I hope this turns out to be the absolute disaster I am expecting.

I hope investors will see that the technology powering Reddit is no longer novel in execution or deployment. ActivityPub and its derivatives like Lemmy have proven this fact in practice.

The value of Reddit lies in its userbase and quality of dataset. As Reddit evolved to become increasingly hostile toward its userbase, the most valuable members become the most heavily impacted. This leads to the migrations away from the platform and eventual degradation of data quality. The sale of user data to ai ahead of the ipo is an important indication that the reddit c-suite is keenly aware of this.

Hopefully the financial world will see the ipo as a cash out for investors and not a viable investment into a sustainable business model.

That’s a nice fantasy, but the reality is that only a tiny portion of people actually migrate off a platform these days. Reddit knows that they can abuse their userbase for profit without considerable fallout, which is why they do it. Users don’t have the desire or patience to create new communities these days. They’re not interested in going somewhere with fewer people. Of course some users are interested, those users are us. But what was the percentage of people during the mass Exodus? I think it was less than 1% if I remember correctly.