Technology

The main 2 changes they want to make before the IPO are killing old reddit (no/less data siphoning, css, no stupid nfts/animations/other dumb attempts at monetization) and removing anything nsfw (not just porn, anything considered nsfw like gore, violence, etc. This means state/police violence gets removed, anything to do with war gets removed.)

idk how much impact banning third party apps will have, but if/when they get rid of old reddit, that will be much worse for them. right now at least there's that as the last bastion of classic reddit pre-enshittification. Many subreddits will just outright stop working as they rely on classic css for critical features (as well as bots, the api will eventually be rendered unusable for them as well probably). Also, moderation is hard/impossible on new reddit or the official app. At that point, discussions about moving the subreddit to a custom css lemmy instance start happening.

then goes porn subreddits. Tbh, those users and that content is actually a net negative on the business in general i'm guessing (no ads served, google/apple/mastercard/visa breathing down their necks). That's still a hell of a lot of users lost permanently, which is X less on the active user count to show to investors.

I'm just wondering, by the time they get to their IPO, all of these changes will have turned away basically all veteran reddit users and moderators. I don't think they're going to put up with rebellious moderators, they'll just replace them (there's already going to be a list of "reddit approved moderators" that can use mod bots, this is the start of that). Will there even be anything left by IPO time? Will there even be an IPO, if the users go down by 40% like tumblr? I mean, they could easily just pivot to a mainstream facebook/instagram/tiktok alternative, but will it work? Those apps already exist. Why would anyone ever go from them to reddit? They'd have to be filling a market gap, like tiktok did after vine got shut down. I just don't see it happening.