The Reddit IPO is a Disaster. . . so let's burn it down

friends fellow members of the internet we need to have a chat about this upcoming Reddit IPO which is basically guaranteed to destroy everything that we loved about the site in the first place while making a select group of wealthy corporate overlords even more extremely wealthy overnight the plan is to make up for their shortfalls and profits by selling user generated content to train new AI models and letting the website grow up into what they call a more mature phase by growing up they mean more profitable for the guys in suits but the community isn't buying it in the last year Legions of unpaid moderators quit Reddit in protest when the websit stopped supporting third-party apps that made their jobs easier a few weeks ago the UI changed to make the feed more video and photo focused and now it looks like Instagram or Tik Tok and the board board of directors is trying to convince its users to Rally around this upcoming IPO like they did for GameStop and pump and probably dump the company into mem stock Stratosphere while leaving the users holding the bag as someone who's contributed hundreds of posts over the 17 years I've been on the site this makes me incredibly angry it makes me angry enough to do something about it and I have a plan that I need your help with now for those of you who have missed the news Reddit filed an application with the New York Stock Exchange to list itself as a public company in March of this year under the symbol rddt reddits Bankers are seeking to raise roughly $5 billion in valuation which I will note is about half of what they expected they would be able to raise in 2021 this week Reddit HQ sent out an email to its most prolific users offering us us the chance to participate early and buy shares in the company before it goes public at the so-called institutional rate while on the surface this seems like an interesting chance to own a piece of Internet history the magic of Reddit never really came down to its innovative graphic design or web architecture but from the contributions of its users the 73 million of us who visit the site every day the mods and contributors who write millions of insightful snarky obnoxiously lewd heartfelt confusing conspiratorial analytical and motivational posts on the website's 3,1 125,000 subreddits we the users were never in it for the money we wanted Community we wanted a good laugh or a funny meme we did it for the lulls the entire idea that websites need to make gazillions of dollars is antithetical to the spirit of why users are there in the first place and why is it our job to make them Rich a core part of reddit's business model in the coming years will be to take all of those user contributions things that were put online because people wanted to share something personal or funny or whatever about themselves notably for free and then turn those contributions into Grist for the AI Mill not only that the CEO Steph Huffman has the gall to call those contributions reddit's intellectual property as if he owns them just because we post them on his site I'm going to quote the New York Times here we expect our data advantage and intellectual property to continue to be a key element in the training of future AI models Mr Huffman CEO said in the letter the company has a number of undisclosed licensing agreements to use this data and expects to make an upward of $23 million over the next 3 years from those contracts according to the filing here's what I think they're really trying to do in 2021 the subreddit Wall Street bets orchestrated a frankly brilliant moment of revolution around the meme stock GameStop over the course of a few weeks they sent the share price of GameStop from $4 to an all-time high of $483 in a short squeeze that brought hedge funds to their knees I've never seen anything like it holy I'm not going to go into all the details you can watch the whole story in the movie Dumb money Huffman and his ilk are hoping that Reddit users will take these token shares that we being offering at a special institutional price and drive reddits IPO price up to insane Heights through the magic of Internet hype and fan communities what they haven't reckoned with is that the typical Reddit user can already see the writing on the wall this IPO isn't the beginning of good things it's the end of all that was good and here's how we can strike back instead of selling out the years of our heartfelt contributions that we spent on the site for a chance at making a modest profit we can take a card from Reddit history and orchestrate a mass Exodus just like what happened in a very similar circumstances in the great dig migration of 2010 if tens and then hundreds and then thousands and then millions of us all create accounts on another link aggregator with the same basic functionality as Reddit then I think that we're going to actually change the way the IPO goes what's going to happen is that there will be be shock waves that go through the news cycle and will force the social media overlords to respect the contributions of their users we will not just be widgets in some sort of game plan to make social media Empires off the backs of our free labor and we know we can do it because we've done it before now if you weren't around here on the internet back in 2010 let me tell you this story of dig way back in say 20 8 dig was the web link aggregator of the moment it had millions and millions of users and in 2008 Google actually put in an offer to acquire them for $200 million which at that time was actually like a ton of money for IPO stuff you could upvote and downvote various web submissions and things that made it onto Dig's front page went viral on the internet then in 2010 dig broke its Covenant with its users when they changed the way it ranked Post in what had gone down as one of the worst redesigns in Internet history users were so angry at what they called new dig that millions of people moved to Reddit like almost overnight and I was one of them and then we built Reddit we built those communities four years later dig was all but forgotten and was sold to a company called beta works for just half a million dollars users had the power when we act together things change at the time dig thought it could manipulate its users into being content automatons in an effort to monetize them into irrelevance Reddit is now doing something pretty similar and it's our chance to strike back here's what I want you to do I want you to go to another aggregator platform now at this moment I don't have a clear favorite alternative to Reddit I don't have a dog in that fight I thought it would be sort of funny that after you watch this video you could go start up an account on dig and we could just have the migration go back but I looked at the site this morning and it was pretty awful but there is a decentralized network that it's already becoming popular with some former Reddit users and it's called lemi and I've been scrolling through it all morning and even though it's pretty Bare Bones it has all of the functionality that you love on Reddit it has the ability to make knee communities up voting and down voting and commenting with the added feature of being hosted on a distributed set of servers which means that no single corporate Overlord will ever be able to take its cut and make it like some profit generating machine what's more it actually has a reasonably Lively Community that's already there so you won't be posting on a dead husk of a webboard hoping that the community will show up there are also mobile apps and various kinds of functionality that are currently missing on Reddit since they secured reddits borders so rather than pumping money into reddits bloated and disingenuous IPO let's take the power back let's send a clear signal to corporations that think they can own us simply because we logged onto their website and created a username and started to actually enjoy ourselves and the way we're going to do this is by creating usernames on another site we are the ones who created these social media Networks by our contributions and efforts so I'm going to put links down to how to log on to lemi down below it's really just you click a link and then you click another link and you create a username not hard but when we do this and when we do this in Mass what will happen is that the new cycle will suddenly see a spike in all of these new accounts right before the Reddit IPO and then people are going to get scared and people are going to lose money and just maybe we're going to get a little power and maybe we'll enjoy ourselves on lemi too all right that's my plan please share this with anyone who you think might get on board