This is one of those rare cases where what is being said is less interesting than who says it.
What: Reddit stock is junk, the IPO will fail hard, and anyone investing on it is begging to lose money. I believe that most people discussing this in Lemmy already know that, so the info isn't new here.
Who: Forbes. Forbes' target audience is investors; greedy vulture capitalists love it. So if Forbes says "it'll sink!", investors are less eager to buy stock, and that sinks the stonks even further. So what Forbes says is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm glad that Forbes is doing it. I want to see Reddit die.
EDIT: as other posters are correctly highlighting, I derped - the article is from a "contributor", and it has basically no impact or visibility.
Note that this is a "contributor" post, which is essentially their sneaky wording for editorial. It isn't a real Forbes article and anyone that knows the Forbes website won't pay any attention to the article.
Very important distinction! Even I've written "contributor" posts on behalf is a company when I was moon lighting for a block chain startup. They're not quite ads, but you very much can buy your way into that.
Good catch - I didn't pay attention to the fact that it's a contributor post. Even then, I believe it to be still exposing the "Reddit is junk stock" (implied: "don't buy it!") discourse to potential investors. The title alone already does it, for those who skip past the article.
Great piece of marketing to have someone write the article, have people talk about it mistakenly as an actual Forbes article and drive interest in the stock that will make many clueless individuals suddenly have an interest in Reddit Stock.
News is news .... any news whether good or bad, especially if it is controversial and agitates people, is good news for the company pushing their name.
Chances are .... it was Reddit company marketers that set up this article to be featured on the Forbes website to drive attention to their company and their upcoming IPO.
"Forbes" is not the Forbes you are referring to. It's a blogging platform that shows the forbes name and claims they're "Contributors" but isn't actually "Forbes Magazine" which is what investors actually trust.
Basically this is just some shitbag pretending to be classy by hiding behind someone who sold him that space. There's a ton of shit Video Game "Articles" on the site too, same story(masquerade), same value (low) , same respectability (none)
competition has had many years to acquire Reddit prior to this IPO and have chosen not too. Acquiring Reddit now wouldn’t create all that much value for a competing social platform.
The scale is immensely and massively different. Modern social media is not going away, the digg phenomena was one driven by a much smaller number of more passionate users.
That much smaller number of more passionate users has already left Reddit.
Compare to Lemmy's userbase, which is anti-capitalist and clearly has a bone to pick with reddit. If I had to value Lemmy it would be for the cost of hardware and operations alone.
Which is kinda what Reddit should be valued at, because its a community oriented site, the value is never in the contributions. You can't guarantee their engagement. They can always pack up and leave. Anyone thinking there's a value in community oriented sites is being fooled.
I know people are gonna think "daaaamn, you just shit over lemmy too" but Lemmy makes no illusion of it, its a community funded effort, so the product offering is going to be suited to its audience, and this helps engagement. Reddit has no greater objective than tricking advertisers that people will visit.