I deleted my main reddit years ago. I hate the whole concept of hyping up a hot stock just to cash out immediately, so I wouldn't have done it out of principle. Still, good for those who came out...
I deleted my main reddit years ago. I hate the whole concept of hyping up a hot stock just to cash out immediately, so I wouldn't have done it out of principle. Still, good for those who came out better off.
And I doubt any current nor former redditors would bet on long term growth of RDDT to begin with, so that was never in consideration.
That was one of the most annoying things about Reddit to me. There was a subreddit called r/superstonk that kept hitting the front page with the stupidest posts. It was filled with a bunch of...
That was one of the most annoying things about Reddit to me. There was a subreddit called r/superstonk that kept hitting the front page with the stupidest posts. It was filled with a bunch of people holding onto meme stocks way past when the bubble burst trying to convince themselves that they didn't lose their life savings if they refused to sell the stock.
The whole hot stock thing is fun if you like gambling, but when people delude themselves into creating a cult around a stock they went all in on, it's just sad and annoying.
Unfortunately, it still exists and is still making the same posts. I don't know if it's still hitting the front page though, I try to avoid reddit while logged out.
There was a subreddit called r/superstonk that kept hitting the front page with the stupidest posts.
Unfortunately, it still exists and is still making the same posts. I don't know if it's still hitting the front page though, I try to avoid reddit while logged out.
Default Reddit is 50% low effort junk, 25% economic angst, and 25% social/romantic angst. Any time I take a dip back in I’m quickly put in an absolutely terrible mood.
Default Reddit is 50% low effort junk, 25% economic angst, and 25% social/romantic angst. Any time I take a dip back in I’m quickly put in an absolutely terrible mood.
Perfect summary of it. For hobby or topic focused subreddits where visitors would explore solutions to problems together, now I find a slew of entry level hobbyists creating the bulk of the posts,...
Perfect summary of it. For hobby or topic focused subreddits where visitors would explore solutions to problems together, now I find a slew of entry level hobbyists creating the bulk of the posts, and the actual interesting stuff that my targeted search turned up shoqing few meaningful responses.
I feel like the goodwill and curiousity that built the social internet went from forums to Reddit when it was clear how great it was to have a consolidated place, and from Reddit to... Adulthood? When it became clear how shitty it had become.
Honestly a way to sort by text, link, or media posts would help the usability of reddit a ton. The text posts are where niche subreddits shine, but images and videos get upvoted more. The actually...
Honestly a way to sort by text, link, or media posts would help the usability of reddit a ton. The text posts are where niche subreddits shine, but images and videos get upvoted more. The actually useful text posts get pushed off the front page and are not represented in the top posts filters.
Absolutely. Tricks like quotes, asterisks and other ways of narrowing search terms are not common knowledge anymore (or were they ever?) and it means that people probably aren't finding what they...
Absolutely. Tricks like quotes, asterisks and other ways of narrowing search terms are not common knowledge anymore (or were they ever?) and it means that people probably aren't finding what they need.
It feels to be like high speed trading and day trading is bad for the economy in the big picture. I wonder how things would change if stocks could not be sold in less than 6 months without a very...
It feels to be like high speed trading and day trading is bad for the economy in the big picture. I wonder how things would change if stocks could not be sold in less than 6 months without a very severe penalty.
My feelings are the same as u/stu2b50. High speed trading and day trading are definitely risky and more regulations should be in place to prevent things like day trading with tax advantaged...
My feelings are the same as u/stu2b50. High speed trading and day trading are definitely risky and more regulations should be in place to prevent things like day trading with tax advantaged retirement accounts, but there are a lot of benefits to allowing them to exist.
The constant flow of transactions in the stock market means that we can place a buy or sell order and have it complete in seconds instead of waiting days or weeks to complete. The flow of information is also faster, so investors can have more up to date information on stock valuations and get the best deal.
The tradeoff is short term volatility, but if you are a responsible long-term investor, the short-term fluctuations are not an issue.
So many of these investment opportunities just seem like passing the purse. I don’t see a path to Reddit monetizing. I wish there was a path for non-profit publicly owned services to receive...
So many of these investment opportunities just seem like passing the purse. I don’t see a path to Reddit monetizing.
I wish there was a path for non-profit publicly owned services to receive government funding so social networks critical to human culture and development didn’t have to cave to the word of advertisers and data miners.
