this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
608 points (97.6% liked)

News

23268 readers
2859 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 287 points 7 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 168 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like something a greedy little pigboy would do

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

Lol, if only someone, or like, thousands of someones, warned the others and this. Shame. Anyway...

[–] [email protected] 127 points 7 months ago

ahahahahahahahahaha

Spez proving almost everyone else right.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

On the other hand, he already cashed out once and was wrong, so...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Huffman

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.

[–] [email protected] 67 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Huffman’s top goals included launching Reddit’s iOS and Android apps

Mission accomplished! Those undeniably shitty apps definitely were launched.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I've never used them, but IIRC they acquired some third-party client and then just modified them. "Blue Alien" or something like that?

googles

"Alien Blue", at least for the official iOS app.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Blue

I dunno what the history of the Android app is.

That being said, they're responsible for what they acquire, just saying that a lot of that might not be developed in-house.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago

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. :(

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago

Hey, acquiring another app and launching it as your own app is still launching it! What would they have done without spez?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Alien Blue was fucking awesome, too. Those ass-butts.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Those ass-butts.

This is redundant. That's why we put caps on them and call em ass-hats

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Then he wasn't wrong. Never has made money.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I ain't broke baby, I am just in my growth phase

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

It's old enough to vote. Or serve in the US military.

Or attend college as a non-genius.

I'm familiar with growth stage. 18 to 19 years seems like a long one. Web 2.0 happened years ago.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

yeah but ~~your~~ *OP's statement 'he sold almost all of his shares' isn't really accurate as he really only sold 19% of his shares

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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%

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

oops, my mistake. added correction

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I thought they paid him like $200M last year? How does that work out with only half a million shares?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

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.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024011448/reddit-sx1a2.htm#i1b9a579e78a34dfa99f7f26daeec195b_100

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Those numbers add up a lot better than the guy I replied to. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If the people in this thread could read this and understand it that would be amazing. This isn't some gotcha moment...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

they paid him a million and change iirc, the rest was stock options

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, that was my point. The $16.7M he sold is way less than they reportedly gave him last year.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

oh, i misunderstood

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

That's weird, I thought the majority of the $150m or so he got last year was in stock. And this says he barely cleared 1/10th of that with this sale.

Edit: nevermind, explained in other comments