To short a stock is kind of difficult to do on an IPO because you have to borrow a stock to short it, and pre-IPO only the underwriters have that stock, and are not usually lending it out. Naked shorting – where you don’t actually have a stock but you sell it anyway, lol – is illegal. I know there are a lot of folks talking about shorting RDDT here but you have to actually borrow a stock to short it.

More likely is that Reddit’s trying to get people to buy at a fixed price before it tanks, because any shares purchased pre-IPO are guaranteed cash at a set rate for them, not subject to the trading volatility that will come with the IPO. I think that’s why WSJ is calling Reddit’s strategy an “unusual IPO wager.”

So far this year it’s been a rocky start for IPOs anyway, many are trading below IPO value, even companies that have more in the way of tangible assets than Reddit. But the clock is against them, the Reddit board pretty much has to do it as soon as possible or fight the added market volatility that comes with an election year, among other reasons.

I’ve linked a couple of articles; the second one especially is very helpful. It talks about a similar situation, a healthcare company called BrightSpring with a heavy debt load looking for capitalization that went for an IPO in January 2024, and how they spent their pre-IPO time trying to talk investors into buying at a set price beforehand because that’s how they could still get some cash out of an otherwise shitty IPO showing. Personally, I think this is exactly what Reddit is trying to do, and what this car-dealership style hawking of pre-IPO shares via email is trying to accomplish for the Reddit board.

Archive links:
WSJ: Reddit Plans to Sell Stock to Loyal Users in Unusual IPO Wager
WSJ: Will the IPO Market Spring Back in 2024? The First Big Debut Offers Clues

This pre-IPO invitation to buy is the “pump” part of pump and dump, of course everyone hates it, lol.

“I think it’s pretty cool that Reddit is doing this IPO offer to their mods and users,” a Reddit user who asked me to identify him as Kevon tells me. “It’s a nice little thank you that actually may have some monetary value.”

Kevon’s considering buying shares in the Reddit program, and may buy more once it goes public, if he feels the stock is undervalued.

Kevon sounds like a nice guy, but someone should explain to him the difference between being given options and buying shares at the IPO price. Reddit’s not doing him any favors.

The REAL value of Reddit that tends to get overlooked in these conversations about Reddit’s measurable value in the IPO has nothing to do with its use or its users, but (1) in its ability to influence public opinion and (2) its possession of users and data to sell on, including being a platform for ad delivery to millions of eyes.

Now look at its majority owners: Conde Nast, Tencent (China), and Sam Altman (AI). There are some who believe this is coincidence. But I believe where there is money, there is no such thing as coincidence.

Reddit has already proven that it has never made and will never make a profit in and of itself, yet the cash continues to flow. That’s because Reddit management is structured around churning Reddit’s secondary benefits into wealth for itself, and nothing else.

Look at their actions, both in the short term and in the long term. Regardless of their words, the owners have proven incontrovertibly that neither the users nor even the usability of the site means jack shit to them.

It’s ALL about advertising money, being able to steer public discourse, and scraping data wherever they can find it. That’s the real product.

Thus it’s a pretty certain guarantee, IMO, that anyone who isn’t already on the Reddit board or an owner of Reddit will lose whatever they invest in the IPO, because Reddit is NOT about social media, or providing/creating value for its users. Reddit is solely about scraping the secondary benefits that the users provide and selling them off for the benefit of the few.

Even the selling off of pre-IPO shares – normally reserved for those already involved in the ownership or financing of a company about to go public, because pre-IPO shares can offer massive gains if the IPO is successful – should tell you that they expect RDDT to instantly sink. Why on earth would they give those sweet pre-IPO shares up to the unwashed masses if they thought there was even a remote chance the IPO would at least break even?

This IPO is complete shit, lol. And what’s even funnier is that the C-suite of Reddit is SO used to pulling fast ones over on their users that they aren’t even trying to hide it. I feel sorry for anyone buying these shares, because they are going to tank on day one. There’s literally no value there, other than for the rich boys already skimming it off the top, and this IPO is their final skim.

Henrietta Lacks has entered the chat . . .

Emphasis on dump . . .

Given how rigged the entire experience became over the years, what with the relationships between supermods and admins, the number of openly broken promises and the sheer amount of asshattery involved in everyday happenings, the neverending lies, and then marginalizing the visually impaired in one stroke with a response that seemed like a useless long form of “so what are you gonna do about it?” just like they did with the API call debacle, this seems far more like a toilet factory reserving shares in shit for its biggest shitters more than anything else. And at least a toilet factory would have something tangible in porcelain to show for it in the end, but Reddit’s just a huge steaming pile of ad riddled bot shit now.

