this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
400 points (96.9% liked)

Technology

57472 readers
4165 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Reddit Is Letting Power Users In on Its IPO. Not Everyone’s Buying::Reddit says it wants to reward users by letting them buy into the company’s public listing. Some say it’s too risky—others say they won’t pay a company they’ve already given hours of free labor to.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 145 points 6 months ago (2 children)

They're just trying to get people to tie their real names, addresses, email, and financial information to their profiles, especially the ones with established post histories going back years.

They can figure some of that out, but all rolled up and verified by the account holder?

That makes their data on users waaaaaay more valuable to the people who buy data.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Now this is one part where I believe them. Public companies have strict controls on their investor relations. I can believe that they are going out of their way to keep their investor info separate from their user info. They will probably get fined by the SEC if they don't.

That doesn't make it a good investment, of course. I don't want to be King Steven's exit liquidity.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 months ago

Yeah, I think they just want memestock-like bag holders, people invested in reddit "as a company/platform" who are unlikely to sell

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

With Spez at the helm I'd be surprised if they didn't wind up getting in trouble either way, guess time will tell.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I actually got an email from Reddit about the offering today. They specifically, in bold, say they don't have access to this information as it is only provided to the plan administrator.

You would still have to be idiotic to join this IPO.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

They specifically, in bold, say they don’t have access to this information as it is only provided to the plan administrator.

I seriously doubt it, because if someone isn't verifying that you hold the account it was sent to. People could "sell" their invites and I feel like this is already walking a fine line with the SEC with the whole "early access" thing.

It would be trivial to write a bot that pm'ed accounts that met this metric to receive an invite offering a tiny amount for their codes.

Hell, someone could do that and never follow thru with buying accounts as it would make some users more likely to buy.

This whole thing is likely to go horrible, because reddit never thinks shit thru.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

This is really nothing special in the world of IPOs, companies offer their initial shares to specific parties before the public is able to puchase them. These are typically investors, employees, etc.

It would be a pretty big problem if it was found that the financial company administering the IPO was to share personally identifiable information to Reddit. SEC rules actually have teeth, so I wouldn't be too worried about them lying about it. It does look like you have to provide them a name to register so sure they might have that associated with your account if they don't already, but it does help prevent selling the opportunity to buy.

It isn't helpful to spread FUD here when you are discussing something like the offering of securities products which have very defined procedures that the offering party must follow. This is one area you don't want to fuck around and find out about.