Short term, they'll make money on their api. The quality content is old, though, once the AI companies have slurped it up they have it. The company hasn't done anything to make sure high quality...
I don’t see a path to Reddit monetizing.
Short term, they'll make money on their api. The quality content is old, though, once the AI companies have slurped it up they have it. The company hasn't done anything to make sure high quality content keeps coming in. Some folks have stuck it out for the love of whatever they're doing, but these things are always a cycle. Mods get burned out or life gets in the way.
There's always been a pattern where small subreddits produce good quality content, get attention and grow bigger, and then the quality gradually becomes worse as a result of the popularity. But...
There's always been a pattern where small subreddits produce good quality content, get attention and grow bigger, and then the quality gradually becomes worse as a result of the popularity. But that trend really seems to have accelerated recently. Where a sub can go from having good content one month to bad content the next. It's kind of interesting from an outside perspective, although of course pretty annoying when it happens to your favorite small sub.
To the moon! Just kidding I had my fun with dogecoin and while I know crypto's different from stocks, that was still enough gambling chaos for me, even if I came out slightly ahead.
To the moon! Just kidding I had my fun with dogecoin and while I know crypto's different from stocks, that was still enough gambling chaos for me, even if I came out slightly ahead.
Yeah I should have. First I was up $110k and bought back in, then I was up way more. I was on a roadtrip at the time and couldn’t baby sit the shares. It was my friend who told me about GME. He...
Yeah I should have. First I was up $110k and bought back in, then I was up way more. I was on a roadtrip at the time and couldn’t baby sit the shares.
It was my friend who told me about GME. He convinced me to buy option contracts. After I executed the call options he said it was going even higher and I figured “what the hell, he hasn’t been wrong yet!”. Turns out you should quit while you’re ahead. I did take that lesson to Vegas and turned $50 into $100 on the roulette table and just walked right out with my profit and bought some dinner.
A high school acquaintance of mine who got into a high-frequency trading firm said that with GME they “put their standard algorithm on it” and made $5MM dollars. These days he’s trying to start an online Mexican casino and is very forward, at least to me, about it being about stealing poor people’s money. It’s interesting to see someone normal become that. I do not want to support him in any way but I also have a morbid curiosity and no ability to stop him. So I watch from afar.
Wow, my WSB story was going from $600 to $4k and then down to $400 in the span of a week trading options. It was fun, but more in a going to a casino way instead of being a hedge fund manager way.
Wow, my WSB story was going from $600 to $4k and then down to $400 in the span of a week trading options. It was fun, but more in a going to a casino way instead of being a hedge fund manager way.
I donated blood soon after and the phlebotomist mentioned my high blood pressure. I said I’d gotten involved in some stock market gambling and he leaned in and asked “Gamestop?”
I donated blood soon after and the phlebotomist mentioned my high blood pressure. I said I’d gotten involved in some stock market gambling and he leaned in and asked “Gamestop?”
To give this a little more nuance: In theory stocks are supposed to be a way to support an industry or a product you have some reason to understand and invest in. If you've spent your life working...
To give this a little more nuance:
In theory stocks are supposed to be a way to support an industry or a product you have some reason to understand and invest in. If you've spent your life working on engines, and someone is working on a brand new one, and you really believe it's going to be a big thing due to all your expertise, then it might be a wise investment because you actually understand the product.
That said, just because you know the product doesn't mean you also know the business and the industry. The company you're backing might have an AMAZING product but the business sense of a hammer. And even if that's not an issue, yeah there's just outside factors that can occur. Oops funding dried up. Oops there's a supply shortage. Oops the fed turned off the money hose.
This is why any successful investment strategy is very much about managing your risk and your money correctly. If you make a million a year and throw $5000 at reddit, well you can probably afford that loss and might feel your information justifies the risk. If you leverage everything you own to throw $400m at it, go seek help.
I mention all this because reddit is a pretty good example of many users here having a very "on the ground" experience with the product and its life/possible future, but probably haven't spent a lot of time really looking at their "boring" public financial data and researching where they're likely to go. Before you invest in anything you not only need to do the legwork on the product you're investing in, but also have your own financials together to know how much you can afford to invest.
I went against every instinct in my head last night and bought 500 out of the 1k stock allotment. Sold 20 minutes after opening for +55%. Ofc now my brain is like "why didn't you go all in" but...