I think this IPO reserve probably sounds reallllly good to both the very guilty and the very gullible, and to absolutely no one in between.

Then I hop to another instance or create one of my own (running 19 or later so I can block his) and problem solved, lol.

Federation means Musk can buy a single instance, or even a hundred instances, but cannot prevent anyone else from simply opening another somewhere else and making their own portal to the same content he wants to collect behind a paywall (if he even could).

I feel like AI companies have been scraping Reddit for their datasets already since the beginning and without permission.

Well yeah, Sam Altman (Open AI) was even on the board of Reddit for a while. It’s a safe bet that they’ve been doing it for years.

Like the Budapest Memorandum, lol.

This is not surprising, given as much nuclear saber-rattling as Putin has done in the last two years. He is absolutely desperate to be feared and for the West to back down, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement. Every day that goes by is a day his own empire slides back a bit, and his home control weakens as more and more Russians personally feel the bite of war coming back to them in myriad little ways.

And meanwhile, as Putin grows weaker both at home and abroad, Europe and especially his bordering countries are strengthening both alliances and arsenals, choosing NATO over Russian lies and Ukrainian freedom over the easy path of just letting him have yet another country without a fight, like Georgia and Crimea.

This war was only supposed to last three days, and we’re almost at the two-year point. If Putin could already have used nukes, even in the tiniest of “accidents,” he would have.

Yet Putin is even more aware than anyone else that nuclear saber-rattling is ALL he can do without triggering MAD and/or putting the “blast” back into “oblast” when his shit blows up without leaving the pad for want of maintenance over the last few decades.

Putting nukes into space is a great way of reinvigorating the threat behind his nuclear arsenal for the rest of the world and giving us all a bit of shock-and-awe – but without actually having to turn the key on anything he’s had laying around for the last forty years.

“Less filling, tastes great.”

But it’s still all theater. What Western satellites or resources can he actually nuke, anywhere, without triggering Article 5?

This is the truth. They’ve been trying and failing to peel his supporters off him since 2015 and have not only epically failed, they’ve generated more for him over time and the ones he has stick even harder.

If the GOP or anyone else actually had any ability to steer his followers away and onto something else, the Day-Glo demagogue would have disappeared off the world stage long ago. But they can’t, and because he IS a demagogue while they have all the personal appeal and charisma of flaking eczema, they never will.

I just tried the OpenVINO transcription on a random speech-over-music mp3 I happened to have: it works great, FAR better quality than I expected (I think I was expecting Youtube quality, but this is much cleaner and clearer). Perfect capitalization, good sentence breaks, adequate punctuation (commas, periods, question marks).

Only problem is that I can’t figure out how to copy the transcription so I can paste it outside Audacity: the transcriptions show up attached to specific portions of sound, like track labels. While it will save me the trouble of having to actually transcribe audio manually, to get them out of Audacity and into a word processor it looks like I may still be stuck copying each “label” individually unless I can find a way to copy or export them.

EDITED TO ADD: I just answered my own question, lol. File -> Export Other -> Export Labels -> .txt file

https://archive.ph/t8Hyl

A few seconds in the breakroom microwave ought to take care of any problems in that regard, if there’s no other obvious metal in them like grommets for laces. Bzzzzt ding! and problem solved, lol.

You should consider crossposting this to !thenightfeeling@lemmy.world community; it would fit right in. Good pic, OP.

I’m not the guy you’re talking with, but I have successfully installed multiple flavors of Linux on a 2010 MacBook recently, and am now running Zorin on it. Linux will run on unbelievably tiny resources compared to Windows. I wrote a post about it a few months ago asking the Linux community here for suggestions if you’re interested.

deleted by creator

In the US there already are some, they just need to be stiffer and with dedicated enforcement. This is the federal law; there are similar state laws also listed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988

Nah, you’re good. For some of us it’s the first time seeing it, and I really liked reading what people far more familiar with this tech have to say about it here, including that it’s old news for them. So thank you, seriously, for posting it.

Though I’ve already managed to switch from Gmail and it’s kinda refreshing

No doubt, I’ve been thinking about doing the same. What provider did you go with, and what is your experience so far, if you don’t mind me asking. I’m definitely looking for recommendations.