Here's hoping. (yeah, I'm an unreasonable, hateful bitch. I despise what they did with the Apollo dev (and others) and I hope it bites them in the arse.)

How it started: what if we built a platform where people create and moderate the content, but we just make all the money?

How it's going:

If I understand the article correctly, that 5.6 billion evaluation was at the end of May - before any of this shitshow started

On one hand, it's likely exactly what they wanted. They get a vanilla app with vanilla content, perfectly tailored for vanilla investors. The part they forgot is that the beacon of internet culture will never be vanilla.

But valuation is a very real predictive measure on IPOs, and what Reddit is making all these bad decisions in preparation for. They tried to cut a little more pie by dragging third party app users onto their app to try and increase revenue and bump valuation, it's just that it was so terribly misguided and executed that it had the opposite effect and blew up in their face.

True, but the valuation is for investors and per fucknut, Reddit isn’t making any money, hence the api push to a paid platform.

Also, Reddit is going public soon when they IPO and investors aren’t going to want to invest in a bot ridden, non active community.

I’d say 75%+ used Reddit on their phones and many of them used 3rd party apps.

The point is, Reddit IPOing soon and then this fiasco is the worst thing for them.

Reddit is antsy to effectuate their exit strategy.

Or to put it more simply: everyone with a stake in Reddit, from pigboy Huffman, to institutional investors like Fidelity, to employees who earned equity is eager for Reddit to have their IPO so they can offload their shares on the public stock market.

Their valuation will be an important factor, if not the most important factor, that will determine for which price those stocks will initially be put on the market.

So while slashing the valuation in half will not directly lose them money, it could translate into the initial stock price being half of what they anticipated, causing them to get half of what they would’ve gotten had the valuation not be slashed in half.

There is no way in hell that people with equity in Reddit are not pissed about the slashing of the valuation, since they now anticipate getting a haircut as much as half of what they initially expected to get.

Private companies (which is most businesses) are still worth something. If big investors like Fidelity value your business at $1bn, banks will absolutely consider that as collateral for loans and so on. And if they say your business has halved in value, they’ll consider that too.

Greedy Pig Boy has said for a long time that Reddit isn't profitable. That means they're losing money every year.

Buy shorts? Buy puts?I need some ill advise, where's wallstreetbets when you need them?

I mean I have first editions of the original runs from 1997 when they were brand new to the states. In fact, all of my cards are from the original set that was released, I never collected anything past the first 151 set. I'm not saying their valuation was not inflated, but it's the usual trope of "oh hey, you remember that old nintendo, those old basketball cards, old baseball cards, etc.. I got rid of them" trope

Now something that was super inflated, beanie babies and yes, I still have almost all of the old mcdonald's ones still in bags from when I was a little girl. I don't care that they aren't worth monetary value, they are worth something to me sentimentally. Something I collected with my mom.

It’s not out of solidarity, advertisers are worried they’ll turn into lightning rods: https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/ripples-through-reddit-as-advertisers-weather-moderators-strike/

If good people left Reddit, then the content that remains for the others might not be good enough to keep them engaged.