I went against every instinct in my head last night and bought 500 out of the 1k stock allotment. Sold 20 minutes after opening for +55%. Ofc now my brain is like "why didn't you go all in" but I'm trying to be happy with my gains haha
Similar situation. Bought just under $500 worth. 14 shares at $34 each. Sold them at $54.40 each. I was initially going to put in $1000, but that was if IPO price was maybe around $20. But since...
Similar situation. Bought just under $500 worth. 14 shares at $34 each. Sold them at $54.40 each. I was initially going to put in $1000, but that was if IPO price was maybe around $20. But since it was in the low $30s range, I got freaked out a bit. Idk why; clearly, I'm not an investor.
I figured if I lost $500, I'd be OK with that. But instead, I made almost $300. Easy money.
Would've been nicer to have made almost $600 on a $1000 bet, but hey, I'm still $300 richer! 10yrs of being a mod finally paid off. No, I don't want to think about what the hourly rate might come out to be. I'm just going to be happy with what I got.
I really really considered doing the same but for once tried to listen to my instincts and looks like I missed out on some gains! Oh well, that's life I suppose.
I really really considered doing the same but for once tried to listen to my instincts and looks like I missed out on some gains! Oh well, that's life I suppose.
Yeah this was one of those cases where if I felt I had spare money to throw around on it I might have done so on a similar "well when i'm this certain i'm often wrong" logic. Still feel like i'd...
Yeah this was one of those cases where if I felt I had spare money to throw around on it I might have done so on a similar "well when i'm this certain i'm often wrong" logic.
Still feel like i'd be net negative by a lot if I always followed through on that. I absolutely would've taken profit instantly on a win. No way i'm riding that out and hoping for more.
I also considered it, but a long time ago I swore I'd never use e-trade because I hated all the talking baby commercials. It looked like you had to create an e-trade account to participate, so I...
I also considered it, but a long time ago I swore I'd never use e-trade because I hated all the talking baby commercials. It looked like you had to create an e-trade account to participate, so I decided against it.
From Reuters Wow, they had a good IPO - $748m is quite a lot. Seems like institutional investors are into tech companies again? No doubt the stock will have a topsy-turvey share-price, though.
From Reuters
The San Francisco, California-based company priced its IPO at the top end of its $31 to $34 range. The IPO valued Reddit at $6.4 billion, while the company and its selling shareholders raised $748 million.
Wow, they had a good IPO - $748m is quite a lot. Seems like institutional investors are into tech companies again?
No doubt the stock will have a topsy-turvey share-price, though.
Interesting if selling data for AI will be profitable in the long run. Also, who owns the comments? Under the EU I'd assume it's the user but I'm not sure? Seems kinda iffy for Reddit to license...
Reddit is betting that data licensing could become a major source of revenue, and said in its filing that it’s entered “certain data licensing arrangements with an aggregate contract value of $203.0 million and terms ranging from two to three years.” This year, Reddit said it plans to recognize roughly $66.4 million in revenue as part of its data licensing deals.
Interesting if selling data for AI will be profitable in the long run.
Also, who owns the comments? Under the EU I'd assume it's the user but I'm not sure? Seems kinda iffy for Reddit to license content from the EU but maybe anonymity is enough to free them from that burden?
I feel like no. Obviously we don't know the terms of the deals, but I feel like training on the existing data would be all that's needed. Future data seems of questionable quality and a marginal...
Interesting if selling data for Al will be profitable in the long run.
I feel like no. Obviously we don't know the terms of the deals, but I feel like training on the existing data would be all that's needed. Future data seems of questionable quality and a marginal value-add given what we know about the degradating quality of moderators and mod tools.
Can a company get the existing data, train an LLM, not renew the deal, and still sell/offer the LLM? I'm not sure. But that's what I'd try and do.
Just as an FYI, a substantial portion of the pre-2023 Reddit corpus is “freely” available as a torrented snapshot of the Pushshift archive. That’s what a lot of companies (especially on the...
Can a company get the existing data, train an LLM, not renew the deal, and still sell/offer the LLM? I'm not sure. But that's what I'd try and do.
Just as an FYI, a substantial portion of the pre-2023 Reddit corpus is “freely” available as a torrented snapshot of the Pushshift archive. That’s what a lot of companies (especially on the smaller side) are likely to grab and use if they’re not interested in later data. I’ve been meaning to snag a copy for ages…
I know on an intellectual level that text is incredibly small on hard drives, but it’s bonkers to me that basically the entirety of Reddit up until 2023 could all fit on a disk that I can buy...
