No more: Fidelity, a major investor, in April slashed its valuation by 41 per cent. According to Pitchbook, the company has raised more than US$1 billion and was valued at US$10 billion at the time of its last funding round in August 2021. Additional signs of dissent will chip away at Reddit’s value to investors.Īlready, Reddit’s perceived worth is under pressure. If he is to steer Reddit to a multibillion-dollar IPO, Huffman will need moderators to be on his side. That’s to say nothing of the wider role moderators play in hosting communities. If that were left to Reddit’s own small workforce, each of its permanent employees would have needed to review and remove approximately 30,000 posts each. Moderators removed 56.9 million pieces of content in 2022, according to Reddit’s most recent transparency report. Indeed, Reddit would struggle to function without the huge army of volunteers who do the work of moderating comments and keeping communities in check. Huffman called the protest “noise”, further infuriating some dedicated users who rightly view their role as essential to the site’s collaborative atmosphere. Some Reddit devotees were incensed about the new fees. He says that’s unfeasible and will have no choice but to shut the app down. That access is currently free but will be subject to fees starting next month.Ĭovering those fees for Apollo’s 1.5 million users will cost approximately US$20 million a year, Selig estimates. ![]() Like other apps, it needs access to Reddit’s application programming interface (API). Selig is the creator of Apollo, a popular app for using Reddit. The value is the community and the platform.” “Reddit of course has to keep the lights on, and of course has server bills and engineers to pay, (but) they aren’t the ones providing the actual value. “It is a different kind of tech company,” app developer Christian Selig told me. Aside from some advertising, the platform has changed little since its founding in 2005.īut Reddit has paid a price for staying cool and no-frills: The company isn’t profitable. Unlike Meta and other, bigger tech peers, Reddit has managed to retain its identity as a non-corporate, free-spirited space. Users have long worried about what going public will mean for their beloved social media platform, having seen sites like Twitter and Meta shift priorities and ethos under the pressures of pleasing Wall Street. LOSING ITS IDENTITYīefore moving past this week’s events, Huffman would be wise to recognise that the argument playing out is far bigger than this one issue. ![]() The conflict highlights the innate tension surrounding Reddit as it envisions finally moving ahead with its long-awaited initial public offering, now anticipated for sometime later this year.Ĭhief executive officer Steve Huffman told his staff in an email Tuesday (Jun 13) that “like all blowups on Reddit, this will pass as well”. ![]() The move angered power users who depend on those apps to make Reddit easier to use. More than 8,000 subreddits, the specialised forums that make up the platform visited by almost 60 million people daily, went dark earlier this week to protest Reddit’s decision to impose expensive conditions on the creators of third-party apps. But whether the freewheeling site has addressed the deeper tensions tugging at the company is another matter. SAN FRANCISCO: Reddit has mostly come back to life after a multiday protest by moderators took thousands of forums offline.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |