Reddit is a very risky venture. It relies on enormous amounts of free work and they are not keen on the website being further monetised. The mods are regularly at odds with the site ownership and without them it looses value quite fast, the moderation is what makes the site work. While last years protests against the API shutdown didn't take reddit down the scars of that action and the protests by users are visible on a lot of searches of the site now. Many users deleted the contents of their accounts alongside the account and you find deleted posts all over the historical posts now. Its reduced the value of the site quite considerably for answering weird questions via another search engine.
This incident caused Lemmy to become a stable and permanent competitor that is gradually growing and competing with Reddit. Its still tiny but unlike a year ago it works a lot better its not hastily been thrown together. Reddit enacting another war with its users and there is now a clear alternative that people can go to. The trust wont be there in Reddit as a company for a lot of users and they wont need as big a push as last year.
Its a risky investment because its nothing without those mods and if they protest or leave the user base will quickly dissipate as the site descends. Its been harder to moderate since a lot of the tools were lost with the APIs. The quality of Reddit has clearly dropped in a lot of subs. Reddit does not have many cat lives left. They still haven't made any money and the entire project seems to be unstable.
Everything you said is accurate and can be summed up as “investors should have no faith in Huffman at the helm”, which is enough to tank a growth stock like Reddit is supposed to be.
Quite honestly, as someone who has done deep value investment analysis for fifteen years, I’ve never seen a company purposely do anything as self destructive as what Reddit did, particularly before going public as part of it’s IPO roadshow phase. These guys are amateurs and it shows.
- their software stack was relatively simple and easy to maintain
- their moderators were volunteers who worked for free & loved their job (as opposed to FB who are hiring them for 30/hour)
- their expenditures were very low for a company of that scale.
- third-party developers built great apps for free and boosted the site, and this was when Reddit team didn't have the resources to build a proper app of their own (they ended up acquiring Alien Blue, one of the favorite apps of that time and adopted it as their mobile client)
They had a huge presence for minimal expenditure, and they let it all go with more & more short-sighted decisions. Quite sad to see something just decay like this.
Hi, out of curiosity: could you share some of that deep value investment analysis - even if it is outdated - or even better, perhaps some of the methodology or heuristics?
It's possible to write a bear perspective on any company of any size. I remember reading the ones about how Facebook would never make money around the time of Facebook's IPO. Those turned out to be wrong, to put it lightly.
Calling Reddit mods "retards" is a disservice to the mentally handicapped. They are, in the aggregate, in no way a benefit to the site or to human civilization. Anyone who has actually used the site for any length of time, and ever ventures out of the likes of /r/politics and /r/worldnews, knows this.
None of this takes away from the fact that Reddit is, in the aggregate, (as others have said) the single largest collection of discussions on Earth. Bigger than 50 years of every mailserv combined, 45 years of Usenet, 20 years of Facebook comments, or 15 years of Stack Exchange. Expecting Lemmy or Mastadon to supplant it is futile.
This incident caused Lemmy to become a stable and permanent competitor that is gradually growing and competing with Reddit. Its still tiny but unlike a year ago it works a lot better its not hastily been thrown together. Reddit enacting another war with its users and there is now a clear alternative that people can go to. The trust wont be there in Reddit as a company for a lot of users and they wont need as big a push as last year.
Its a risky investment because its nothing without those mods and if they protest or leave the user base will quickly dissipate as the site descends. Its been harder to moderate since a lot of the tools were lost with the APIs. The quality of Reddit has clearly dropped in a lot of subs. Reddit does not have many cat lives left. They still haven't made any money and the entire project seems to be unstable.