Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
www.bloomberg.com

Summary

Reddit shares have dropped 50% from their February peak, when the stock had soared over 500% from its $34 IPO price last March.

Much of the early enthusiasm came from AI-related deals allowing Reddit’s content to be used for training models, but recent doubts about long-term growth in the AI sector have dimmed that optimism.

Analysts remain skeptical and some call the stock “super overvalued,” noting Reddit still is not making any money.

Market uncertainty and early investor sell-offs continue to weigh on Reddit and the broader tech sector.

Non-paywall link

  • futatorius@lemm.ee
    2·
    7 days ago

    Let me know when spez is living under a bridge, so I can go piss in his cardboard-box shelter.

  • MuskyMelon@lemmy.world
    178·
    9 days ago

    Lets take a platform driven by community participation and ostracize community users. Yeah that’ll work out well.

    Reddit getting Digged and me likey.

    • RestrictedAccount@lemmy.world
      401·
      9 days ago

      That is a deep cut reference. They are relaunching as an AI play.

      That will bring back the people who were providing the free content.

      (/s on the last part)

      • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        8·
        8 days ago

        Seriously. I remember Digg. My life’s social media path has been slashdot->digg->reddit->lemmy.

        I was there! I saw it all! <shakes cane>

    • arrow74@lemm.eeEnglish
      23·
      9 days ago

      Yep the train from being offered early access to their IPO as a “power user” to a permanent account ban did not take long.

      So here I am

      • rice@lemmy.orgEnglish
        6·
        8 days ago

        yep they will, it’ll be grok running 99% of twitter and 95% of reddit in the next 5 years. (and those numbers are probably already near there)

  • Madrigal@lemmy.worldEnglish
    126·
    9 days ago

    Aww, did Spez trade the family cow for some “magic” beans?

    Good luck rebuilding the farm now, buddy.

    • Talaraine@fedia.io
      33·
      9 days ago

      My parting message to Spez when I changed all my posts was, “Enjoy the IPO asshat!” While I wish I could update that message, it’ll still do. xD

      • Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
        6·
        8 days ago

        hi i am the human male, called spez, i was birthed from a alien space ship , and hatched from an egg and sent to earth to manipulate the populace.

  • 52fighters@lemmy.sdf.org
    1001·
    9 days ago

    I remember the early days of Reddit when it really felt like a community project. Back then, they had the goodwill necessary that Redditors would have personally financed a chunk of the costs of running particular Subreddits. Not anymore. That goodwill is gone.

  • antisocialite@lemmy.todayEnglish
    881·
    9 days ago

    The censorship going on there is crazy. I understand a site needs to tamp down on violent rhetoric but they crossed the line into absurdity. They banned me for calling out the racism in the GOP platform.

        • imvii@lemmy.caEnglish
          23·
          9 days ago

          Same. 11 year old account got banned for saying something. I’m not even entirely sure what it was. They deleted it and gave me the finger.

          Fine with me.

          • carrion0409@lemm.ee
            20·
            9 days ago

            I had my account since the pandemic and I got one 3 day ban for “inciting violence” a few weeks ago and they didnt tell me what I actually did. It was lifted so I moved on and kept following the rules. Then a day after the article about spez caving to musk came out I was given a perma site wide ban for “inciting violence” with no working link to what I actually did. The admins wouldn’t tell me either. I assume it’s because of my activity in left leaning subs and my comments calling Musk a shithead and saying his toy cars are garbage.

            • antisocialite@lemmy.todayEnglish
              19·
              9 days ago

              They’ll sweep ban entire comment sections of a submission they don’t approve of and they’re using AI to do it, so there are lots of false positives and dubious reasoning. They’ll send you a message lecturing you on your behavior but delete your comment so you’re left with only a vague idea of what they’re referring to.

              • futatorius@lemm.ee
                2·
                7 days ago

                Before they used shitty AI, they just hired autistic mods who would exaggerate anything into a bannable offense of some kind.

