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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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What the hell do people expect? It's weeks before the frigging IPO. Of course they are going to do everything they can to post a profit. The users are not the customers. The users are the product. The investors are the customers! Dummies!
How can they even do an IPO when the CEO is here saying the company isn't even profitable after 15+ years?
That's perfectly normal. You're not really understanding what's up for sale. Reddit has been operating at a loss with attractive services to build a userbase. The objective the whole time has been acquisition (for the original team) or IPO (for Conde Nast). Investors will have access to these user to exploit however they like. That's what's for sale, here; the users.
The IPO is expected to raise 10-15 billion dollars. That means that investors are expecting to extract at least that and ideally (over Reddit's lifetime) several times that from the user base. Things will have to change radically to facilitate that. If we expect Reddit to reliably remain relevant for another ten years, they're going to try to suck two billion dollars out of us every single year.
The thing is, people make the data, it should be THEIRS to sell. Reddit and all other websites should be paying for the data they steal from users. We create the data, we create the value, they take it for nothing and exploit it to make billions and become some of the wealthiest businesses in the world.
The situation we have now is basically like a car manufacturer building a car but not paying the person who manufactures the screws.
The thing is, the people shouldn't be using commercial social networks, because when they do, they are the product. When they do, they lose control and ownership of their data. Their data gets used against them and against all of us.
None of this should be a surprise to anyone and I find it incredibly frustrating that it is. We've been telling you for twenty years.