Reddit is planning six tiers of early access based on each "participant's contributions to Reddit," the company said in its updated SEC filing. Those tiers are based on a user's "karma" score, ostensibly an aggregate total of up/down votes on posts and comments.
The first tier of users will be those "who have meaningfully contributed to Reddit community programs," though what that means isn't explained more clearly. After that come tier 2 users, who must hold at least 200,000 karma points or have taken at least 5,000 moderator actions. Tier three includes users and moderators who hold at least 100,000 karma points and have taken 2,500 moderator actions. Tiers 4 and 5 are each half of the previous tier's total, and tier 6 includes everyone else, with a waitlist available if the total number of shares purchased exceeds the original 1.76 million.
Basically people who karma farm with low effort posts. This will only encourage low quality posts.
The best part is that this whole thing is about having the "opportunity" to purchase reddit stock at its IPO price. This user generated content farm wouldn't dare give away equity for free to users responsible for the site having any past, present, or future value.
I'm not a finance person, but the only gambling I'd do on this company is hope that Wall Street pumps the price post-IPO so I can short it.
My understanding is that the value of each reddit user is priced roughly at $2. A Facebook user is priced at roughly $40. Their only options to maybe be profitable are more enshittification, more users, or both. Or, you know, not paying hundreds of millions of dollars to the execs of an RSS feed with voting and comments.
I bet wallstreetbets is going to pile into shorts out of the gate because who doesn't want to stick it to reddit and its WSB lol. Then after a slumpy start some whale is going to blow up all those shorts and pump it like crazy and then everyone will buy panic calls and the early ones in will fade the top and screw over the call buyers on the way back down. Thats my prediction. Not touching this with someone else's 10 foot pole lol
I got the you’re invited to the IPO email from them and said, Fuck you Spez, as I deleted it; god that felt good. I hope they short the ever loving hell out of it.
A Reddit user is $2 now, but they have terrible ad targeting. Reddit users volunteer troves of info about themselves, so even a modest effort to start tying all those user signals together could be a great boost to that number (which really wouldn’t take much). Plus monetizing that base for LLM data and you got a stew going. They’ll of course do the cash grabby enshitifying stuff too, but their user data is much more underutilized than facebooks at the moment.
I got offered a while ago and I had 1,500 link and 0.5M comment karma after a decade. I was never a moderator or did anything important. I can't imagine that was considered meaningfully contributed. At least I hope not.
I got invited with just a bit over 100k; I considered it, just out of 'fuck it, why not' but didn't follow through. I have like 6 posts of maybe, maybe 300 upvotes combined, the rest is comments; either helpful, amusing, but not really 'meaningful'. Account since 2013, lurker for a while before that. Though I got out of my shell and shed a ton of social anxiety with those comments, so personal growth woo.
I'm really curious about how it's going to launch, and the first few months.
As someone who was invited to that first group and told them to go fuck themselves, it's actually mostly people who have participated in reddit surveys and reddit mod meetups (where mods from a local area get blasted on Huffman's dime). Almost every mod that I know that went to one of these events got an invite and all of them gave similar answers to me.
Also, 200k karma isn't a ton. It likely places you in the top 1%, but most people don't participate anyways. I had over 300k (I think, I'm not checking) and maybe 1k was from a single post. Everything else was from the occasional comment
For the first group though they didn't actually bother to look into them. The 2 subs I ran have both been private since the last priest despite numerous warnings that I'd be removed if I didn't make them public. And my subs participated in numerous protests before then.