I know on an intellectual level that text is incredibly small on hard drives, but it’s bonkers to me that basically the entirety of Reddit up until 2023 could all fit on a disk that I can buy these days for under $100 — that’s more information than I think I could read if I browsed for like an hour every day for the rest of my life!
Thanks very much for the offer! I've just been putting it off since I need to move disk space around; my large data drives are clogged with LLM weights.
Thanks very much for the offer! I've just been putting it off since I need to move disk space around; my large data drives are clogged with LLM weights.
It's been in the reddit terms of service forever that if you post it there then it's theirs. I've always kinda been waiting for the authors that used to post their books chapter by chapter to...
It's been in the reddit terms of service forever that if you post it there then it's theirs. I've always kinda been waiting for the authors that used to post their books chapter by chapter to really blow up and reddit to sue for their cut, but it seems like I've been thinking to small.
Why is that? You'd think they'd like to preserve as good a user experience as possible since they're selling the data users produce. Unlike other social media platforms, this doesn't focus on...
Why is that? You'd think they'd like to preserve as good a user experience as possible since they're selling the data users produce. Unlike other social media platforms, this doesn't focus on shoving ads onto everything nor does it necessitate a clunkier interface so the users end up spending time doing nothing there.
I don't understand. If their strategy is to provide quality data for LLMs, it's in their best interest to produce that as well as possible, which means developing a user friendly experience....
I don't understand. If their strategy is to provide quality data for LLMs, it's in their best interest to produce that as well as possible, which means developing a user friendly experience. Unless they're just trying to cash out and sell the platform but even if the next owner continues the same strategy, it's in their best interest to continue this as well.
They're largely an app now. The majority of their users are from the reddit app. I see posts every day that I'm on there that boil down to "I love this app", "I hate this app", or "this is too...
They're largely an app now. The majority of their users are from the reddit app. I see posts every day that I'm on there that boil down to "I love this app", "I hate this app", or "this is too much to write on an app". It is going to continue to hamstring their content more and more as time goes on.
But has that anything to do with them betting on data licensing? The experience might be miserable but I don't understand what that has to do with this. How would that help them to sell the data,...
But has that anything to do with them betting on data licensing? The experience might be miserable but I don't understand what that has to do with this. How would that help them to sell the data, how does that strategy have anything to do with their enshittification?
I was specifically responding to your statement that "it's in their best interest to produce that as well as possible, which means developing a user friendly experience". I was pointing out that...
I was specifically responding to your statement that "it's in their best interest to produce that as well as possible, which means developing a user friendly experience". I was pointing out that moving their users to an app is hindering the creation of quality content/data. I don't know how it will help them sell the data, my guess is that it won't.
Anyone else thinks it will tank it at some point? I mean personally find it odd its listing - what exactly is it basing its listing and ongoing future on?
Anyone else thinks it will tank it at some point?
I mean personally find it odd its listing - what exactly is it basing its listing and ongoing future on?
You can read their S1. Some of their numbers do look good; $840m in revenue, 82% margin, 20% YoY growth, a large new revenue option in selling data to LLM developers that they've only just begun...
You can read their S1. Some of their numbers do look good; $840m in revenue, 82% margin, 20% YoY growth, a large new revenue option in selling data to LLM developers that they've only just begun to tap into. They have a lot of cash on hand and a fairly low burn rate.
Both. They’re different metrics. Margin is the amount you earned minus the cost of revenue (eg things like server fees). When you look at net profitability, you have to factor in costs like...
Both. They’re different metrics. Margin is the amount you earned minus the cost of revenue (eg things like server fees).
When you look at net profitability, you have to factor in costs like salaries for feature work, interest on loans, and so forth. Anything that cost money would go into that one.
I doubt many of those buying read the required listing of risks involved in the company. The primary one is the Redditors themselves. Now, if the company can grow its customer base and quickly...
I doubt many of those buying read the required listing of risks involved in the company.
The primary one is the Redditors themselves. Now, if the company can grow its customer base and quickly pivot from the unique customer driven structure it was based on to one JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, then sure, profit is possible.
But one day in, I've already seen the quality of posts dropping, which I suspect is from moderator decisions across the board. Time will tell.
Yea there's a very good chance this tanks below initial offering price within a week or a month. A year from now, I wouldn't be surprised if the Reddit IPO looks like the Grindr IPO, but the big...
