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.
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.
Yeah, I think they just want memestock-like bag holders, people invested in reddit "as a company/platform" who are unlikely to sell
With Spez at the helm I'd be surprised if they didn't wind up getting in trouble either way, guess time will tell.
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.
I got an invite, too. I reported of as spam.
I also got one. I have a little bit of money sitting in a brokerage holding account, and I was already thinking of buying a single share as a joke (so I had the option to heckle them "as an investor in the company"). But I wouldn't do it via their stupid IPO insider process. That requires the buyer to share some PII with reddit. And I don't trust them as far as I could throw them.
This asshole is just exercising his options to take money from the same moderators that were up in arms over his changes last year. Make no mistake, this is Spez's revenge.
I really hope this whole thing backfires on reddit, but I think the reality is that it will further enshittify until it's profitable, and it's already so big it's unlikely to fail.
Lemmy just isn't a replacement and I think the nature of lemmy will stop it from ever being one unless someone throws godlike resources at one giant instance that federates with basically nobody.
What is holding lemmy back? I use it almost exclusively for months and find it to be a great replacement.
I think the main thing holding it back is the lack of active niche communities.
This is the big thing. There are multiple niche, and not-so-niche, subreddits that just don't exist here. Or they have nowhere near the presence as on Reddit.
Don't get me wrong, I'm trying to fix that by contributing where I can, but I am just one person.
Yeah a lot of people here pretend like Lemmy and as a side thing Linux are these massive things poised to take over the world but realistically they're just a minority thing that isn't changing much at all.
Will take a new competitor doing something completely different to really stir things up to make moving away from traditional options worthwhile.
Lemmy has relatively poor automation and moderation tools compared to Reddit. There is no automatic moderator, for example, and you also don't have usability tools and things that other people have coded, unlike if you were to use Reddit today, or some years ago in its heyday. Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world because the tools at the time meant that anyone can sign up at .world, and post to beehaw, bypassing their registration restrictions.
Federation can also be a bit of a headache to get around if you're a layman. Do you need to go to all of the instances, or risk losing out on content that is hosted on other places? How do you sign up to it, etc. It's a good bit more complicated, and less intuitive compared to a centralised service like Reddit.
The user base also isn't big enough. Lemmy doesn't quite have the critical mass of users to make it into the mainstream, and put it in more direct competition with a place like Reddit. Even busy communities are really quiet compared to a relatively active thread. This community is arguably only as active as it seems to be because of the bot posts.
Finally, Lemmy is still pretty young, and has a fair few teething issues. It wasn't all that long ago that servers that updated to 0.18 couldn't see any posts from older servers, because they didn't Federate properly, and not all that long before that where Lemmy's UI had some serious glitches, such as by seeming to signing you in as someone else's account. People might want something that's a bit more stable, rather than moving over for sure.
It's probably part of why a fair few Subreddits moved to Discord, since it doesn't have a few of those issues, and is relatively mature.
They sent me an offer. I ain't buying
There have been quite a few comments like yours here. Is everyone on Lemmy a former 'power user'. That would be great.
In another thread a former mod said that both they and their bot had been given the offer.
Someone replied to me in another thread and said that they were giving invites out in stages based on number of mod actions or karma. The first cutoff was "only" 200k karma. The lowest was 20k.
I was thinking of signing up just to see the information but then I read the prospectus and realized it was a losing investment, plain and simple.
I apparently must be as I got one as well.
I got it via email. Reported it as spam. 🤣
Who the fuck is reddit
Some enshittified Lemmy alternative run by a megalomaniac who sucks Elon's dick behind Wendy's dumpsters and milks his userbase (but not in the fun way)
They are going to try and fleece users even more by doing an IPO way too high. Its going to get shorted into oblivion and then settle in at about -70% of IPO value.
Tbh if they'd made an offer like this a couple years ago I probably would've taken them up on it. In fact, I remember when spez first took over he made a thread that floated a similar idea.
Here's my Reddit Gold. 🪙 One share please!
We are letting you in to take a slice if this juicy juicy pie only because you are special. Seems sometging out of a dodgy salesman or a conmans playnook to me
I got an invite. Couldn't invest even if I wanted to because I'm not a US resident.
I wonder what's considered a power user. Because I got one, and I wouldn't have considered myself one...
I may actually try to do the thing where you bet against the stock on this one. Smallest amount possible but it could be fun
Please make sure you read up on how shorting a stock works! Your losses are theoretically infinite if you short a stock. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/100913/basics-short-selling.asp
But they said they'll only do a small amount, so they'll only risk losing a small infinite amount of money.
Options contracts for strategies like this typically cover 100 shares minimum though, so if Reddit's stock goes public at say $10.00 per share and they buy 1 contract, they're going to need $1000 just to buy the contract, and if the share price ends up going up to say $11 instead of going down, that $1000 is gone plus they're down another $100.
That's not how options work.
There's calls, which are contracts where the buyer can buy a number of shares (typically 100) at the specified strike price at any time between purchase and its expiry. Then there's puts, contacts that allow the buyer to sell a number of shares for the specified strike price between purchase and the expiry.
The maximum loss of buying an option contract is the initial purchase price (though with bad luck, you can lose more from buying calls if they are in the green when exercised but then the piece drops before the shares are delivered).
The option with infinite potential loss is selling naked calls, which require you to purchase 100 shares to sell them at the strike price if they are exercised (which they will be if the price is above the strike).
Also, options are priced based on the intrinsic value (difference between the share price and strike price when the option is "in the money") plus potential value over time (statistics based, basically the odds that it will end up in the money based on the difference to strike price, volatility, and time to expiry).
If the 100 shares are worth $1000, options will generally only be priced that much if they have that value. Like puts with $20 strike could be exercised immediately for $1k profit, so the price will be higher than $1k. But $11 puts only have an intrinsic value of $100, plus some time value. If you buy one of those contacts and the price goes up to $10.50, the contract would still have an intrinsic value of $50. If volatility also increases, the time value can increase more than the intrinsic value decreases.
Short selling, which also exposes you to infinite potential risk, is when you borrow shares to sell, expecting the price to go down so you can rebuy at a lower price to return those shares. You pay interest in the meantime, too. There are no options involved, but similarly to naked calls, you have an obligation to buy those shares at whatever price they end up at to close that position.
Btw, please don't assume that because losses are capped for options at the original purchase price (if you're buying), it means options are safe. You're betting completely on price movements, if you're wrong, you lose all of the money you bet. If you bet by buying shares, the price needs to go to 0 to lose the full investment. Holding shares has infinite potential growth and maximum loss of the original purchase price, too, but you can hold them for years and be wrong about them the whole time but still hold some value.
Just make sure you put in a stop-loss order
I did laugh when I was sent an offer for a stock preorder.
If it gave me the right to short then yeah, I'd be in on that.
It concerns me that you are so eager to short yet think that one needs to buy shares in order to short. You should probably just stay away from financial instruments you don't understand
You know what I did with the message I got from Reddit about this? BALEETED
Mine was DACHEATED.
I got the invite but unprofitable companies don't really make up a large part of my portfolio
I got a message from them today and I haven't used reddit since last June or so. They must be desperate.
I got one even though I've not posted in months, let it go when I made an account here. Old account though so maybe whatever algorithm they used didn't look for recency. I don't think I'm interested, it seems to me they have already passed the peak and are on their way down, and going public will surely just accelerate the decline.
Fuuuuuuuuuuck that shit
got the email, trashed the email.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
