What if Musk buys the front page of the internet. There are some interesting Pro’s and Cons Edit: interesting doesn’t mean good
What would you consider to be a “pro” here?
Reddit going under?
They don’t need any help with that
They already have spez. He will make it happen.
He can buy in but he can’t buy all of Reddit. According to the article the IPO will only be for 10% of the company. If he goes in, that’s only going to drive up the price.
They’re still trying to do that?!
I’m curious how they will tank their worth by then, as is tradition.
I hope a big fail LMAO…
I’d expect another big exodus around then.
If a user didn’t exodus for the popular subs last time, I don’t see why they would this time.
Some of those popular subs were reopened with a new mod team that falls in line. Spez was too busy stuffing his ears with ad money instead of listening to his stakeholders
The point being?
That new mod team is obviously full of loyal Redditors.
Point being casual users didn’t see much interruption in the popular subs. So they did not have much incentive to switch to another platform.
“Didn’t see much interruption”? It was all over r/all and they simply decided to not switch. How will less people remaining to protest make more of a difference?
Yes. Best thing we can do is be ready (from a tech perspective) and welcoming (from a human perspective). They’ll come or they won’t.
Compared to summer, Lemmy now has thousands more users, hundreds of active communities (no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects), actual made-on-lemmy content in a bunch of places, and a bunch of apps that mostly have the bugs worked out. It’s probably fair more appealing now to join than it was in summer.
We still have roadblocks: general confusion about federation (the email analogy seems to be working best), difficulty properly explaining how to sign up, a harder time finding communities, and it’s impossible to migrate between instances without starting fresh.
Confusion about federation is not helped by federation not working recently due to a few notable Lemmy bugs (which are now fixed). Hopefully anyone new coming over doesn’t encounter any new major bugs.
I still feel like if we want to grow faster organically we need to natively support more “discovery functions”. Just things that you can toggle off like for example a recommendation screen and stuff. The algorithm for it we can make and adapt open source so no one is scared we collect data.
We’re running into the Linux Vs Windows problem, where you can technically do more stuff and have more control over you account on Lemmy, but you need to be familiar with the fediverse before joining, just to Unterstand how to use Lemmy. That’s a big problem for any potential new user.
Scaled filter in 19.X helps with that
I find Kbin’s Collections feature a good fix for federation confusion. Honestly I think it should be the default type of view when browsing communities, you need to abstract the average user from federation as much as possible and leave browsing by instance as an advance option for those that want to engage with federation in detail
All those toxic Redditors coming here… I hope we can manage to significantly beef up the mod tools before then.
no where near Reddit yet on niche subjects
I’m always saddened by how not-active some of those subjects are. For example: Even many large games struggle to have dedicated, active communities on Lemmy (assuming I’m not terrible at finding them, which is sadly also possible). Even some of the largest games have only completely dead communities here. A huge draw of Reddit for me was to be able to talk about the games I play with other people who do too. And mostly, the games I’d love to talk about aren’t in the top 10 most played games list.
Now I could try to (re)vitalize those communities I would love to see around, and I have done so shortly after the exodus (on my previous account that died with the instance it was on). However, there’s only so much talking into the void I can do until it gets boring.
I also feel like that might be a big issue for people coming over. After I manage to explain to my friends how federation works, they ask me to help them find the [topic of their interest] community, and all I can show them is a community with 10 threads, all over 3 months old and with 0 comments. Sadly it shouldn’t surprise anyone they’re not sticking around after that.
I feel like in some big game communities (like BG3) it looks deader than it should but if you post something you actually get quite a few replies. People are there it’s just that not everyone feels like making a new post.
Though I agree that concentrating on more generic communities for now is a good solution
I think part of the problem is that we migrants decided that each reddit community also needed a corresponding lemmy community right out of the gate. For example, on reddit, there is r/hockey, then there’s a sub for each individual team. However on lemmy, the team subs are dead due to insufficient traffic, and stay dead due to the exact chicken-and-egg problem you describe. The solution is to congregate in a larger community instead, where traffic is higher, even if you’re posting about your relatively popular game. So as a Winnipeg Jets fan, I should post in the lemmy hockey community and not the Jets community. Likewise, if you want more chatter about Cyberpunk2077, post in the general gaming community. It works reasonably well for now, and if the signal to noise ratio ever gets bad in the larger community, then you can split off into specialty topics.
