Can Reddit—the Internet’s Greatest Authenticity Machine—Survive Its Own IPO?

Comments

• astraeus@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Is Wired owned by Advance? The answer is yes. Condé Nast is a subsidiary of Advance. Advance has a 30 percent stake in Reddit.

  This is why they call it “the Internet’s Greatest Authenticity Machine” because we know there’s nothing authentic about that cesspool. There’s even less authenticity behind a biased news article framing itself as disconnected from the subject. Not once do I see mention of Wired’s relationship to Reddit, if your owner has a 30% stake you should disclose that.

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  • Talaraine@fedia.io ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I believe they call that out in the article.. the parentheses look like a late addition though?

    On Halloween 2006, just 16 months after they founded the company, Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast in a deal worth $10 million and agreed to stay on as leaders for at least three years. (Condé Nast, which is owned by Advance Magazine Publishers, is the publisher of WIRED). Condé viewed Reddit as a place to experiment and where the magazine company could build out new ideas online.

    But by 2009, according to users, Reddit’s website was as bare-bones as before the sale. Ohanian and another person familiar with the corporate politics say the site’s growth was stymied by Condé Nast’s uncertain desires for the property and Ohanian’s self-­acknowledged mismanagement. Reddit was awash in half-baked pursuits—including a short-lived iPhone app, iReddit—and a path to sustainable revenue wasn’t yet evident. After the cofounders’ three-year contracts expired on Halloween 2009, Huffman and Ohanian left for new pursuits.

    Slowe and the handful of other staffers left behind at Reddit—now contending with the fallout from a global recession—stumbled through experiments with selling ads and subscriptions. Neither Condé execs nor users were pleased. But they managed to keep the website alive. Anyone could now open a subreddit, and by January 2011, Reddit had 57,000 of them. That year the company began operating as a subsidiary of Condé Nast’s parent, Advance, which let it function more like a startup. (Advance still owns a roughly 30 percent stake.) Amid the changes, Ohanian came back via a seat on Reddit’s board.

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    • astraeus@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Not only a late addition, but purposefully not clarified or explicitly stated at the beginning, or even at the end, of the article. This is like fine print, but tucked into the content of the article so that you have to read the entire piece to get that information. Even then, if you are in the midst of the article you might not even consider how it impacts the framing.

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• BolexForSoup@kbin.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I mean… If you are looking to talk to actual people and hear actual opinions, the simple fact is Reddit is the best major site for it. There is nothing like it, in particular smaller hobby/technical/interest communities. And I say this as somebody who has a comment history full of “fuck Reddit.“ there is a reason. Google searches are only useful if you put “Reddit“ at the end now.

  Is there astroturfing? Yes. Are there tons of corporate interests manipulating it? Of course. But compared to Facebook, Twitter, etc. it may as well will be public access to their corporate owned cable.

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  • MonsiuerPatEBrown@reddthat.com ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Reddit has become useful to see what power wants.

    Reddit is a digital slave labor camp.

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    • BolexForSoup@kbin.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I know what Reddit was. I was a moderator for a sizable sub for many years lol you’re not going to get any disagreement from me there. None of what you wrote above is incompatible with what I wrote. You need to think of it in relative terms. I am not saying that Reddit is some truly authentic experience, far from it. But if you’re looking for legitimate answers to your hobby/technical/fandom questions, name a site that comes even close that 1) isn’t exponentially worse/more corporate dominated and/or 2) is actually big enough to get responses.

      Discord is the next closest thing because of how servers are set up but it’s a terrible repository for information because you need to be invited (no google searching/indexing) and structurally you can’t find anything that’s more than like 5min old.

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    • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      To compare forced labor camps where the alternative is being murdered to people making the active choice to volunteer to serve as moderators is a comparison so lacking in perspective that I'd expect to only find it on Reddit, but I guess Lemmy has managed to foster the same kind of behavior.

      Are you going to compare Reddit killing the API to the Holocaust next?

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  • survivalmachine@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well, yes, it was something beautiful and amazing and we all loved it very dearly, or we wouldn’t be so passionate about what management has done to it and continues to do to it.

