Google could effectively search. Rip googling questions and adding reddit.
- Man, and it works great. It is waaaaay more common to find good answers to a question from a bunch of randoms on the Internet than trying to get an actual answer from a random website. Sometimes you find bs but you can usually quite quickly filter it out, and it gives a good basis from which to then continue to search on the topic.
- I'm trying out Kagi a little bit, and it has a federation search mode of some kind. I tried it for a search and it gave me results from Lemmy.
  I don't know yet how Kagi compares to Google in terms of results quality, I barely used it so far. It's pretty expensive though.

Good fucking luck with that

for that bot-infested shitposting dump?

Pardon me, but I believe you mean that bot AND AD invested shitposting dump.
Hey, it's not just bots! It also serves as a home for trolls and whiny children too.:-)
I hope you know what I mean when I say that Reddit is dead, but Long Live Reddit! :-P
Fuck Spez right in the p***y!

watch the reddit ipo be a catalyst for a stock market crash.
- Imagine reddit causing The Great Depression 2.
How much was WeWork valued at without turning a profit?
It's not that much for a tech company with such a big user base

I 100% can see it easily selling for that much.

You want to know why it's worth that much?

Petabytes of raw training Data for LLMs. Arguably atm reddit us one of the better gold mines of LLM training data on the internet, bazillion of posts already formatted as post-response chains, which is the exact type if format an LLM wants to train on.

Can you imagine how valuable those servers loaded with posts are to a company like OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft?

5 billion is quite reasonable to harvest every reddit post that has ever been made ever and cut it off from your competitors.

The worst part is that ai chatbots will start responding like redditers. I can't wait for chatgpt to regale me with a story about his dad beating him with jumper cables, or jolly ranchers, or hell in a cell.

Has reddit not already been scraped? With all of that information exposed bare on the public Internet for decades, and apparently so valuable, I find it hard to believe that everybody's just been sitting there twiddling their thumbs, saying "boy I sure hope they decide to sell us that data one day so that we don't have to force an intern to scrape it for us".

I asked Bard whether they could make a bastardization of rogersimon10 post and it made this:

Ah, the 2012 Fiesta EcoBoost. A pocket rocket some called it, a ticking time bomb I preferred. Owned one myself, sunshine yellow with a dent shaped like a screaming Muppet (courtesy of a rogue shopping cart). Let me tell you, that car was less a vehicle and more a high-octane game of Russian roulette with pistons.

Every morning was a gamble. Would she purr to life like a hungover kitten, or unleash a symphony of coughs, bangs, and the ominous "Check Engine" light disco? One day, the radio spontaneously switched to polka, which, let's be honest, is only two steps away from a thermonuclear detonation in a Fiesta's internal combustion fiesta.

Speaking of fiestas, the fuel gauge was as reliable as a politician's promise. One minute it was brimming, the next it was flashing "Bone Dry, Mate," even if I'd just filled it. Learned to carry a jerrycan like a Prohibition-era bootlegger, never knowing when the engine's thirst would strike.

But oh, the things that little lemon could do! On a good day, that turbocharged engine was like a caffeinated hummingbird on steroids. Weaving through traffic, leaving Audis in the dust (until their turbos spooled up, of course). Handling? Razor sharp, unless you hit a pebble, then it was suddenly a drunken ballerina on roller skates.

Comfort? Ha! The seats were about as plush as a park bench, and the suspension was tuned for "Feel Every Pebble in the County." But hey, it kept you awake, which was essential considering the constant fear of spontaneous combustion.

In the end, I sold the Fiesta to a circus clown for a fistful of juggling pins and a lifetime supply of those tiny, uncomfortable hats. He seemed thrilled, probably because the polka radio was a bonus feature for him.

So, would I recommend a 2012 Fiesta EcoBoost? Only if you enjoy existential dread, questionable fuel efficiency, and the thrill of living life on the edge (of a breakdown). Otherwise, stick to something safer, like a heavily sedated hamster. You'll thank me later.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with a tow truck and a very suspicious mechanic who keeps asking about "jumper cables." Wish me luck.

P.S. Don't forget the jumper cables. Seriously. You'll thank me later.

Scraped data isn't legal to resell, scraping isn't even legal in the first place.
Just because you can scrape the data doesn't mean it's worth anything.
Companies like MS, Google, OpenAI, FB they make money by selling the usage of their LLM services to other companies who then they use that service to make their own products.
If it came to light that MS/Google/OAI/FB were using illegal training data for their LLMs, it would get all those other companies hit in the crossfire.
So these companies have to do a shit tonne of diligence to assure their investors and clients that their LLMs are purely trained on legally obtained data and are safe to use.
And you know what is a super easy way to assure them of that?
If they literally own the original data themselves

This data was out in the open for a decade and still is. People could train their llm without problems.
- Exactly. Why is this being upvoted?
- They just started charging for API usage so isn't it already not open?
- Not legally / free.
  And yes, that very very much matters if you intend to actually sell the service to companies that they themselves dont want to get hit in the crossfire of potential lawsuits for building their products on top of stolen info.
  So if you can own the data itself (via buying reddit), you now have an ENORMOUS quantity of prime training data that you're investors and potential customers know is legally clean, because you literally own it.
@pixxelkick @ardi60 Well, if anyone wants to buy it for that purpose, then I just hope they remember to screen out the more NSFW parts of Reddit.
Otherwise, their bots are going to start giving some rather unfortunate responses to customer questions...
- I am looking forward to the hilarity of it for a while though.
  "Cooking bot, i have found this cucumber i need to use before it gets bad. What can i do with it?"
  "Shove it up your rectum"
  Could lead to a lot of interesting lawsuits and let a lot of MBA bros look rather stupid.
- Most LLMs have tonnes of NSFW data in their training.
  Typically, if this wants to be blocked, a secondary RAG or LORA is run overtop to act as a filtering mechanism to catch, block, and regenerate explicit responses.
  Furthermore, output allowed lexicon is a whole thing.
  Unfiltered LLMs without these layers added on are actually quite explicit and very much capable of generating extremely NSFW output by default.