Ironically, reddit also went through this exact process 10-12 years ago. r/science became too noisy, so people ended up in r/physics and r/chemistry, and r/askscience and such. We need to start with communities with larger scope until they’re active enough to split.
At this very moment I’m looking for a discussion on sci fi oriented table top rpgs. On reddit, there is dedicated discussion forums for a few of them. Here, I’ll post to !rpg@ttrpg.network because there’s more people there. Off I go!
Exactly.
Communities need to be more generic until a specialisation becomes too much of the content, then a specific community should be started.Basically this is similar to my “organicness” argument. Reddit grew over many years and these niche subs got created as they were needed, not all at once. On Lemmy and the Fediverse in general, there will be another layer of organic growth and organisation with regards to federation, where instances will clump into “neighbourhoods” that users can choose.
User migration is now possible in Lemmy 0.19:
Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.
Oh hey, I guess I learned something today :)
0.19 has been a real improvement in many ways. I’m a huge fan of the Scaled sort – it helps the niche community content to surface.
Do you use an app or the website for this feature?
Scaled sort? Both. The app needs to support 0.19 though.
I tested Sync and Boost but can’t find it. Which app do you use where this already works?
I’m on iOS. I use Voyager and Mlem and both have it.
Can someone tell me what IPO is, and act like I’m not an idiot XD
They’re going to start selling shares of the company on public markets
An IPO is an initial public offering. It is when shares of the company are being sold for the first time. This allows a company to (potentially) raise an enormous amount of money to expand their business.
When people buy and sell stocks or you see stock prices being reported on this is more or less a secondary market, people or investment firms trading stocks amongst themselves. The company doesn’t get any money when a stock trades hands in this fashion.
An IPO is different. The company is selling little pieces of ownership and the money from those sales go into their coffers. To raise the most funds the company wants to convince potential buyers that the company is valuable and is now or will soon be profitable (and will pay a dividend out for each share owned). This assessment of value (called valuation) is often complex and can take a long, long time.
Reddit’s recent effective shutdown of third party apps to force mobile users onto the Reddit mobile app was almost certainly an effort to get a better valuation. It shows potential buyers of shares that the content on Reddit can only be accessed on mobile devices via an app that the company would get the ad revenue from.
All the kerfuffle and shakeups at Reddit have been leading up to the big day, the IPO. The big news scoop is that that date has been set for March.
This is super informative without being condescending, wonderful job
I hope you have a great day!
Thank you and I hope you have the same.
Thanks a lot, this is a great explanation! You should be a teacher
It also is used as a cash cow by many startups where the IPO will get them nice bonuses, large amounts of valuable stock that they can then sell.
This is honestly what I expect from asshole apex as well
Founded in 2005 by web developer Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, Reddit became best known for its niche discussion groups and its users voting “up” or “down” on the content posted by other members.
I appreciate this extremely sly shade at Steve Huffman.
He’s not an entreprenuer because he didn’t do dick between leaving Reddit and coming back to Reddit whereas Ohanian had a few other companies in his back pocket.
I mean, Ohanian sucks, too, but this sentence is just Reuters kicking dirt in Steve Huffman’s smarmy little bitch face and I’m fucking here for it.
Shoutout to all the tip of the spear folks here on lemmy for devaluing reddits ipo. Even if it makes a minimal dent kudos for taking the more difficult road and standing on principle.
You too buddy!
The fediverse has better memes anyway
Although the Star Trek memes factionalized faster than I would have expected.
I’ve tried to go back to Reddit occasionally and it’s garbage, vastly more garbage than I remember last year, from the web design down to the userbase. Whereas I can’t recall a single time I’ve been on lemmy and encountered an [undeclared] bot
Same. It’s pretty damn terrible.
Just today I noticed how low skilled the reddit base seems to be in my general meme/tech/piracy thrmed feed.