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    • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Ever since quitting Reddit and attempting to delete all my comments, search for “topic Reddit” yields good results. I have also noticed that all those best results are between 3-11 years old.

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  • kbal@fedia.io ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Reddit was great in some ways. It's been on the decline for a while and I expect the IPO can only accelerate that. Unless we're all very lucky it's not going to explode in flames and crash into the ditch. It will just shamble on, gradually disillusioning all the people who still cling to it long after it's lost its soul.

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    • BolexForSoup@kbin.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That is what was so upsetting about last summer. I had a lot invested in Reddit. Emotionally, mentall, hell just time-wise. After the “landed gentry“ comment, I just couldn’t deal with it anymore. It was so disrespectful and completely missed the mark for why most moderators do what they do. Like I get it, many people dog moderators and think they’re just “power tripping jannies.” But fact of the matter is most moderators are perfectly fine people just volunteering their time to foster a community they care about.

      So for the CEO of a company whose entire existence is owed to the labor of unpaid users that they never talk to or interact with in any meaningful way outside of a handful of mod teams to come out and call us “entitled” and other adjectives because we are protesting a terrible decision and advocating for people with disabilities…well, there’s a reason many of us left.

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    • floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It will just shamble on, gradually disillusioning all the people who still cling to it long after it’s lost its soul.

      Same as the rest of the corporate internet and all other digital services. I wonder whether people will ever lose patience with it and abandon these things.

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  • darkphotonstudio@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Debatable, especially with AI spambots and (mechanical) turks. How do you know? You could be chatting with a bot or some poor, low paid schlub working in a digital sweatshop somewhere in Asia.

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• DuckGuy@mander.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The Internet’s Greatest Authenticity Machine

  Thanks, I needed a laugh.

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• spider@lemmy.nz ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • realitista@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Its going to be a bloodbath.

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    • bradorsomething@ttrpg.network ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Long dated puts will be sooooo expensive

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• hedge@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  So Huffman’s strategy seems to be “Hey, I know, I’ll just follow that Musk guy’s lead; he seems to know what he’s doing!”

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  • Dymonika@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Haha, I love your wording. This is awesome. And I 100% agree. These people do not know the meaning of the word “enough.”

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  • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t know the answer and I’m not taking a side, but considering how Reddit has never been profitable, I don’t understand how it even still exists. Where does the money come from to keep it running? This question applies to all non-profitable platforms. We know that the executives surely get their inflated paychecks, as do the employees, and the servers keep running (often better than sustainable alternatives), yet the company never makes a profit… How does that work?

    Given that it’s obviously not sustainable, I can understand why “just be happy with that they’ve created” isn’t an option, but that’s the only thing I understand… Everything else is a complete mystery to me.

    I use Discord a lot and I think about this often.

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    • millie@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      A business can be lucrative without being profitable. Profitable means the business itself is making a profit; that is, expanding its revenue. Reddit doesn’t need to do that in order to make everyone who works there money. They just need to keep the servers open and do a little maintenance. Reddit probably could be profitable as a business if it weren’t so lucrative for its CEOs, who presumably eat all the profits.

      I agree, though. Profit and growth are poor measures of a business doing what it should be doing, which is providing a valuable product to consumers. Honestly, these days they’re probably a measure that a company has stopped providing value.

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• NotSteve_@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  archive.ph/urG1R

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  • hedge@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Thanks!👍

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• MalReynolds@slrpnk.net ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Shake the 8 ball : Signs point to no…

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• ulkesh@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I sure hope not. I cannot wait for the day Reddit is crumbling in its own ashes with piece-of-shit Huffman burning in the center.

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• owen@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  No

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• MajorHavoc@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Narrator: It did not.

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  • Kwakigra@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Reddit didn’t survive its slow death many years ago. The rotting corpse it left behind is just becoming a bigger problem.

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    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yep! But I’m sure that an injection of speculative casual short term investors is exactly what it needs to get back on it’s feet. /s

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• NecoArcKbinAccount@kbin.social ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  will get shorted to oblivion imo, reddit has never been profitable.

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