darkmugglet, 2 years ago

I would argue that this whole thing will delay or devalue the IPO. Institual investors will look at this rather public fight and question his leadership. And the whole attempt at damage control makes him look bad. The only investors that will look past this fiasco are those who are doing the long play, and even then, they likely won't want Spez involved.

From a risk perspective, Reddit has just highlighted it's biggest risk: the volunteer moderators. The only way Spez will be able to fix that is to replace moderators with AI or paid moderation teams. At an estimated value of $3.4M, and a company that is not profitable, that increases the risk in terms of the business model.

In general, social media is inherently flawed for profits. The path to monetization is ads and data, and the fact that Spez is now squeezing the users make me think that the value of the data and the ads is not producing the returns to compensate for dumb ideas like the NFT project.