Reddit employees will be able to easily know that more than 1000 subs went dark. They’re also probably well aware about how ad revenue works on the platform.
This message wasn’t really aimed at the employees. It was aimed at the MBAs and bankers who are preparing the IPO. It was meant for investors to say “everything is fine and this is normal…”
Specifically infinite/increasing-growth capitalism.
They need to grow profits/value. These social media tech companies have about saturated potential user base. People are foreseeing a slow-down in ad budgets, and user-data is becoming a commodity. These realities, plus the need to drive up profits, leaves these companies with “no choice” but to seek more and more user-hostile features and rent-seeking behavior to satisfy investors. This was probably a long time coming, and was sorta delayed by valuation gains via an overpriced market. Now the investor love affair with tech has cooled a bit, and they’re asking more for hard-profit on the balance sheets.
The other thing that is ripping through social media platforms is a kind of ‘outrage’ or FOMO among leadership that LLM builders like OpenAI are eating lunch at their table by consuming their user content for training. This feeds into the previous point because they think that their users content can be a product of its own beyond attracting more users or being leveraged by ads. I am not so sure about this because these companies have already gotten their ‘lunch’ if they wanted it, and I am dubious about the value of a model built on data as provided by Reddit’s finest minds, and these platforms have patently failed to stop disinformation bots (which will get worse from these LLMs). But who knows.
Agreed. I think the post-IPO layoffs will be aggressive in Reddit’s case.
It’s not clear to me how reddit could possibly “grow”. They’ve hit peek influence, and ad-revenues haven’t really been a growth factor that has excited investors. They’re not really a technology powerhouse like Facebook or Google - all they have is their central product. So, when the IPO drops, all I can see for reddit is a future of aggressive layoffs and strong enshittification of Reddit as they seek capitalistic eternal increasing growth.
It’s not surprising. A lot of these CEOs run around in cliques. They have forums, news letters, Chatrooms, and social events. When Silicon Valley Bank went down, the CEO of the company I work for was giving us news from other CEOs he was talking to from a shared Chatroom they set up, basically a discord for CEOs.
The other point is that many CEOs are slaves to trend and have a deep fear of missing out.
In a way, they’re organized, and combined with the above, that’s part of why when one big company hops everyone leaps behind them as if they’re moving as one (it’s all a dick-measuring Highschool clique contest though, which is why I don’t use the word conspiracy). I would not be surprised if Huffman and Musk both repeated their rhetoric to an adoring crowd of fellows before they took it to their feeds. It’s maybe why they speak so brazenly, because there is a little echo chamber of people who worship at the altar of Survivorship bias in the hope that heaven will send them more bigger-dick pills.