Reddit Is Letting Power Users In on Its IPO. Not Everyone’s Buying
(www.wired.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 25 Feb 2024 14:00
https://lemmy.world/post/12388569
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 25 Feb 2024 14:00
https://lemmy.world/post/12388569
Reddit Is Letting Power Users In on Its IPO. Not Everyone’s Buying::Reddit says it wants to reward users by letting them buy into the company’s public listing. Some say it’s too risky—others say they won’t pay a company they’ve already given hours of free labor to.
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They sent me an offer. I ain’t buying
I got it via email. Reported it as spam. 🤣
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.
I apparently must be as I got one as well.
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 had two accounts over the years that I’ve gotten to higher tier levels.
It was honestly pretty easy back in the day. There were a couple of topics that I could pretty consistently get 5k+ karma from. Large subs with well known view points. Play into those and you take in massive amounts of karma.
Last I checked my account was in the top 1% of karma.
lol yeah century club with a 16 year old account here. I got nothing.
I just got one 7 hours ago.
15,955 post karma 166,632 comment karma
13 years and a few gildings over the years. Plus I was an alien blue user who got a bunch of years of gold before Reddit’s first app kill off.
I found it this morning. I don’t read reddit but never closed the tab and there was a noid. I read it, laughed, and moved on with my day.
I haven’t looked at my account in a few months and decided to go look just to see if I had an invite.
They must be getting more desperate s they move down the list.
That certainly has to do with account age, though that’s a strange metric to choose.
my old account before it got banned was well over 500k. I’d been on since 2013. yeah, most of us are power users I think.
I certainly never considered myself a “power user,” but I got an invite despite not using reddit since mid-June last year.
I got one with 10k karma and 133k comment karma. Of course, most of my karma is from talking about cartoons, so I’m not sure that really makes me the kind of “power user” that would spend money on this.
I have around 700k comment karma
Fill in the form with fake data ;)
I did laugh when I was sent an offer for a stock preorder.
The second group of people are honest AF 😂
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.
With Spez at the helm I’d be surprised if they didn’t wind up getting in trouble either way, guess time will tell.
Yeah, I think they just want memestock-like bag holders, people invested in reddit “as a company/platform” who are unlikely to sell
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 seriously doubt it, because if someone isn’t verifying that you hold the account it was sent to. People could “sell” their invites and I feel like this is already walking a fine line with the SEC with the whole “early access” thing.
It would be trivial to write a bot that pm’ed accounts that met this metric to receive an invite offering a tiny amount for their codes.
Hell, someone could do that and never follow thru with buying accounts as it would make some users more likely to buy.
This whole thing is likely to go horrible, because reddit never thinks shit thru.
This is really nothing special in the world of IPOs, companies offer their initial shares to specific parties before the public is able to puchase them. These are typically investors, employees, etc.
It would be a pretty big problem if it was found that the financial company administering the IPO was to share personally identifiable information to Reddit. SEC rules actually have teeth, so I wouldn’t be too worried about them lying about it. It does look like you have to provide them a name to register so sure they might have that associated with your account if they don’t already, but it does help prevent selling the opportunity to buy.
It isn’t helpful to spread FUD here when you are discussing something like the offering of securities products which have very defined procedures that the offering party must follow. This is one area you don’t want to fuck around and find out about.
Fuuuuuuuuuuck that shit
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.
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.
How far could you throw reddit?
Have you seen the reddit meetups?
Not very far my friend.
No you didn’t. Your fantasies don’t count.
Please also fill in their form with fake data
If it gave me the right to short then yeah, I’d be in on that.
And that’s when everyone else goes… “to the moooooon!” 🐄🚀🌛
HODL, YOU AUTISTS!
#fuckthoseableistWSBcunts #actuallyautistic
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
Its ok to dabble in amything in small amounts.
But big risk should always br preceded by heavy research.
Or ya know, just YOLO on a 0DTE option because someone on social media likes it too
I didn’t say anything about buying shorts but, to my knowledge, you can’t short something that doesn’t exist. I was stating that I’m willing to bet the price per share will go down significantly in the short term after it’s IPO, no matter what they set as the initial price.
