[HN Gopher] Reddit hires its first chief financial officer as it...
___________________________________________________________________
Reddit hires its first chief financial officer as it prepares for
an IPO
Author : nwotnagrom
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-03-05 14:36 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| pibechorro wrote:
| Reddit is no longer a place of free expression and community. The
| censorship and negative echo chambers there are out of control.
| Its only going to get worse. R/wsb do your magic here..
| indigo_rover wrote:
| I agree, one of the worse offenders that I've found is
| r/DebateCommunism. That subreddit is strangely similar to the
| now defunct r/theDonald and I would go as far as calling it a
| brainwashing academy for the debil mind.
| pradn wrote:
| It has always been like this, since about when it stopped being
| a little community for programmers. r/politics, for example,
| has never been any better than it is currently.
| dageshi wrote:
| You can't have a "community" at the size reddit has grown to.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Of course it isn't, because the libertarian ideal is impossible
| on the internet.
|
| Gab / Parler are self-proclaimed bastions of free speech, but
| they boot left-leaning opinions and have no privacy protection
| (because they were hacked).
|
| Voat gained popularity when Reddit got rid of the hate
| subreddits, and it shut down late last year because nobody
| wants to invest in or advertise on a platform where everything
| goes.
|
| Sorry for zooming in on your 'censorship' comment, but it's
| something that just rubs me up the wrong way. No community can
| do without censorship (or I prefer "content moderation",
| censorship is mainly used for governments and e.g. journalists;
| you won't get put in jail for being a prick on the internets)
| and be sustainable at the same time.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| /u/spezymandus is partial only to his own views regarding what
| content should be permitted to present itself on Reddit to the
| point of hypocrisy. At the end of the day the only reason that
| r/wsb and it's 4chanesque shenanigans haven't been banned is
| because it's onboarded so many new users. But at some point
| it's going to become as clamped down as all the other
| subreddits if not thoroughly eviscerated. Especially as they
| start onboarding advertisers post-IPO. It's goodbye Usenet 2.0,
| hello New Facebook!
| symlinkk wrote:
| I recommend shorting it. Reddit today is an absolute ghetto
| compared to 5 years ago. All of the interesting content and free
| thinking users have been banned.
| pradn wrote:
| Which communities do you mean?
| JamesDeepDown wrote:
| Reddit is a catastrophe of anti-US and anti-capitalist
| propaganda.
|
| The propagandists are:
|
| -Russians, trying to weaken the UK/EU politically
|
| -Chinese, trying to weaken the US financially
|
| -Extreme-leftists, trying to destroy the capitalist framework of
| western society
|
| Clearly these 3 groups despise each other, but they all have a
| common goal. Therefore the propaganda is EVERYWHERE and has
| infected almost every corner of Reddit.
|
| Every day the front page is filled with clownishly fake and
| divisive stories. Reddit does NOTHING to stop this.
|
| I say this because, once they are a public company, they may find
| the tolerance for such propaganda is VERY different to how it is
| today.
|
| EDIT:
|
| I would also say that Reddit as a moral or ethical company is
| amongst the worst corporations that the US has ever seen.
|
| By making money from divisive fake propaganda, they are up there
| with Enron, tobacco companies in the 1960s, those who sold
| Thalidomide is the 1950s, Cambridge Analytica etc etc.
|
| History will be brutally harsh on this company, and those who
| worked there and enabled it.
|
| I wish them luck finding a financial officer who is willing to
| ignore all their problems.
| [deleted]
| taylorlapeyre wrote:
| Without evidence to support these claims, I feel like what
| you've said just sounds like more fear-stoking.
|
| It's also likely that Reddit has become more international, and
| the world at large leans more left than the current US. Couple
| that with mostly-US news stories, and it's not surprising to me
| that Reddit is often quite angry.
|
| Without evidence to support accusations to widespread
| government propaganda, I'm going to have to go with the simpler
| of the two options.
| pjmorris wrote:
| Are you familiar with the 'Powell Memo' [0] To over simplify,
| it makes the 1971 version of your arguments against Reddit, but
| against the prevailing culture of the time. It then argues that
| a deliberate campaign of responding to those challenges is
| called for. I would argue that it was successful in its aims.
| There is a robust culture of promoting US financial interests
| that seems to be able to deal with e.g. social websites.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.#Powell_Mem...
