If you want to have a laugh at how ridiculous the whole market is, Trump’s Truth Social just IPOed and has the same market cap as Reddit even though it’s much smaller and full of insane people.
No one is “keen” at day trading, some people get lucky and think they’re talented. The vast majority lose money because the big players make sure of it.
you definitely have people who go positive in day trading on average more than not by following some patterns and such, its just most people lack the kind of skills to do it and usually do worse than the index (even if they go positive)
I quit trying to day trade ages ago. I put my bigger investments in indexes or companies I think I’m more familiar with than “wall street” and usually long term hold.
If you have the money to spend/blow, the “correct” approach is to:
Put the vast majority if your money into stable investments. Index funds, bonds, etc. You should have a retirement fund with at least one of the major companies (I have had good experience with Vanguard and Fidelity) and they can help with that. This is for retirement and the like.
Put a VERY small amount into “one off” purchases of various stocks. Stuff like “I think this apple computers might take off some day” kind of purchases. This is not a retirement fund. This is gambling. But it still might mean you have money for a kitchen remodel or a rainy day.
But if you don’t have money to “throw away”? Do not buy individual stocks. Or crypto. Or anything other than what you need to have a life after you age out of the workforce because late stage capitalism.
Most of my etfs are doing better than my stock purchases, but I have had a couple big wins over the years. I’m expecting my reddit put options to be another, though.
Does this mean that they don’t believe in reddit or is this normal? I really don’t know personally.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman sold 500,000 shares on Monday at an average $32.30 price, receiving $16.15 million. CFO Vollero Andrew sold 71,765 Reddit shares for $2.318 million. Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Wong sold 514,000 shares for $16.602 million.
Chief Technology Officer Christopher Slowe sold 185,000 shares for $5.975 million. Chief Accounting Officer Michelle Reynolds sold 3,033 RDDT shares for $97,966. Board member David Habiger sold 3,000 shares for $102,000.
Does this mean that they don’t believe in reddit or is this normal?
It’s pretty normal I think. This is how economy works these days. Companies IPO to turn the shares into liquidity. It’s all so that the greedy people at the top can get their payday.
They hopefully would plan on continuing as normal even if they expect the company to tank. Otherwise it would be an obvious insider trading violation I think. Of course CEO is a bit of a fanboy of Musk, who regularly committed securities-related crimes and is always under SEC investigation for the crimes he repeatedly commits, but probably still makes more money off the crimes than the penalties…
Pump and dump. They sold all those shares to shareholders and they are going to answer to them now. They stopped listening to the users a long time ago. Enshittification is inevitable.
It’s already fairly enshittified. The discourse has really gone downhill over the past few years. Remember how good the AMAs used to be? Or the AskReddit threads that were full of interesting stories?
Greedy little pigboy was always going to get his cut, that was the whole idea. Build something juust big enough to get bought out, and if that doesn’t work, sell the parts as unethically as possible.
I look forward to him thinking he’s a big dick player now and getting absolutely chummed by the real sharks
If a company takes its stock public, the shares sold generate cash which is held by the company selling them, and used to build the business. Nobody who bought them, including the insiders, is really forbidden from selling them (except insofar as insider trading laws apply), but if an insider sells shares this early it indicates a deep distrust by the seller of the underlying value of their own company. Doing so while letting outside investors spin is therefore unethical because it signals that the people who built the company are planning to abandon it and let the stock tank.
See also: lock-up period, which is not required during an IPO (news to me!) but the absence of a lock-up period sure seems like a red flag someone should have noticed. Although, I suppose, many people did.
He sold about 500,000 shares. He owned, apparently, 3.3% of the 17.06 million total shares of the company, meaning he had a little over 562,000 shares. He sold almost all of his shares. That doesn’t exactly exude confidence in future growth, IMO.
The site’s audience grew rapidly in its first few months, and by August 2005, Huffman noticed their habitual user-base had grown so large that he no longer needed to fill the front page with content himself.[11][14][15] Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million.[3][16] Huffman remained with Reddit until 2009, when he left his role as acting CEO.[17]
Huffman spent several months backpacking in Costa Rica[18] before co-creating the travel website Hipmunk with Adam Goldstein, an author and software developer, in 2010. Funded by Y Combinator,[19][20] Hipmunk launched in August 2010[21] with Huffman serving as CTO.[22] In 2011, Inc. named Huffman to its 30 under 30 list.[22]
In 2014, Huffman said that his decision to sell Reddit had been a mistake, and that the site’s growth had exceeded his expectations.[23] On July 10, 2015, Reddit hired Huffman as CEO following the resignation of Ellen Pao[24] and during a particularly difficult time for the company.[25] Upon rejoining the company, Huffman’s top goals included launching Reddit’s iOS and Android apps, fixing Reddit’s mobile website, and creating A/B testing infrastructure.[3]
Since returning to Reddit, Huffman instituted a number of technological changes including an updated mobile site and stronger infrastructure, as well as new content guidelines.
I don’t think that he’s had a whole lot of faith in Reddit as a business since early-on.
My favorite way to visualize the meaning of “asshat”: the person is such a sad waste of human life that their entire upper body is effectively just a hat for their posterior.