Short
Probably best to just not interact.
They have no profit model. Can’t lose by shooting.
It can take longer for the market to realize you’re correct, than you can remain solvent for.
It’s literally a cooked plan with the SEC. If you file, it is expected on a timeline. There is literally no avenue to back down that doesn’t spell the end of your filing. Look it up. It’s only happened a few times, and to spectacular disaster.
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.
Then they started listening to consultants, and now Im here
Well everyone wants to be Zuckerberg so what else are you gonna do except get consultants?
Yeah, Reddit became mainstream. But with the quality going down (and me just not liking it anymore), I would probably never now.
Here’s my Reddit Gold. 🪙 One share please!
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.
Sounds like you should buy.
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.
Your assessment of Linux is bad. So bad. Laughably bad. Hilariously bad. Ask anybody who works on servers whether or not Linux is “a minority thing that hasn’t changed much at all”.
It depends upon who are you are, doesn’t it? For me, Lemmy hasn’t become a total replacement for reddit, but it’s replaced it about 90% I would say. The only time I spend on reddit is for those niche communities, and a lot of people don’t have those niche communities.
Linux has its uses yes.
Posters here act like the everyday consumer gives a fuck about it though, and they don’t. Great for servers, garbage for consumers.
And I’m sure lemmy can be used to replace reddit for most things, but again - the majority of everyday people won’t because it’s convoluted and not as good for their needs.
They will get created and grow
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.
The far left view of the community and Linux lovin showing up in nearly all of the threads.
For me it’s the lack of interesting communities to browse. Everything active seems to be about, Linux, programming, politics, Star Trek or anime. Some midtier memes. That’s basically a list of subreddits I had blocked on reddit. And it’s all that exists here.
Edit: I just counted. I’m subscribed to 179 communities. In the first 50 posts on my subscribed feed (basically 2 days worth of content), there are 7 communities featured. The first post that does not mention above topics and isn’t a meme is post no 15. In total, there are 4 posts in the first 50 posts that do not mention any of those topics. 2 of those are interesting to me. That’s just not a good enough ratio.
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Hey, I’m not connecting the dots about the revenge. Could you elaborate please?
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. www.investopedia.com/…/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
Never heard of it, I’m sure it’ll be fine though
I’ve heard you can get more by using leberige…or liver-edge… something. Make sure to add a lot of that.
To the moon!!!
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)
I’m guessing I know why I didn’t get let in on its IPO.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/36535670-b0b8-4bed-ae5d-2826a868db69.png">
Not enough karma?
Dang, and you seem really torn up that you cannot throw your money in the trash :)
Apart from the fact that I’m too poor to do it anyway, pretty much.
You know what I did with the message I got from Reddit about this? BALEETED
Mine was DACHEATED.
got the email, trashed the email.
I got an invite. Couldn’t invest even if I wanted to because I’m not a US resident.
Ditto
Larger market manipulators have every mean to buy the shares, bank accounts at USA etc. I guess they are targeting them to help IPO.
Just fill in the form anyway, put fake data including a fake email address!
So they’re going to send many invitations and get 0 dollars in return
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.
How do you perceive Reddit’s trajectory with its IPO?
I got the invite but unprofitable companies don’t really make up a large part of my portfolio
Exactly. It might be that the content they own (that we have them) is worth enough for them to be profitable, but I’m not going to put money down now based on something that might happen later. They’re not a startup, they’ve been operating nearly 20 years!
Fill in their form with fake data ;)
I wonder what’s considered a power user. Because I got one, and I wouldn’t have considered myself one…
What’s your approx upvote count if you don’t mind me asking? I wonder what their criteria is.
8 y.o. account, 23k post karma, 64k comment karma. So, not that much. Sadly can’t tell you over how many posts/comments, because the API Tools that used to count that all are dead. Obviously.