Yea there's a very good chance this tanks below initial offering price within a week or a month. A year from now, I wouldn't be surprised if the Reddit IPO looks like the Grindr IPO, but the big question mark for me is how much value they can ultimately derive from licensing their data.
For those with FOMO just a reminder that betting it all on a single IPO and not an index fund is still basically gambling.
I deleted my main reddit years ago. I hate the whole concept of hyping up a hot stock just to cash out immediately, so I wouldn't have done it out of principle. Still, good for those who came out better off.
And I doubt any current nor former redditors would bet on long term growth of RDDT to begin with, so that was never in consideration.
That was one of the most annoying things about Reddit to me. There was a subreddit called r/superstonk that kept hitting the front page with the stupidest posts. It was filled with a bunch of people holding onto meme stocks way past when the bubble burst trying to convince themselves that they didn't lose their life savings if they refused to sell the stock.
The whole hot stock thing is fun if you like gambling, but when people delude themselves into creating a cult around a stock they went all in on, it's just sad and annoying.
Relevant video from Folding Ideas - This is Financial Advice (2:31:44)
Damn, Dan sure has reach!
Unfortunately, it still exists and is still making the same posts. I don't know if it's still hitting the front page though, I try to avoid reddit while logged out.
Default Reddit is 50% low effort junk, 25% economic angst, and 25% social/romantic angst. Any time I take a dip back in I’m quickly put in an absolutely terrible mood.
Perfect summary of it. For hobby or topic focused subreddits where visitors would explore solutions to problems together, now I find a slew of entry level hobbyists creating the bulk of the posts, and the actual interesting stuff that my targeted search turned up shoqing few meaningful responses.
I feel like the goodwill and curiousity that built the social internet went from forums to Reddit when it was clear how great it was to have a consolidated place, and from Reddit to... Adulthood? When it became clear how shitty it had become.
TLDR: the goodwill era of the internet is over.
Honestly a way to sort by text, link, or media posts would help the usability of reddit a ton. The text posts are where niche subreddits shine, but images and videos get upvoted more. The actually useful text posts get pushed off the front page and are not represented in the top posts filters.
Absolutely. Tricks like quotes, asterisks and other ways of narrowing search terms are not common knowledge anymore (or were they ever?) and it means that people probably aren't finding what they need.
It feels to be like high speed trading and day trading is bad for the economy in the big picture. I wonder how things would change if stocks could not be sold in less than 6 months without a very severe penalty.
How so? Laypeople may daytrade to their peril but high speed trading in general is important for market liquidity and price discovery.
My feelings are the same as u/stu2b50. High speed trading and day trading are definitely risky and more regulations should be in place to prevent things like day trading with tax advantaged retirement accounts, but there are a lot of benefits to allowing them to exist.
The constant flow of transactions in the stock market means that we can place a buy or sell order and have it complete in seconds instead of waiting days or weeks to complete. The flow of information is also faster, so investors can have more up to date information on stock valuations and get the best deal.
The tradeoff is short term volatility, but if you are a responsible long-term investor, the short-term fluctuations are not an issue.
So many of these investment opportunities just seem like passing the purse. I don’t see a path to Reddit monetizing.
I wish there was a path for non-profit publicly owned services to receive government funding so social networks critical to human culture and development didn’t have to cave to the word of advertisers and data miners.
Short term, they'll make money on their api. The quality content is old, though, once the AI companies have slurped it up they have it. The company hasn't done anything to make sure high quality content keeps coming in. Some folks have stuck it out for the love of whatever they're doing, but these things are always a cycle. Mods get burned out or life gets in the way.
There's always been a pattern where small subreddits produce good quality content, get attention and grow bigger, and then the quality gradually becomes worse as a result of the popularity. But that trend really seems to have accelerated recently. Where a sub can go from having good content one month to bad content the next. It's kind of interesting from an outside perspective, although of course pretty annoying when it happens to your favorite small sub.
To the moon! Just kidding I had my fun with dogecoin and while I know crypto's different from stocks, that was still enough gambling chaos for me, even if I came out slightly ahead.
I made like 12k on dogecoin and when I got out, all I could think was “wow, I’m a lucky idiot”. Valuable lessons learned across the board though.
At one point I was making $10k/hr on GME. Made $250k in a few days, then lost all my gains and my stop loss order executed. So net ~$0!