They acquired Alien Blue, but what they put out under “Reddit” was not Alien Blue in the least bit. They basically bought it to kill it. I had Alien Blue. :(
Well, you wouldn’t expect it to in the growth phase.
A lot of consumer-facing Internet companies have a large portion of their costs be fixed costs. That is, a programmer or QA guy costs the same amount whether you have ten users or ten million users. But your revenue is linear in your userbase size. So you really don’t want to be a small company, if you fit that profile.
The idea is to burn money and grow rapidly to the point where your fixed costs are relatively small. It makes no sense to try to generate profit if you lose growth for it.
That’s especially true for social media companies, because for them, network effect is a major factor – the value of the network is something like the square of the number of users.
So you really want to be big, not small.
So the solution is to grow quickly, lose money during that period, then adjust and monetize the userbase when you can’t afford to burn money growing any more.
That transition to a profitable state after a money-losing growth state usually means that a company is gonna do something unpopular (since they’re optimizing for something other than appeal) and what Corey Doctorow was complaining about as “enshittification”.
The fact that Reddit lost money during the growth phase doesn’t mean that it was a failure – that would have been intended, part of the business model.
Now, if it’s losing money once the growth phase is done, that could be another story.
It doesn’t, he had like 4.6 million shares before the ipo. The 500,000 number sold is just his class A shares. He’ll still have 4.1 million shares of class b stock after this it looks like. The class b stock has ten votes compared to one vote for class a stock for any shareholder votes I believe. So selling only his class a shares won’t change the percent voting control of the company he has by much. The person you’re replying to is confused about how many total shares he has. I don’t think the class b shares are being openly traded though, I think the ipo is just offering class a shares, which is what’s causing the confusion here. He sold almost all of his class a shares, but still has plenty of class b.
Yeah, I mean ipo’s in general are definitely a rich get richer kind of thing that screw over retail traders, but I don’t think there’s anything particularly unusual about this one.
According to the second link, he sold nearly all of his class A shares, but none of his class B shares. His total share of the company went from 3.2% to 2.6%, which, is still not insignificant.
19% is still a lot higher than the “only 40mil out of a 16 bil stock” that I’ve seen mentioned and upvoted elsewhere in the thread. But yeah, not that big of a deal, I imagine. I was expecting him to sell over 30%
So, at some point, Reddit was going to have to be generating a return. Spez or no spez.
I don’t particularly like the route they took – killing the third-party clients was annoying and I think that there were ways to be a profitable super-forum site and still have third-party clients. But it was gonna be something, and whatever they did – more ads, selling data on users, only providing some functionality to paid users – was gonna be unpopular.
I would have been ok with reasonable prices for API calls. Bandwidth has a cost after all. But they so obviously set out to drive the third party apps out of business so they could sell ads in the official app/website it just disgusted me.
Also that new mobile site is so shitty, I refuse to believe it’s not on purpose.
I don’t get why they had to drive out 3rd party apps for that? They try to make the ads look like user content so it seems like they could have fed it into the 3rd party apps. It must have something to do with the exact placement of the ads?
What they didn’t see in doing so was that the core content of the site was curated mostly by people who used either old reddit or third party apps. Modding would be unnecessarily annoying without them. The content is, in fact, way worse than it used be, more importantly bots are in the open and with no counter. You can track the amount if reposts. As for mods they can be as toxic as ever, posting on reddit is hard unless you follow small subs or generic ones that let you post whatever. The site itself is the opposite of user friendly: they wanted to be an alternative to all other social media ever…but instagram, tiktok, youtube, even that deranged thing known as x, let you post peacefully amd without too many restrictions. Reddit…forget about it.
There were some internal docs leaked that made me think their real motivation was that they had signed some contracts for API access and pricing (probably a direct response to AI scraping), and that they were actually contractually obligated to close stuff down and/or set crazy prices. I think it may not have been about apps at all (or very little)
What do you think API access is? They have 100% control over how much they charge for access. There is no entity above them that they’re signing contracts with to decide pricing. There is no situation where what you just said makes any sense.
I could have lived without third party apps. What drove me away was how they gaslit and lied to the 3rd party app developers about the costs, then started making outragious and unsubstatiated allegations about the Apollo dev. It became painfully obvious reddit is a trashy company run by trashy people.
If you make stuff using money from investors who are giving you that money with the expectation that you will use it to generate a return, yeah, pretty much.
Absolutely. Although, of the 3rd party developers, Christian was probably the biggest thorn in Spez’s ass. Homie’s Apollo developer update posts were legendary and were covered by international press.
yeah he was the one who talked with reddit regarding that issue. idk about the thorn thing though. at the end reddit still runs even after multiple subreddits shutdown. hope reddit’s stocks crash.
it might have hurt reddit’s userbase a little but definitely not a scar. he has already sold most of shares, so he will be sailing that ship until he can loot all he could and then jump to another ship when it starts to sink.
There are no guarantees an IPO will pop, even a buzzy one. Uber debuted at the low end of their estimate and trended downward, for ex, and didn’t recover for over a year.
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