Ah... so they're shorting it.

As in short circuit?
- Short selling, Wallstreet thing for making money when the stock. It kinda works like borrowing a stock and immediately selling it, then we it's time to return the stock you borrowed you buy a replacement and if the price has gone down you keep the profit.
- shorting means to bet against a stock. instead of buying a stock and waiting for it to grow over a long period and selling it for more money (long position), you borrow the stock from somebody, sell it, then buy it back (for a lower price) after a short amount of time to give back to whom you borrowed it from. (short position). If the stock price rapidly drops in that time, you gain money.
  If this sounds like a perversion of what investing was supposed to be, yeah welcome to wall street

LOL if you listen to some angry people in other threads, they will claim that not a single thing has changed.
The haircut isn't done yet...
You wrote a ransomware?

$5 Billion for a chronically unprofitable, niche social media platform in an already crowded field. Yeah, Ok. You'd get a better return on your investment if you just burned the money for heat.

"niche" website in a crowded field....that is also the top 9th most visited website in the world, above tik tok.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
- I love how xvideos comes before x/shitter 😁
- Reddit is niche when it comes to social media. It caters to a particular group of people and has its own style of both content and engagement, just like Facebook or Tiktok have their own styles. I would argue reddit is, in some ways, more like an old school forum with a fresh coat of paint. It requires more effort from the user to engage with than some other social media platforms. The content can be a lot "heavier" and it's not centered around people and/or personalities. To be clear thats something I liked about Reddit but I don't think it really resonates as much with the average user.
  Site visits are just one metric and, while it's an interesting metric, it doesn't say much without a lot more context. OK, so a lot of people end up visiting Reddit. Why? Is it intentional? Is it because every third Google result is a reddit post? If so, is it driving further engagement? If not, then that benchmark is worth little. If it is driving further engagement, then something else is wrong.
- What's Reddit?

Reddit is such a nice example of capitalism turning a genuinely nice thing into a pile of garbage.

Can you short an IPO?

You can buy puts on the IPO price.
- Only if their DMM enables options. There are many stocks without options. In that case, the only alternative would be to borrow shares from your broker and sell those shares instead. You’d then have an actual short position that could be recalled by the lender.
  Either ways, I’d probably not touch it. I wouldn’t want the theta burn or the risk of getting recalled while price actions tries to figure out a direction.
I like where your head is on this.

Everyone here are thinking $5 billion means Reddit won. Wasn’t their evaluation at $15 at one point?

If the went from fifteen bucks to five billion, yes they totally won 😉
- Well I guess I fully set myself up for that one lol
If you mean that an entitled douchecanoe who has no trouble allowing genocides to occur on his service getting stupid rich, then they did win. If you are looking at how much they could have gotten, then, yeah, they suck.
- Sorry, what genocide happened on Reddit?

Meanwhile tech is hemorrhaging.

Good luck Reddit! 😂

Valuable training data for AI. Spez does not give a damn about it. He gladly takes money and sell it off to someone like OPEN AI whose models can be trained on its data.
"I trained on millions of users' data and now I ape them. AITA?"
Whatever it is Spez is saying this to the staff

How about $5?

Silver award. Take it or leave it
You're going to need more than that to cover the legal liability of the lawsuits brought against the company. You could easily end up in the negative, with a mess like that!
- $5 + tree fiddy?

Would love to see this become the fastest IPO to tank.

Yeah but then when it collapses all the roaches will scurry off to other forums, including lemmy .
Personally I want it as a place to sequester the hard and alt right, like 4chan was before the digg exodus.
Every time someone pops the infection caul where they gather, it just spreads their toxic juice everywhere else.
- Sadly I’ve found a few of those on Lemmy already. What I’d prefer is the internet of the 1990s when it took effort to figure out and the masses were too lazy or dumb to do so.
  And that sweet, sweet dialup modem sound.

For ads? How else do they make money?

Selling user data, selling top posts and comments to corporate marketing accounts, selling control of dialogue about any subject to sway public opinion, reddit gold, making the platform more ass.
- Good points.

Good luck!

Um...really? I don't think so!

Politics and whatever the other maladies are that infect Reddit aside: the app and the website are impossibly difficult to use. Ita just ads ads ads. Even if the place was a veritable utopia that’s a no from me dawg.

.com mirror: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&q=%2Fm%2F0b2334&hl=en

Did they fucking recover deleted messages?

I can find every post after automatically editing and deleting them afterwards

I still wouldn't use it, but Elon should buy it so he can more convincingly posture a saviour of independent social media. Just drop the tracking, sell square ads on the sidebar based on content only, open up api for all sorts of uses and make rif is ridiculous fun for reddit the official client. Give it to five geeks to maintain and call it a public service. What's a bit more down the drain? It's all gonna go Midas anyways. At least that would be a win for the internets