Don't work at reddit, but if they are going IPO, the employees are probably holding onto their stock and crossing their fingers until it is worth something.
I have no knowledge of reddit, but I have been in companies that have IPOed, as well as companies that just say they are going to in order to appease investors wanting their money back and to keep the employees strung along on a sinking ship.
And the difference is that people truly going for an IPO are trimming costs and getting their ducks in a row on bureaucracy and legal fronts, including confidentiality. Those just using it to dangle as a carrot are... just talking about IPOs without changing internal business processes.
Only someone inside could tell us which one reddit is doing.
Yeah, having gone through a company that IPOed -- 100% agree. You're crossing your fingers and using your calculator to try and figure out how likely you are to hit the jackpot (or much more likely the massive tax burden). The company as a whole is basically going through a checklist to batten down all the hatches and implement pretty rigorous controls. So, they are likely seeing a lot more formal process for doing things. This along with trying to make the company look as healthy and profitable as possible. All this API business could even be a result of them going through the Risks section and seeing that having competing apps using their API is a major risk.
Also, chances are you are going to see zero communication from them when they do formally file. Since I think once they actually file they go into something called a quite period where they don't say anything publicly.
> All this API business could even be a result of them going through the Risks section and seeing that having competing apps using their API is a major risk.
Doubtful. Plenty of companies have APIs, and it's not like their actions have strengthened the company all that much.
Plenty of publicly traded companies have free APIs allowing third parties to build the same front end and sidestep their primary source of revenue (showing users ads)?
To clarify - I am not a fan of Reddit’s latest move, I see it as a product of the management hoping to soon be beholden to Wall Street. That necessarily comes with securing of revenue streams.
If they just worked with the users I'm pretty sure a lot of us would be absolutely proud of reddit for making it big and raking in the dough. All this time they'd left open old.reddit.com as a nod to us who've been here through all these years, and the new users were content with the redesign that was designed to get reddit paid.
Could you imagine how it would go down, if reddit had quietly negotiated with developers to allow for user API access and limiting the rates to that which a normal user would consume? (e.g. 400 calls a day or whatever). This would both allow for 3p apps to continue hooking us up with the oldschool forum board we like, WHILE preventing LLM models from scraping 1 Gigabyte of text every day.
Literally everyone would have been happy. Users would have the slight inconvenience of maybe having to re-log into their app, LLM and Researchers would pay for the privilege of getting to scrape 1 Gigabyte of text a day.
The only loophole here is malicious apps scraping the user's data as they browse and selling that black market. But is that really such a big hurdle as to completely discard the approach?
Isn't there a blackout period for the hoi polloi that prevent them from selling for ~90 days after the IPO? Big shots get to sell ofc but your average employee will have to watch the post-IPO slump go deeper and deeper.
Still probably worth waiting out, but it's not like there's a big payday at the end of this rainbow for most. Could probably negotiate some kind of bonus with new employer to offset that loss, even.
Good point. If I was holding stock/options close to an IPO, I guess my interests might be better aligned than usual with whatever short-term corporate moves that pander to Wall St.