| stjo wrote:
| Not the proper thread for this discussion, but I don't know if
| I want Reddit to stop it. Do you want free speech and all the
| speech you don't like with it? Or you want heavily moderated
| echo chamber? It seems to me people want neither - they disdain
| the "ugly" opinions of people other than them, but they don't
| want to feel oppressed by Big Corp choosing what is ok and what
| not.
|
| The solution is having multiple silos, think YouTube channel
| "Second Thought" (heavily leftist content) or Parler, when we
| get the worst from both worlds - everybody always trying to
| find the smallest place that can feel safe to speak with no
| actual discussion between different viewpoints.
|
| Pushing for more moderation leads to precisely this option. I
| believe we need less of it, even if this forces us to confront
| the "other side".
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Eh? At the same time it is (was?) a bastion for Trumpists and
| conservatives.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| A company that is nowhere near being profitable (on top of
| virtually no cash flow) is going public?
| cecja wrote:
| Well at least we know why they censored porn from /r/all.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| Anyone have a recommendation for a reddit clone open source
| project?
|
| Edit: an open source project where you can quickly roll out your
| own reddit style, link agg, site.
| pov wrote:
| https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes
| pierrec wrote:
| Not quite a clone but a decentralized version:
| https://getaether.net/ has been slowly improving since it was
| posted here a while back. Still not a lot of users, I think,
| but that could easily change with events like this.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Gab? Voat?
|
| lol.
| kowlo wrote:
| Lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
| NoOneNew wrote:
| How mature would you say the project is (obviously a very
| subjective question)?
| kowlo wrote:
| It works, but it's a little awkward to customise at the
| moment... an example at https://lemmy.ml and
| https://www.chapo.chat (although chapo are supposedly
| moving away from Lemmy)
| NoOneNew wrote:
| Holy ballsack, chapo is a leftist cesspool like parler is
| a rightist cesspool. It's just one big death to america
| ISIS wonderland.
|
| Lemmy looks interesting all the same... but maybe a
| different example site that's not politically extremist
| would be better to convince folks to try it lol.
| [deleted]
| kowlo wrote:
| I won't pass any judgement on either community, but to
| clarify, I was linking them as "popular" Lemmy instances
| as a demonstration of the technology
| jodrellblank wrote:
| What kind of political viewpoint thinks /ISIS/ is on the
| /left/?
|
| Aggressive fundamental Islamic theocratic dictatorship
| without human rights, without equality, without trial
| before jury ... what does that have in common with the
| left and representative democracy, equality, helping the
| poor and sick, regulating corporations and environmental
| pollution, pro-peace, anti-warfare, and etc?
| caslon wrote:
| Wow, the quality of discussion on that second link is
| really incredible. Surprising!
| JamesDeepDown wrote:
| Advertisers HATE unmoderated user-generated content. The UGC on
| Reddit is probably the most extreme for any mainstream website.
| How are they going to make money? No advertisers will touch them
| in the current state.
| bidirectional wrote:
| But advertisers _do_ touch them? Everytime I go on reddit I see
| dozens of ads.
| JamesDeepDown wrote:
| Advertisers on Reddit are small boutique businesses. Fortune
| 500 type companies won't touch them.
| cecja wrote:
| I suggest you disable your ad blocker and visit some of the
| major subreddits instead of talking out of your ass.
| bidirectional wrote:
| To test this out, I fired up reddit.com in a private
| browsing session. The first four ads I saw were: a Windows
| 10 HP laptop, an AAA game from Square Enix, coronavirus
| messaging from the UK government, and a small indie game.
|
| I don't think what you're saying is true at all.
| sefrost wrote:
| I've seen a lot of Accenture adverts.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| I checked on a computer with no ad blocker, and I see
| adverts from the UK Government for their job seeking help
| site, SquareSpace[1], Toyota[2], Sky[3], HP / Microsoft,
| BT[4]. You signed up a new account here to post politically
| divisive and trolling views on Reddit, apparently based on
| fantasy.
|
| [1] Squarespace isn't in the Fortune 500 because they're
| 575th, so it's close -
| https://fortune.com/company/square/fortune500/
|
| [2] Toyota isn't in the Fortune 500, but they're 10th in
| the Fortune Global 500 -
| https://fortune.com/company/toyota-motor/global500/
|
| [3] BSkyB is not in the Fortune 500 size, but would be
| about 180th by revenue if it was.
