Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

It's kind of... hilarious that Reddit has managed to wait so long that they've ended up shooting for an IPO just after the company's third largest individual shareholder (Altman) created an existential threat to destroy reddit.

A couple of years ago I think you could've made a decent argument for reddit, it's never going to have as good economics as Facebook but there's definitely value and communities there. It's a bit like twitter- big reach but poor economics.

The problem is that with Generative AI there's just an enormous question mark over the business. What is Reddit going to do to ensure that their pseudonymous user base are real people and it isn't just going to be over-run with bots. They already had a smaller version of this problem - astroturf advertising, but now that problem is on steriods. And because they don't have any money they don't have the resources to solve this problem!

If you want to buy this stock I just don't know how you justify to yourself that any of the numbers are going to be real. How many unique users are real users? How many ads that were displayed appeared in front of real eyes? How many comments are actually hand written? And if you as a shareholder don't know, the hell is Reddit going to persuade advertisers?

Re: Reddit Launches Long-Awaited IPO with $748M Target

#10

Post by everfrustrated » Mon, Mar 11, 2024, 12:11 PM UTC

Reddit CEO pay was $190M

Company exists simply to extract money for the CEO. You'd have to be insane to buy any shares.