this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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They are about 2 years too late.
The rise in interest rates and the end of easy VC money has swung the dial back to: Companies actually need to generate profit and not just show user growth to be attractive to investors.
The IPO will not go as spez dreamed for so long.
Yep, but also, I think spez is done. He's just cashing out and fuck you etc.. etc..
He'll catch enough to successfully eject and thats that for him. Reddit will die. But we'll have survived, and the open web will continue.
Yes, he will cash out but I feel it will only be a fraction of what he hoped to get.
He will be comfortably rich but to someone who expected to be obscenely rich, he will see it as a failure.
Serves him right for pissing on Aaron Swartz's grave. In fact, it's hardly justice.
To quote that great late 20th century philosopher, Terry Pratchett:
There is no justice in the world, there is Just Us. (and many of us are not nice people.)
I’m not convinced Reddit will die. I think it will continue to limp along in its zombie state. But I kind of wish you were right, just because I’m still a bit mad about it.
Well, Digg still exists...
Ha I went from Digg to Reddit to Lemmy. Does that make me old?
Your chain is missing at least BBSs, slashdot, and fark. My own is missing Usenet and IRC (I played with them, but didn't spend time there)
Depends, I went from BBSes to slashdot to koro5hin to reddit to kbin and do not feel old.
To me old-age begins when you feel you are past the time when you can learn/experience something new and/or new tech no longer feels exciting/interesting but scary.
I have met people in their 80s who have a younger outlook on life than some people in their 40s.
I mean, idk man.
Going public does funny things to a company.
Of course spez is cashing out. That was the whole point of returning as CEO after Ellen Pao was sacrificed to cleanse the site and make it investor friendly. He just wants to cash out more than the $6 million he got the first time.
He'll only get to buy three yachts instead of 5. Seriously, he's going to have a s'ton of the highest rank shares, all they have to do is hold the lie together long enough to sell.
That last phrase is really doing a lot of heavy lifting. When you own a large chuck of stock in a post IPO company, trying to cash out large ownership stakes has the effect of crashing the price.
My expectation is that what ever the IPO price is, one year from then (the usual minimum time to be able to sell a stake like spez will have) it will be lucky to be 5% of the launch price.
Especially with all the tech layoffs right now.
Not just that but the golden era of social media is probably over. With the advent of free access to powerful AI, user content is about to become hot garbage. And with 30% of the Internet using adblockers, I wouldn't touch reddit with a long stick.