|
| [4] British Telecom, which is not in the Fortune 500, but
| would be about 100th by revenue if it was.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| If/when Reddit IPOs I look forward to the shenanigans /r/wsb and
| friends will play. Given that reddit primary relies on the free
| labour of moderators, I can see co-ordinated mod strikes
| occurring with the purpose of hurting the share price as a way of
| making reddit hq pay attention.
| nojito wrote:
| >I can see co-ordinated mod strikes occurring with the purpose
| of hurting the share price as a way of making reddit hq pay
| attention.
|
| For every mod that goes on strike, many more people will step
| up to take over.
|
| Most of the mod work in the high volume subs are through
| automod anyway.
| Macha wrote:
| If it comes to Reddit Inc replacing the mods, that will
| likely be a relatively unpopular move for at least the short
| term until people forget.
|
| The stock price harm is less from the site disruption but
| more for continuing the site's reputation as hard to
| monetise.
| Graffur wrote:
| In my experience, automod ruins subs. Post something.. get
| notification.. removed by automod
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I for one don't believe a company's politics - public or
| otherwise - have a significant impact on share prices.
|
| Rich or many people buying and selling though.
| bombcar wrote:
| I suspect r/wsb will run afoul of some not-quite-applicable
| rule before the S-1 is filed.
| penagwin wrote:
| I doubt this, reddit seems to have embraced the attention wsb
| has gotten them (see their super bowl ad).
|
| While I can see shenanigans with replacing mods, I don't see
| them shutting down the subreddit.
| Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote:
| How's reddit going to handle 500 mods going awol?
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Reddit replaces moderators on popular subs all the time.
|
| There are thousands of people who would accept the
| position.
| madamelic wrote:
| Not to mention the supermods who are thinly veiled
| employees / contractors of Reddit.
| w0de0 wrote:
| Are they truly as fungible as the parent comment
| suggests? If they are indeed "thinly veiled employees /
| contractors of Reddit" that would imply some not
| immediately replaceable value in their work, stemming
| from informal training, donation of time, tolerance for
| redditors, etc.
|
| If so, indeed they may strike and indeed they may be in
| the right demanding some part of an IPO's value.
| slap_shot wrote:
| Can you expand on what you mean by that?
| maxfurman wrote:
| GP is implying that the admins will find a way to take down
| WSB if it does in fact ever threaten Reddit's IPO, whether
| or not any actual rule breaking occurs. Which wouldn't be
| completely unheard of for Reddit.
| bombcar wrote:
| Exactly. They've done it before and if the SEC starts
| asking pointed questions or even a bad NY Times article
| that threatens the IPO, WSB will be gone super fast.
| Shivetya wrote:
| I agree with what is implied, Reddit is provided quite a
| bit of cover in this area, they could simply say they did
| it to prevent possible legal issues that they would be
| liable for. Of course this does not stop them from using
| their Discord to effect any action they want.
|
| I am still waiting to see how Congress acts overall to
| the likes of WSB and trading apps in general. I am
| betting they will have some wonderful sounding law with
| all sorts of wording claiming it is to protect the
| unwitting amateurs while in fact simply protecting their
| wall street donors from these amateurs upsetting their
| apple cart.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > wouldn't be completely unheard of
|
| I'd phrase that as "is standard operating procedure",
| actually.
| mrfusion wrote:
| I miss the reddit of 15 years ago. Such an exciting place. Can we
| recreate it?
| Macha wrote:
| Small, dominated by techies. Isn't that pretty much what HN has
| become, minus the porn that was on Reddit from early on? It's
| hard to argue that HN is still really focused on startups. They
| get an outsized influence because of who runs it and where it
| came from, but they're still a small percentage of the content.
|
| Reddit was only founded 15 years ago, but I'm pretty sure HN is
| actually larger than the reddit of 12 years ago, when I joined.
|
| /u/Deimorz (former Reddit admin, prior to that foudner of
| r/Games, which was one of the more successful attempts at doing
| a "same topic but more serious" competitor to a sub that ended
| up meme filled) is also trying his own competitor at tildes.net
| for more general purpose. Notably it's not a "free speech zone"
| like Voat and other attempted alternatives, so shouldn't be
| full of nazis when more reasonable users are looking for
| somewhere to migrate to.