Dude I know it's easy to say this from the sidelines but damn if I made 250k in a few days I would have cashed out and bought a house
Yeah I should have. First I was up $110k and bought back in, then I was up way more. I was on a roadtrip at the time and couldn’t baby sit the shares.
It was my friend who told me about GME. He convinced me to buy option contracts. After I executed the call options he said it was going even higher and I figured “what the hell, he hasn’t been wrong yet!”. Turns out you should quit while you’re ahead. I did take that lesson to Vegas and turned $50 into $100 on the roulette table and just walked right out with my profit and bought some dinner.
A high school acquaintance of mine who got into a high-frequency trading firm said that with GME they “put their standard algorithm on it” and made $5MM dollars. These days he’s trying to start an online Mexican casino and is very forward, at least to me, about it being about stealing poor people’s money. It’s interesting to see someone normal become that. I do not want to support him in any way but I also have a morbid curiosity and no ability to stop him. So I watch from afar.
Wow, my WSB story was going from $600 to $4k and then down to $400 in the span of a week trading options. It was fun, but more in a going to a casino way instead of being a hedge fund manager way.
I donated blood soon after and the phlebotomist mentioned my high blood pressure. I said I’d gotten involved in some stock market gambling and he leaned in and asked “Gamestop?”
To give this a little more nuance:
In theory stocks are supposed to be a way to support an industry or a product you have some reason to understand and invest in. If you've spent your life working on engines, and someone is working on a brand new one, and you really believe it's going to be a big thing due to all your expertise, then it might be a wise investment because you actually understand the product.
That said, just because you know the product doesn't mean you also know the business and the industry. The company you're backing might have an AMAZING product but the business sense of a hammer. And even if that's not an issue, yeah there's just outside factors that can occur. Oops funding dried up. Oops there's a supply shortage. Oops the fed turned off the money hose.
This is why any successful investment strategy is very much about managing your risk and your money correctly. If you make a million a year and throw $5000 at reddit, well you can probably afford that loss and might feel your information justifies the risk. If you leverage everything you own to throw $400m at it, go seek help.
I mention all this because reddit is a pretty good example of many users here having a very "on the ground" experience with the product and its life/possible future, but probably haven't spent a lot of time really looking at their "boring" public financial data and researching where they're likely to go. Before you invest in anything you not only need to do the legwork on the product you're investing in, but also have your own financials together to know how much you can afford to invest.
I went against every instinct in my head last night and bought 500 out of the 1k stock allotment. Sold 20 minutes after opening for +55%. Ofc now my brain is like "why didn't you go all in" but I'm trying to be happy with my gains haha
You made money. Stocks aren't about buying at the exact bottom and selling perfectly at the mega-peak, but making good decisions.
Similar situation. Bought just under $500 worth. 14 shares at $34 each. Sold them at $54.40 each. I was initially going to put in $1000, but that was if IPO price was maybe around $20. But since it was in the low $30s range, I got freaked out a bit. Idk why; clearly, I'm not an investor.
I figured if I lost $500, I'd be OK with that. But instead, I made almost $300. Easy money.
Would've been nicer to have made almost $600 on a $1000 bet, but hey, I'm still $300 richer! 10yrs of being a mod finally paid off. No, I don't want to think about what the hourly rate might come out to be. I'm just going to be happy with what I got.
Note: $200 richer after capital gains tax.
Shh, let me have this for a bit...
But yes. I was looking at the rate this morning =/
Eh, the max you can typically be taxed on capital gains is %15, so he's at least $255 richer...
No, capital gains can be taxed at your marginal income tax rate if you sold less than 12 months after you bought.
I really really considered doing the same but for once tried to listen to my instincts and looks like I missed out on some gains! Oh well, that's life I suppose.
I did the ole "inverse reddit" because every single person I saw was saying it was going to tank immediately. It actually worked 😅
Yeah this was one of those cases where if I felt I had spare money to throw around on it I might have done so on a similar "well when i'm this certain i'm often wrong" logic.
Still feel like i'd be net negative by a lot if I always followed through on that. I absolutely would've taken profit instantly on a win. No way i'm riding that out and hoping for more.
I also considered it, but a long time ago I swore I'd never use e-trade because I hated all the talking baby commercials. It looked like you had to create an e-trade account to participate, so I decided against it.
From Reuters
Wow, they had a good IPO - $748m is quite a lot. Seems like institutional investors are into tech companies again?
No doubt the stock will have a topsy-turvey share-price, though.