So many basic questions that could literally be answered by or get a start on from ChatGPT etc.
Instead they pollute the subs with their low effort requests for help or guidance.Example: How to get started on pirating anime.
That was a legit title…
The younger generation is less tech savvy than the millenial generation who were forced to figure stuff out themselves and didn’t have smartphones.
I get the idea that a lot of people who emigrated to the fediverse are older and also more tech literate given all the linux memes.
I don’t want to bash those folks that want to liberate themselve but this is either a designed request to engage discussions (state a correct fact, nobody responds vs. state a purposefully wrong fact and everyone and their dogs will come to correct them) or they are literally unable to search google on how to pirate.
This is like being unable to look up porn by themselve searching “Woman tits naked”.
You have a point. Helps increase engagement, like making a spelling mistake or rage bait.
Tiresome, but common.
There are a few bots, mostly spammers. If you mod a community, you can see them. They’re typically caught by the spam filters before I even notice they’re there.
And Huffman’s programming skills weren’t even that great because they quickly brought in Aaron Schwartz to make it all work, yet they always conveniently leave him off of the founders’ list.
This is literally the story of almost every successful tech venture. Even in the company I work for, the CEO was a former salesperson while the dev who started it all was still a dev after 20 years. He singlehandedly created the entire product catalog but no one outside of the company knows his name. The CEO’s name is all over everything, including a “book” he “wrote”.
There’s always a low profile nerd somewhere in the background who is absolutely key to the whole operation but they rarely get cred.
Man I wish you were wrong but I have seen this exact thing 95% of the times I had a look behind closed doors of companies.
And even more dumb: this nerd usually gets undervalued, and as soon as they leave, it takes about half a year for ppl to realize how fucked they are and frantic recruitment noises to fill the offices in the hopes to pick up the pieces.
There is a certain satisfaction in leaving a job and then hearing they had to hire three new people to do what you did.
Huffman was fucking pissed about how good Alien Blue and Apollo were. He bought and absolutely fucking ruined AB and when he couldn’t buy Apollo (he tried) he crushed it under his boot heel.
Fuck Reddit. Scumbags.
RIP Aaron.
RIP Aaron indeed. May his fighting spirit be the anchor point for any community that’s succeeding Reddit.
Aaron’s actions have inspired maia arson crimew.
Amen.
When can we start shorting the stock? /s
It takes a few weeks for options to become available, but they will.
If you have a shit ton of money you can buy shorts directly.
Why do ya need tons of money for shorts? I can buy some $15 shorts at Walmart just easily.
Prob didnt need the /s
If you really want to sabotage, just upload lots of videos to subreddits that you can’t advertise on.
brb time to launch my porn career!
so use Reddit for exclusively porn? way ahead of you
Lemmy has way better quality porn
Disagree. Lemmy’s porn in like 75% just bots reposting content.
Although this is to be expected, and at least this means we have content, it is also a bit unfortunate.
The Bot content is utter garbage. A good chunk of it is reddit links to old stuff. I’m sick of seeing Bot posts from reddit where someone posted a question 3 years ago.
Maybe so, but it doesn’t have my porn
Not if you’re gay
But they killed APIs entirely for nsfw, so that is broken now too.
You can technically just make yourself a mod of your own private subreddit, then NSFW works fine with the API. It works with RedReader. I still use Reddit a bit for very niche subreddits.
Im betting porn only has a year or 2 left on reddit. They already been slowly purging for years. Got to keep the advertisers happy.
There was some other social media site that banned porn a few years ago, I think it was Tumblr? I wonder how that worked out for them.
They reversed the ban and in any case, there was still a shit ton of porn on the site, it was just written rather than drawn.
What’s even there now? I only knew of tumbler because of the anime titties.
It’s been pretty active all this time tbh. I didn’t notice getting worse, but then I was never there for the porn.
Maybe not active in the right way from an advertising perspective idk, but it’s never been lacking good content.
Let me check my Tumblr, oh wait. I don’t have one.
OnlyFans tried a while back. There was probably some internal political maneuvering going on with that one.