| dang wrote:
| > It's hard to argue that HN is still really focused on
| startups.
|
| I should hope so. That was the intention behind its name
| change in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Part of the problem is that all of us who have Reddit
| nostalgia are also 15 years older, largely set in our
| careers, and oftentimes have families and other demands on
| our attention.
|
| Reddit was founded at a specific moment in history, and a lot
| of what made it special was what was going on in that moment
| of history. It was right when the web became useful and
| mainstream and it became possible for a few guys to put
| together a website and change the world. A lot of the
| excitement of that time period was around "What _else_ is
| about to change in the near future that we could take
| advantage of? " The early Reddit userbase was often
| 20-somethings and a few late teens, right around the age
| range when peoples' futures are most fluid and eager to jump
| on the next thing.
|
| There are a bunch of similar exciting developments happening
| _right now_ , with similar exciting communities. DeFi,
| drones, self-driving cars, robotics, EVs, a lot of climate
| tech. Curiously, most of them get dismissed when they're
| posted on Hacker News, much like how most 40-somethings
| dismissed Web 2.0 when it happened. Maybe it's more a
| function of the age than the community or tech.
| thewarrior wrote:
| You're one of the people on HN whose comments I follow. I'd
| be curious to hear your opinions on
|
| DeFi: Sounds really interesting but feels like something
| really niche not like the next Reddit.
|
| Drones: Drones are really cool and programmable. Fully
| agreed.
|
| Self driving: Potentially transformative in 10-15 years.
| There's not much most of us can do to be a part of it. It
| will be dominated by Tesla, Waymo.
|
| Robotics: The eternal dream. But right now it's hard to
| even make a robot that prepares Amazon packages. Might
| definitely change at some point.
|
| EVs and climate tech: Very important work but it's hard to
| get rich quickly off of it. That reduces interest.
| nostrademons wrote:
| DeFi: Very interesting long-term, but the infrastructure
| isn't there yet - Ethereum (or alternative) needs to
| scale, and there need to be better ways of representing
| real-world things on the blockchain. I'd say at least a
| decade off, and could go the way of the 2000-2005 P2P
| boom (note though that that boom had some very lasting
| effects: Bittorrent, Skype & VC, DVCSs like git, and
| Bitcoin). We'll probably have periodic bubbles and busts
| until then. May get some help from Fed policy. _If_ it
| succeeds it will revolutionize everything - the financial
| sector is 25% of American GDP and our primary export,
| features a lot of moral hazard and grift, and smart
| contracts enable some forms of commerce we haven 't seen
| before.
|
| Drones: My 3-year-old will ask me "Daddy can you fly the
| drone now?" and absolutely loves chasing it. Great toy
| now, starting to find some industrial uses with
| insurance/forestry/firefighting/etc. Will absolutely
| revolutionize warfare when the next war happens.
|
| Self-driving: Another wartime technology. I think this
| will limp along in niche markets until then, and then
| explode (no pun intended) when we need to maintain
| logistics networks under armed threat. Likely to be a
| cornerstone of post-war transportation networks, but not
| in the form they are now. Rather than struggle with
| sensor algorithms, we'll likely build the sensors &
| coordination into the road infrastructure and ban manual
| driving.
|
| Robotics: This is like AI in that when it succeeds, it's
| no longer called "robotics". It's already used very
| extensively in manufacturing and logistics (have you ever
| looked up airport baggage handling systems on YouTube?).
| We aren't going to get general-purpose robots, but we
| might see a wave of micro-manufacturing appliances a la
| 3D printing (put in raw materials, get back a product
| made to your specifications, distribute products
| digitally) as well as descendants of today's household
| appliances (we already have this with Roombas, robotic
| lawn mowers, robotic tractors, etc).
|
| EVs: Will probably go mainstream around 2023-2024. If
| you're already a top-notch electrical engineer you can
| likely get very rich on this right now by founding a
| company and letting a SPAC take you public next year. For
| the rest of it the excitement will be in buying one and
| upgrading our solar panels, power wall, power grid to
| support it.