              • carrion0409@lemm.ee
                9·
                9 days ago

                And they wonder why their stock is tanking. The only outcome I see for reddit in it’s current state is being bought out by Google and turned into a telemetry farm.

          • rice@lemmy.orgEnglish
            9·
            8 days ago

            I got a 15 year old account banned for logging in via tor… they run a tor website for tor access on the tor network lmfao.

        • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          61·
          8 days ago

          I want to see the comedy-of-errors timeline where Luigi beats the rap based on a technicality or jury nullification…He finally gets out of jail…Then he immediately does it again.

      • lythium@lemm.eeEnglish
        14·
        9 days ago

        Thanks! I came from Reddit too. Looking for a safer place to stay in touch with the community. Are we allowed to say the name of Mario’s brother here?

        • exixx@lemmy.world
          18·
          9 days ago

          You can not only say Luigi, but you can also say that you wished it had started a trend.

        • cynar@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          8 days ago

          The basic rule is that you can say what you want (and people can call you what they want for it!).

          It would be polite to self moderate to an extent. No point getting the instance owners in to legal hot water. That’s a massively higher bar than Reddit has set however. Chatting about and admiring Luigi is completely fine.

    • samus12345@lemm.eeEnglish
      30·
      9 days ago

      I have to admit I never thought they would punish users for simply upvoting content that went against their corporate overlords’ interests. True thought policing.

    • Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
      9·
      8 days ago

      they are tamping down on the wrong kind of content, anything that disagree with israel, luigis incarceration, or elon and trump is an auto ban.

  • TomMasz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    86·
    9 days ago

    Spez fundamentally misunderstands what Reddit is and who it belongs to: the people making the posts and providing the content. The more he alienates the users, the less value Reddit will have. He’s shot himself in the foot and he’s getting ready to fire again.

  • aramis87@fedia.io
    64·
    9 days ago

    It’s not just the AI bubble, it’s a distinct lack of faith in Huffman and as a CEO. He’s not forward-thinking enough, he hasn’t understood where the company’s value lies, and he’s ridiculously distracted by the latest shiny tech things (reddit NFT avatars, reddit crypto, reddit AI).

    I fully expect Google to buy reddit at some point, exclusively harvesting all the info for their search engine, all the content for their AI models, and all the submission/view/voting data for their user profiles (what are you interested in, what do you think of these concepts, where are you connecting from, here are more ads we can send you, and these are arguments that might sway you in purchasing or other decisions).

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      7 days ago

      If Google weren’t under antitrust pressure, I think that would have already happened.

      In many ways, a Google owner would probably make Reddit better for a while. Google cares a lot more about the data people are generating than making the site itself profitable. They could afford to run it at a loss for years, whereas Reddit investors want to ensure they make money soon.

      But, I’m glad it might not happen. Then again, who knows what will happen to Google and antitrust in the Trump admin, where bribery is now perfectly legal.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    54·
    9 days ago

    If you deleted your content, reminder to go back and check it again. Despite running a deletion from my GDPR export data, yesterday I noticed a bunch of comments suddenly showing up on my account that weren’t there before so I i had to rerun the deletion.

      • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        9 days ago

        I’m not sure. If you can log in, probably. You can try a GDPR request, but reddit has refused to delete data under GDPR, saying deleting your name off posts and comments is sufficient.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      13·
      8 days ago

      Should also go back and check to see if you were unbanned. I was banned during the API purge, for mass editing+deleting my comments. First automod banned me from various pro-Spez subs when I started editing my old comments. Then when I repeated the edit+delete with my second/third/etc accounts, it “permanently” banned them site wide for ban evasion.

      Went back a little while later, and all of my accounts were magically unbanned and all of the edits+deletes were undone. The benign explanation is likely that the ban(s) prevented any of the edits from actually committing. But the more tinfoil-hat explanation is that the admins want the site to look more active, so they rolled back bans so old content was still available and their user count appeared higher than reality.

      • Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        8 days ago

        it does explain why you could comment in subs you were banned years ago. i heard at least from the modhelp sub that permabans were supposodely to be 1-year before it gets unbanned, obvious repeat offendors get a lifetime ban(the spammers excessive account bottings). but thing is some subs dont update thier filters so they can ban you again, and trigger a sitewide ban.

    • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
      8·
      9 days ago

      There’s a non-malicious reason for this - if you used a script based on interacting with the website, when subreddits went hidden, it actually hidden your own comments from you. So they aren’t visible to automated scripts and then when subreddits go visible again, suddenly it looks like comments “came back”.

      • jaybone@lemmy.zipEnglish
        162·
        9 days ago

        And this is compliant with GDPR?

        “Your stuff was hidden when you made the delete request. But then later we made it un-hidden so oh well 🤷”

        • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
          10·
          9 days ago

          No, because what he’s describing is a self-run comment editing and deleting script.

          GDPR account deletion works very differently.

          Note I’m not defending Reddit here, as much as anything it’s advice for anyone (like me) who has to go back and re-run the script every few months because of those brave people whose form of protest is very temporarily inconveniencing themselves.

    • Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      8 days ago

      i noticed when i deleted my primary comments, it was ommiting other posts, like controversial.

    • muusemuuse@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      9 days ago

      Is there a way I as an american can delete all my posts from my banned accounts?

  • Fingolfinz@lemmy.world
    48·
    8 days ago

    Spez can suck a taint. I was on there forever and immediately bounced once that bullshit banning stuff started happening. Should have left sooner but that was the final straw

    • barneypiccolo@lemm.eeEnglish
      15·
      7 days ago

      Who could have foreseen that banning all the highly active, long-term accounts in the same month would have a negative effect? Now they can live with all their bots, puns, Russian Karma Farmers, novelty accounts, and trolls.

    • ceph@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      8 days ago

      Yeah, same here. It took a few things over time to ultimately get me to leave, but my finding out many of my comments were being shadow-removed was it.

      • Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        8 days ago

        I commented on a niche sub a few days ago, and it got shadow removed by the mod, don’t even show up as a violation on the inbox, then it triggered a “suspicious activity on account ban, until I change password”, also because I used a Firefox fork instead of the chromium browser

  • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
    41·
    8 days ago

    Their only utility now is in five year old comment threads discussing niche topics, and that can only stay relevant so long.

    • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch
      13·
      8 days ago

      Though half the time it’s

      deleted

      thanks that really solved my problem, you’re amazing!

      I still have mixed feelings about deleting one’s whole comment history, though i also did that when I left reddit. it’s the right thing to do, but the amount of information lost because of greedy leadership is super sad.

      • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
        6·
        8 days ago

        I still have mixed feelings about deleting one’s whole comment history, though i also did that when I left reddit.

        Same. I also did that. Mass edits + delete. I wish there was a way we could collectively move all that history to a non-commercial platform.

        it’s the right thing to do, but the amount of information lost because of greedy leadership is super sad.

        Also same. I backed up all my user data for sentimental reasons, but that’s hardly enough to be of any utility on its own.

        I really did feel like I was participating in a community, and was doing something positive with all my posting. I was just treating reddit like any other forum from my youth, not really thinking how ofc it would become commodified and enshittified.

        I feel like such a fucking idiot sucker. Over a decade putting in time outside work, lunch breaks, toilet breaks, morning, evening, just contributing to an IPO package.

        • C45513@lemm.eeEnglish
          5·
          8 days ago

          don’t feel bad; you were contributing to a community. all the people that updooted your posts were grateful for the advice, laughter, kindness, or insight you gave.

          it’s just over now, and we need to build new communities again. nothing lasts forever.

      • Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world
        5·
        7 days ago

        Don’t delete your account, scramble your past comments into AI generated gibberish. It poisons the well for AI and makes the site even more unusable by humans.

        There is nothing like reading one or two sentences into a comment and realizing it is garbage.