Isn’t the whole point of that platform porn though?
Tells you how scarred advertisers are of a titty.
Tumblr reversed their ban a year ago, so that’s pretty self evident.
It was only a partial reversal from what I’ve heard.
2 years left till the inevitable porn ban on reddit and 3 years till that decision kills them
Reddit doesn’t allow NSFW videos on their own hosting service
Hmmm, let’s see.
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Failing company rooted in a more traditional framework they’re trying to break out of
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Said company has no idea what they’re doing and keep doing ridiculous things to “break out of” traditional framework
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Keeps doing things no user/customer asked for
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Said company has no real effective long-term game-plan and keeps changing tack because of bad previous choices
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There’s a good chance the company could go completely bust because of lack of good business plan and solid leadership
Redditors: Reddit is the new GameStop!! DRS!! MOASS!!!
Keeps doing things no user/customer asked for
I’m pretty sure the advertisers - their real customers - asked them to show more ads.
Huffman is ostensibly following Elon Musk’s lead, and last I checked, Musk had pretty effectively chased away a massive amount of what one might call “rational” advertisers. Reddit is absolutely following a similar path, and soon enough there will be advertisers who no longer want to be associated with a toxic brand.
Ostensibly? I think you mean obviously/openly.
It’s not just similarities; Steve Huffman is openly and directly copying Musk. Honestly, given Ex-Twitter’s performance, I have no idea why any investors are allowing that.
spez doesn’t care. He’s realized that, despite his best befuddled efforts, reddit is failing and that no one else will hire him for a cushy CEO job. He wants to take his bag and leave while the getting is still (relatively) good.
Dont forget the booooots sooo mannny boooots how the hell are there such low effort bots everywhere on that site
Blatantly wrong
I fucking love dumbshit comments like these!
“I’m going to say this comment is totally wrong, but I don’t actually care enough about the issue to explain it or use more than *checks notes… two words to justify my position.”
Fucking hilarious, every time.
It’s unlikely I’ll write a longer answer on my phone. But if all you have is ridicule again, and insults, I’ll leave you with some short thoughts.
Gamestop has been doing fairly well, looking at financials. And people complain about not owning their virtual stuff, which NFT smart contracts could be a solution for. I don’t necessarily agree on the the specifics for blockchain based solution though, nor did I like the picturefest which only obfuscated good use cases.
Edit: unlike of course vague half truths
Imagine simping for NFTs in 2024.
It’s a technology, simple as. But since we’re back at the start, who profits the most from not moving status quo?
What other viable and available technology options are there for a system where the consumer can somewhat freely do what they want with digital assets?
And wtf simping? Wat
What other viable and available technology options are there for a system where the consumer can somewhat freely do what they want with digital assets?
NFTs do nothing to help this.
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Is it even worth anything to investors anymore at this point? Huffman kind of destroyed any faith anyone had in Reddit, seems like it’s just going to slowly turn into an ad distribution service to scam people who don’t know any better lol
I’ve said myself that reddit’s biggest assets were it’s passionate userbase and it’s trove of commentary. But I remember reading a comment, years ago now, that reddit’s biggest asset was it’s profile data. They know what communities you visited, and which you were most passionate about. They know what specific topics and keywords got you involved in a conversation. They know the content that you upvote and that you downvote. They know roughly where you live, what times you’re online. They probably have a decent idea of your job and how much you earn. They data is worth something to data brokers, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they start selling it after the IPO.
Well yeah, but that’s worth a lot.
There’s always some value to vultures (and vulture capital) that want to pick over the pieces. It might even still have meaningful value as an ongoing social media platform. But the expected IPO value has dropped heavily in the past few years, and is likely to keep dropping. This really isn’t because of anything at Reddit, but of the financial markets in general.
The big question is how will investors feel about the potential for returns, i.e. revenues. I expect to see (well, read about) a whole lot of enshittification over there. Much more data mining, ads, freemium features, etc.
Buying puts on that bitch on day 1.
Hope we see some more migration. Lemmy is miniscule in comparison, with 60,000 active users by last count across all instances.