Interesting if selling data for AI will be profitable in the long run.
Also, who owns the comments? Under the EU I'd assume it's the user but I'm not sure? Seems kinda iffy for Reddit to license content from the EU but maybe anonymity is enough to free them from that burden?
Presumably there's something in their TOS that grants them a very permissive license to use content you post on Reddit.
I feel like no. Obviously we don't know the terms of the deals, but I feel like training on the existing data would be all that's needed. Future data seems of questionable quality and a marginal value-add given what we know about the degradating quality of moderators and mod tools.
Can a company get the existing data, train an LLM, not renew the deal, and still sell/offer the LLM? I'm not sure. But that's what I'd try and do.
Just as an FYI, a substantial portion of the pre-2023 Reddit corpus is “freely” available as a torrented snapshot of the Pushshift archive. That’s what a lot of companies (especially on the smaller side) are likely to grab and use if they’re not interested in later data. I’ve been meaning to snag a copy for ages…
It's available as a torrent, I can share a magnet link if you want. (1.6 TB; zstd compressed)
I know on an intellectual level that text is incredibly small on hard drives, but it’s bonkers to me that basically the entirety of Reddit up until 2023 could all fit on a disk that I can buy these days for under $100 — that’s more information than I think I could read if I browsed for like an hour every day for the rest of my life!
That's 400,000 floppy disks!
Thanks very much for the offer! I've just been putting it off since I need to move disk space around; my large data drives are clogged with LLM weights.
It's been in the reddit terms of service forever that if you post it there then it's theirs. I've always kinda been waiting for the authors that used to post their books chapter by chapter to really blow up and reddit to sue for their cut, but it seems like I've been thinking to small.
The enshittification continues.
Why is that? You'd think they'd like to preserve as good a user experience as possible since they're selling the data users produce. Unlike other social media platforms, this doesn't focus on shoving ads onto everything nor does it necessitate a clunkier interface so the users end up spending time doing nothing there.
If they can make a hefty profit this quarter, users' experience doesn't matter.
I don't understand. If their strategy is to provide quality data for LLMs, it's in their best interest to produce that as well as possible, which means developing a user friendly experience. Unless they're just trying to cash out and sell the platform but even if the next owner continues the same strategy, it's in their best interest to continue this as well.
They're largely an app now. The majority of their users are from the reddit app. I see posts every day that I'm on there that boil down to "I love this app", "I hate this app", or "this is too much to write on an app". It is going to continue to hamstring their content more and more as time goes on.
But has that anything to do with them betting on data licensing? The experience might be miserable but I don't understand what that has to do with this. How would that help them to sell the data, how does that strategy have anything to do with their enshittification?
I was specifically responding to your statement that "it's in their best interest to produce that as well as possible, which means developing a user friendly experience". I was pointing out that moving their users to an app is hindering the creation of quality content/data. I don't know how it will help them sell the data, my guess is that it won't.
Thanks for clarifying!
Anyone else thinks it will tank it at some point?
I mean personally find it odd its listing - what exactly is it basing its listing and ongoing future on?
You can read their S1. Some of their numbers do look good; $840m in revenue, 82% margin, 20% YoY growth, a large new revenue option in selling data to LLM developers that they've only just begun to tap into. They have a lot of cash on hand and a fairly low burn rate.
Meanwhile their CEO said during the API kerfuffle that they were unprofitable. Which is it?
Both. They’re different metrics. Margin is the amount you earned minus the cost of revenue (eg things like server fees).
When you look at net profitability, you have to factor in costs like salaries for feature work, interest on loans, and so forth. Anything that cost money would go into that one.
I doubt many of those buying read the required listing of risks involved in the company.
The primary one is the Redditors themselves. Now, if the company can grow its customer base and quickly pivot from the unique customer driven structure it was based on to one JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, then sure, profit is possible.
But one day in, I've already seen the quality of posts dropping, which I suspect is from moderator decisions across the board. Time will tell.
Maybe I should have bought into the IPO when I had the chance. Oh well haha
Eh, I'd wait at least a week to see how it actually shakes out.
Yea there's a very good chance this tanks below initial offering price within a week or a month. A year from now, I wouldn't be surprised if the Reddit IPO looks like the Grindr IPO, but the big question mark for me is how much value they can ultimately derive from licensing their data.
I hope all the scrapers drive that value near the average annual moderator's salary.
Yea I made that mistake with JOAN.