Here's hoping. (yeah, I'm an unreasonable, hateful bitch. I despise what they did with the Apollo dev (and others) and I hope it bites them in the arse.)
I wish it lives. May we never forget Aaron's dream for the platform. May we never forget it. It's my goal in life to carry on in his and other's footsteps so we may use what we have made to help others.
He definitely would have been all about ActivityPub, if not involved with bringing it about. Still amazes me that he was one of the inventors of RSS, arguably a proto-ActivityPub.
That valuation cut was from before the whole shitstorm. We've yet to see the impact that this has all had on them, but given the attempts to crush the protests by the reddit admins, when they've just sort of ignored this stuff in the past, its likely not good
On one hand, it's likely exactly what they wanted. They get a vanilla app with vanilla content, perfectly tailored for vanilla investors. The part they forgot is that the beacon of internet culture will never be vanilla.
They tumblr'd themselves and they haven't even 100% gotten to the porn part. I hope all the only fans people on reddit have backups and start jumping ship.
That’s not them actually losing money, though. They’re a private company, not a public one. Their valuation is just what analysts think that they’re worth—it has nothing to do with how much money they have.
But valuation is a very real predictive measure on IPOs, and what Reddit is making all these bad decisions in preparation for. They tried to cut a little more pie by dragging third party app users onto their app to try and increase revenue and bump valuation, it's just that it was so terribly misguided and executed that it had the opposite effect and blew up in their face.
Splez recently said he thinks they will now go for the IPO later than they had planned originally. So I guess he's hoping this will blow over, the public/investors will forget and they'll recover. I'm not so sure.
Private companies (which is most businesses) are still worth something. If big investors like Fidelity value your business at $1bn, banks will absolutely consider that as collateral for loans and so on. And if they say your business has halved in value, they’ll consider that too.
Reddit is antsy to effectuate their exit strategy.
Or to put it more simply: everyone with a stake in Reddit, from pigboy Huffman, to institutional investors like Fidelity, to employees who earned equity is eager for Reddit to have their IPO so they can offload their shares on the public stock market.
Their valuation will be an important factor, if not the most important factor, that will determine for which price those stocks will initially be put on the market.
So while slashing the valuation in half will not directly lose them money, it could translate into the initial stock price being half of what they anticipated, causing them to get half of what they would’ve gotten had the valuation not be slashed in half.
There is no way in hell that people with equity in Reddit are not pissed about the slashing of the valuation, since they now anticipate getting a haircut as much as half of what they initially expected to get.
I mean I have first editions of the original runs from 1997 when they were brand new to the states. In fact, all of my cards are from the original set that was released, I never collected anything past the first 151 set. I'm not saying their valuation was not inflated, but it's the usual trope of "oh hey, you remember that old nintendo, those old basketball cards, old baseball cards, etc.. I got rid of them" trope
Now something that was super inflated, beanie babies and yes, I still have almost all of the old mcdonald's ones still in bags from when I was a little girl. I don't care that they aren't worth monetary value, they are worth something to me sentimentally. Something I collected with my mom.
I'm actually surprised that metric would change much, because the users viewing ads aren't impacted by changes to the API or third party apps. So that's literally just 20% of people who either stopped using the site in solidarity or couldn't get to their content because of the protests.