Heck, even /r/mildyinteresting has 220,000 users and that isn’t even the main subreddit, it’s a misspelled version of /r/mildlyinteresting.
I think it’s fine. Lemmy was actually nicer with less users. Now it grew a bit and all the trolls also came along. If it becomes huge, it will probably lose most of its charm.
Bigger is actually not better sometimes I think.
I’m happy right now with it. But sure, mostly memes and Linux stuff which I like, so…
Also Reddit has been around for over a decade and lemmy has existed for about 4 years. It’s hard to compare the two in that regard.
/r/videos used to be a default and supposedly has millions of subscribers, but when I was still on reddit you’d regularly see content with 100 upvotes reach the top of the subreddit and maybe 10 comments. Often this was on bot reposts.
Their numbers should be take with a huge grain of salt.
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Seems like a terrible investment, I can’t see what they can possibly do to add value. Everybody who wants to use Reddit is already on it and anything they do to try and milk it will just lose them users.
I’ve had the impression for a long time that Reddit could stand to lose a large part of its users in order to be more profitiable. The nerds getting into long winded “ackchually” “debates” are making the site worse for the meme scrollers and they are also not the type to click on ads. They’re not trying to attract more users, they want to maximise revenue from the existing pool. I don’t think it’s a coincidence Reddit has been slowly moving away from “discussion board” and towards image and short video (like the other three big platforms) because that’s where the money’s at.
My prediction is that shortly after the IPO we’ll see .old go away, and a further sterilizing of subreddits ability to forge unique identities. The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators, buuuut they haven’t had trouble after the API debacle so maybe there are more people willing to provide free labor than I assume!
The only question I have is how do they expect to attract sufficient moderators
I mean YouTube comment sections were known for years to be an unmoderated nightmare of just people saying the absolute dumbest shit.
YouTube was and still is the most popular video site.
I think reddit has just stopped caring about the real content of the comments since, like you said, they’ve pretty much pivoted to images and video. Expect the comments section to be further eroded as well, in the name of needing less moderation. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Reddit do an “AI” push where the “AI” is mostly just replacing moderators with what amounts to a more advanced automod.
I hope the STONKS Apes are ready…
They will short the fuck out of it. There is literally no way this company can make money without making the product so much worse they will really start bleeding the users they need for revenue. It will explode on launch week and crash two or three weeks later.
Long short, long volatility until it flatlines. Basically free money. Their product is users and their data. If they upset the ecosystem users leave and decrease valuations… leads to layoffs and cost saving measures. Rinse and repeat until sufficiently dead.
The second they’re publicly traded layoffs will simply be part of the cycle regardless of stock performance. C-Level must be seen to do SOMETHING to generate profits, or at least try. Regulators suck hard at following up on anything, but you gotta play by the book to keep them from sniffing around.
I’m also fully expecting this to be a case of butchering the pig. Huffman and the other cunts in charge will sell of their shares, make millions and run it into the ground. Much less scrutiny if a publicly traded company evaporates due to bad stock performance than when a private company suddenly disintegrates and the C-Level runs away with all the cash. Blame it on the STONK crowd and you’re literally golden.
I’m sure they’ll try and make as much money on the way out as possible, but tinfoil: This is the start of the end with a certain degree of intent by those in charge of that fucking company.
Without a doubt. They can’t reasonably increase revenue so they need to pad* the books with layoffs. Those will result in the platform rotting out (further) from the inside. That’s the long short position. Long volatility while the price bounces around like a coked up jack russel terrier.
The offering would also test the willingness of some Reddit users to back the company’s stock market debut. Many investors posting on the platform have helped fuel dozens of “meme” stock rallies in the last three years.
Whatever nonsense the’re implying here is twisted and awefull. Like they owe it to the platform?
How are futures doing on MemeEconomy?
Over here on Lemmy, Star Trek memes are doing fine, so that bodes well for our future stonks.
No idea, my account over there got soft-locked more than a year ago, moved here when Apollo stopped letting me lurk.
Surey those communities moved over aswell? Cant imagine its more then bots and my dad nowadays.
