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.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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.

    • dhork@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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.

      • FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        With Spez at the helm I’d be surprised if they didn’t wind up getting in trouble either way, guess time will tell.

    • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      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.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        They specifically, in bold, say they don’t have access to this information as it is only provided to the plan administrator.

        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.

        • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
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          2 years ago

          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.

    • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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.

  • just_change_it@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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.

  • skozzii@lemmy.ca
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    2 years ago

    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.

    • archchan@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      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)

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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    2 years ago

    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.

  • kraftpudding@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I wonder what’s considered a power user. Because I got one, and I wouldn’t have considered myself one…

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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.

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      I got one, and though I’ve accumulated a bunch of karma, I haven’t been regularly active for months.

  • SkippingRelax@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    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

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I got an invite. Couldn’t invest even if I wanted to because I’m not a US resident.

  • hamid@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I got the invite but unprofitable companies don’t really make up a large part of my portfolio

    • macrocephalic@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      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!

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      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

      • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        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.

      • CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        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