|
| Climate tech: Will likely ultimately fail in stopping
| global warming but will invent lots of useful innovations
| that might be applied to other industries in the future
| (sort of like how microwave ovens came out of radar and
| computers came out of artillery guidance). If you have
| good skills and a long time horizon, the play is to go
| work for one of these companies, learn everything you
| can, spend your time researching, and then ride it until
| it goes bankrupt and then apply the technologies toward
| something more mundane.
|
| I'd agree that we're not in 2005 now - it feels more like
| 2002-03, where you can tell that there's interesting
| stuff going on but nothing's really ready for primetime
| yet. We had stuff like Friendster, Kazaa, LiveJournal,
| BaseCamp, then - all precursors to really important
| stuff, but the specific successes hadn't yet happened.
| echlebek wrote:
| HN feels more like a single subreddit than reddit as a whole.
| There is far greater cultural diversity on reddit.
| LanceH wrote:
| I find it is constantly being recreated in different subs,
| though they do tend to get more specific.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Unfortunately, in many small subs that become popular and
| then become victims of success, the entire lifecycle of
| Reddit is recapitulated, and not just the fun early days.
| aroman wrote:
| Reminds me of the eternal September effect:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| holler wrote:
| Agree, my time spent in r/worldnews way way back was an
| influence in building Sqwok, as I wanted a Slack-like public
| app for discussing the news. There are many options out there
| these days but I believe there's still room for that vision &
| actively building it. https://sqwok.im/p/Q4KowEDMcpY9iw
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| Anyone have a good run-down of how Reddit makes money? (Or does
| it?)
| m463 wrote:
| Most startups make their money selling stock.
| peanut_worm wrote:
| Reddit Gold and Advertising
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| If they file to go public, they'll have to provide information
| on how and how much money they make. It'll be interesting to
| see, because on the one side the public opinion on the awards
| is pretty bad, but on the other they are being handed out left
| and right often enough.
|
| Maybe it's one of those whale markets like with in-app
| purchases, where <2% of the users are responsible for >80% of
| income.
|
| That said, Reddit has also been giving out free awards that
| users can hand out, probably to try and get them hooked into
| the award system.
| arkitaip wrote:
| Ads and Reddit gold (its own currency). I think that various
| membership related monetization is the future of Reddit and far
| more stable than ads. Just look at what Twitch is doing with
| subscriptions, bits, emotes and donations.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| It used to be just Ads and Reddit Gold. Now it's mostly
| investment funding from China (via Tenecent) and the Middle
| East.
| CallMeMarc wrote:
| Ads and reddit coins afaik.
|
| Coins can be used to buy either their premium subscription (no
| ads and a few other things) or can be used to "award"
| posts/comments. You can select which award you want to give,
| there are multiple that are by reddit and there are awards that
| are subreddit specific. An award can also give the awardee some
| coins (e.g. you pay 200 coins and the awardee gets 100).
| nwotnagrom wrote:
| Would be interested to see the numbers. Assuming no one has
| ever seen these?
| CallMeMarc wrote:
| Would definitely love to see the numbers, but I suspect
| Tencent is paying their bills mostly
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah, my understanding is they were pretty much breaking
| even after the original introduction of gold when they
| had a skeleton crew of ops people, a ceo and a couple of
| backroom staff. They've massively expanded and even
| yishan forced the company to SF since then, so I'm pretty
| sure there's no way the extra award types have kept up
| with that expenditure.
|
| Like I think Reddit of ~2015 was a relatively sustainable
| lifestyle business, but the traffic numbers were way
| higher than that so there's the big push to turn it into
| another facebook/twitter.
| hilldude wrote:
| ouch, they'll probably have their pornhub moment at some
| point when credit card companies will notice that they have a
| lot of unmoderated adult UGC content.
|
| That's a massive risk for their business. My guess is that
| they are going to get rid of the nsfw subreddits like tumblr
| did.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/CUSnI
| EasyTiger_ wrote:
| Of course they won't mention how it's the most astroturfed
| platform on the internet with some of the worst communities.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| And some of the best. I've recently started reading /r/peloton
| and it's really impressive how it remains friendly, fun and
| well-informed, despite covering a sport that attracts
| conspiracy theories and accusations (mostly around doping).
| mandown2308 wrote:
| Great. I like reddit.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Will mods get stock options?
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