Per Hollywood Reporter, the filing reveals that recently departed and returned OpenAI jefe Sam Altman is one of the biggest shareholders — third overall. It confirms that the Newhouse family's Advance media company, one of the earliest "race to the bottom" newspaper companies on gutting days of print newspapers, and China's Tencent are second and third. (Advance used to own NOLA, the Times-Picayune, before wrecking it so badly that the Baton Rouge Advocate started a New Orleans edition and Advance ultimately sold. In addition, Advance also wrecked the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in part by making the Cleveland dot com website entirely nonunion.) So, there you go; you have Advance as a pre-Alden Capital version of Alden, Sam Altman's murkiness, and Tencent probably looking to start Reddit gaming or something.
That all probably says a variety of things about the post-IPO Reddit that aren't that good.
If that wasn't enough, Google announced a deal with Reddit to be able to scrape it more.
That's not good in another way. The insufferability of older-usage diehard Redditors about how it's the "front page of the Internet" will probably only double down. In reality, though not as bad as it once was, nonetheless, it's still about as much "the front page of Quora" as it is "the front page of the internet."
Actually, the biggest cesspool is the #BlueAnon at r/politics. There's lesser cesspools (setting aside the racism and sexism cesspools for which Reddit was once known), mainly, per the top link and later, additional thoughts, involving moderators that are favorites-players at minimum, Nazis at max. Finally, there's the chuddery of downvoting.
Related? We know Google "returns" promoted listings, as in, people who pay Google money, more and more at the top of search feeds. We also know that it's more and more returning more and more SEO garbage. We also also know that more and more of that SEO garbage is AI generated.
Will Altman in the future work on bots for Reddit to double down on this? Will he get it to partner with Google on training Google's own AI? Wonder what the likes of a Cory Doctorow might say on this?
Let's also remember that Reddit is still losing money. Typical tech site, but yet, big money tech bros have their boners out. Probably for tax writeoff reasons if nothing else.
Meanwhile, don't you have to be desperate or addicted to pay $50 a year for Reddit Premium? "Ads-free Reddit"? Woo-hoo! I already have AdBlockPlus for free, plus Ghostery. "Exclusive avatar gear"? Even more desperate. "Members' lounge"? WTF. The "coins and trophies"? Per Business Insider, sounds like a "I'll scratch your back you scratch mine" form of karma laundering.
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Also, me no like Reddit's new layout. Dunno if the change is in connection with the IPO or not, but in any case, I don't like it.
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Update, March 15: Wired has an in-depth piece, looking mainly at the IPO, but dropping back to look at Reddit from the beginning. It confirms some things I suspected on my own, such as rings of spambots, which still exist, obviously. It confirms just how craptacular the API is in many ways, as well as the amount Huffman has done since his return, as well as the amount of heavy lifting that's left. Frankly, per one of the piece's angles, yes, like a typical tech-world IPO, but complicated by deep Redditors' level of fandom (which Wired doesn't really address whether or not it lasts that many years) I think the IPO is overvalued.
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