this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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"Become profitable" is just their stated goal.
I think that their actual goal is to look profitable for the upcoming ipo so that the CEOs can cash a fat check and leave. They likely don't care about what happens after that.
So the "become profitable while simultaneously destroying everything that made it valuable" platitude is more like "they're cutting down the tree for the wood without thinking about the squirrels"
Yep.
Say the IPO is 9/1/23. The company wants to do anything they can to juice the numbers for that date, even if it means on 9/2/23 it crashes and burns.
When a company prepares for an IPO, every long-term metric is thrown out the window
Time to figure out if I can short it at the IPO
Not public yet, I’m afraid
But there are only so many Elon's that would buy a sinking ship for a shit ton of money.
That's the dumbest part. There's no guarantee that this ipo bid is going to pan out. Huffman is betting big, it's just too bad he's so full of himself that he doesn't realize his actions will probably be what causes this ipo to fail.
He wanted to fly under the radar and make changes that look good on paper while keeping the community relatively the same. Instead he made a splash so big that major news outlets are still talking about it months later, and now he's actively alienating the volunteer work that holds the whole site together.
Greed kills another thing, history of humankind.
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding your comment but.. it's an IPO, they're going from private to public. Twitter was the opposite, which is unusual. Right now Steve Huffman is the musk of reddit.
They still need people to actually buy the shares of a sinking ship.
There's gonna be plenty of institutional investors and index funds who don't give a shit about drama that will buy it up regardless.
For what? To lose money?
SNAP 2.0
Sounds like Lynx Africa
But are investors this stupid? Who invests in an IPO without doing research on the company's activities? If they check the internet and it's countless articles about how their users and moderators are pissed and leaving, why would anyone think it's going to be profitable?
The sad thing is that reddit will probably do alright for at least a few years. It may not be an awful investment in the short term.
That said, it'll slowly burn out and investors will be left holding the bag. But that's alright, because Steve Huffman will have gotten his payday and retired to the decommissioned missile silo that he converted to luxury apartments in case of doomsday. All he had to do was fundamentally change the way people use the internet by selling the company that his two smart buddies created.
Fucking preach.
Yes. Look at the 2008 housing crash, and tell me average investors are intelligent.
They definitely do, check out WSB and Robinhood subs
Investors aren't great at seeing what makes or breaks a community. They just want to see how Reddit plans on profiting from the community.
Not necessarily, companies like Twitter make consistent losses with no real path to change that, yet its deemed to have value by investors.
It's more like "cutting down the forest to harvest the wood once" rather than "manage the harvesting so that it can be generating wood for generations". It's typical capitalism.