Interesting. I haven’t received anything and I’ve had my account for about the same amount of time but have 100k karma. Most of mine is also comment karma.
I have over 100k comment karma (and much less post) and got an invite. It’s meaningless anyway as I am not a US citizen.
Oh, for me too, I still find it interesting
I got one a week ago.
I did some digging on who gets what when and over the course of about a week and a half they have three tiers.
I think the first was 200K+, then I think 50K+, and then 10K+ off the top of my head.
What are the benefits of each tier?
Just getting the opportunity to register an account to be included in the IPO presale event.
Just an FYI, that’s a bot, possibly either for a news site, some kind of valuation service, or for AI. Half hour old account that’s asking related questions and quoting the entire context of the question, and offering no actual input beyond that.
Thanks
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/915ccea9-1b2e-4bb3-b58b-70e359a52924.jpeg">
Thank you!
Are you a mod of something? Might be related to that, cause I got an invite too and the only thing I can think of is I have moderation activity.
He’s damn close to tier 2. With some of the behind-the-scenes Karma balancing stuff he may be at 100,000 total.
Yeah they just started tier 2. I got an invite and I’ve abandoned all my accounts.
Nope
The reason you are here)
It looks like everyone big in crypto scam and market manipulation have such qualities. Most of them are alt right and Musk fans so it is easy to spot them.
Huh?
Say a negative thing about Brave or any of alt right hate campaigns against anyone who likes diversity. They will keep down voting whatever you post/comment and insane things happen. E.g. 2 comments supporting the same idea in the same post scoring +20 and -20. The best thing to do against is not to be there at the first place. People who think they are highly technical, nerd, bright or have elite taste shouldn’t work for Spez, for free.
It’s based on Karma or mod actions and the invites are going out in waves. I’ve taken a screenshot from reddit’s faq page regarding the program that shows the tiers.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/91b99f20-ba9b-4b3a-a475-527431d8b444.jpeg">
Hm, 25k karma is not what I’d call a power user, but ok. Thanks for sharing.
They’ll only invite people at that level if nobody buys at the higher tiers.
Oh, that makes more sense
Imagine being in /r/centuryclub but still not being cool enough to get into the real exclusive club - Group 1 reddit IPO.
That’s literally the group they just offered to. So, I guess not enough people bought the first wave.
I got one, and though I’ve accumulated a bunch of karma, I haven’t been regularly active for months.
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
.
Opinions on Reddit’s IPO offer?
The users generate the content. The users control ad viewership and thus revenue. Inviting power users to invest as retail investors is insider trading.
I got a message from them today and I haven’t used reddit since last June or so. They must be desperate.
Same here. Quite bizarre too, since I’m not even a US citizen so I’m not even allowed to buy in. And surely based on their user data Reddit should know that…
Just fill in the form anyway with fake data. I did it.
So they’re going to send many useless invitations.
I’m in exactly the same boat. I was tempted to buy exactly one share to gamble with, and then I thought about their monetization efforts and the fact that they’re offering shares to a person who deleted every comment and post they ever made.
I am not American tax payer but what does American government and independent organisations do regarding influencers are being bribed to help a high profile IPO?
E.g. a user will have 200K+ karma and thousands of followers and will get pre IPO share. So, will “duckyduck” will sure sit on a corner and will never try to benefit his stock? They won’t post to wall street bets? Because of ethics?
I received the email yesterday despite having deleted my account. I rarely if ever delete emails. This was a first in many years.
Hey those one guys went to the moon, why not me too hur dur
-Spez probably
what if we edit our old posts to random junk to mess up the ai
I deleted all my comments in June, still got an invite.
a lot of people do. there are greasemonkey scripts for it. some scripts even only delete certain old posts after a certain date so reddit isn’t picking up to it quickly.
they gave me the option, but I’m not in the US so I couldn’t even do it if i wanted. so why they even asked me to is beyond me. it’s just bs.
“hey… wanna buy our stuff?”
“yes”
“oh you’re not from the US. sorry.”
“but you knew I’m not from the US”
“meh.”