u/spez ist ein Hurensohn
stimmt
Just another person bringing love, peace, freedom through the judicious use of 🤜
u/spez ist ein Hurensohn
stimmt
I think the core problem is that Reddit’s leadership wanted it to be an SV unicorn, and they tried lots of ways to make money off the site (cryptocurrency, Reddit gold, an official app that I swear was designed to make you click on ads by mistake, etc.). But it as never going to be the kind of cash making machine, actual or potential, that they were looking for. Well, that and, once you start taking outside investments (especially from VCs), the goals of the organization necessarily change towards making an exit (IPO or acquisition).
I think this essay gets at a lot of the things about how the place worked and why the value was hard to convert into money. The feudalism frame is a little gimmicky, maybe, but does provide some perspective and a useful analogy.
I completely agree, it’s a pretty bad time for an IPO - in general. But, they also raised 10 rounds ($1.3 billion total) in funding over the years, a lot of that in the last 3-4 years; their E and F rounds were in 2021, for $250 million and (iirc) $700 million respectively. That’s a lot of pressure to produce results, especially after the pandemic-inspired craziness has worn off and the Fed changed the zero percent interest rates that drove a lot of poor business decisions.
To quote a sadly departed poet on the subject - mo money, mo problems.
Yes, and? That doesn’t change the fact the article talks about numbers that came from before any of the protests happened.
Fidelity’s devaluation (along with the increased overall desperation in SV venture capital) is a cause of the API changes and heavy handed suppression of the protests, not a result of them. It’s an attempt to halt/reverse that slide by asserting control and taking concrete measures to better extract value from Reddit.
From the very article you linked:
Fidelity now estimates that Reddit’s holdings could be around $15.4 million as of May 31, which is down over 7% from the fund’s estimates of $16.6 million from this past April. This new figure is is also a reported 45.4% slide since Reddit secured Series F funding in August 2021, when an asset manager acquired the platform’s shares for $28.2 million.
The numbers are from May of this year, not since June.
Read your sources.
From the article you linked:
Fidelity now estimates that Reddit’s holdings could be around $15.4 million as of May 31, which is down over 7% from the fund’s estimates of $16.6 million from this past April.
This was from before the whole shit fiesta actually happened.
First of all, most of the devaluation happened before any of this went down. Second, stopping the chaos on the platform plays well with investors.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear - they care, but think he’s doing what’s necessary to drive value for investors by eliminating places where revenue or potential is being lost - 3d party apps that don’t show Reddit ads/collect user data and the new found value of posts and messages as training data for LLMs.
You’re replaceable to them, and frankly the fact that you care makes you less valuable than a random person who’ll just click on memes and post answers to questions. The communities that they can effective extract value from are more trouble than they’re worth. You and your ilk are the problem, not spez.
Nobody with the power to fire spez has a problem with what he’s doing. This is likely driven by VCs and other investors wanting their money now that the Fed has turned off the cash hose.
As a great poet once observed, “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.”
I lean hard centrist.
The internet peaked with gopher, tbh. Mosaic was the beginning of the end.