• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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    20 hours ago

    Companies pay for API access so profits go up and stock value go up.

    I assume the reddit stock doesn’t pay dividends based on profits. But if you bought for 10 dollars and now it is 500 dollars? You can sell some of that stuck to people hoping it will go up to 1000 dollars for a solid profit. And so forth.

    And if it DOES pay dividends (some kinds of stocks do) then a percentage of those profits are directly sent to the share holders based on how many shares they have.

    • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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      20 hours ago

      I understand how stocks work. Reddit stock is just a legitimizes greater fool scam as no one will ever get a dividend or see any return in their investment short of managing to sell the stock for more than they bought it. Reddit is absolutely worthless in an strictly economic sense. It’s value is soley in societial and political ways

      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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        20 hours ago

        see any return in their investment short of managing to sell the stock for more than they bought it

        So… it is a stock that doesn’t pay dividends? Like… that is what stocks are.

        • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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          20 hours ago

          Which will only actually ever benefit anyone that owns massive amounts of the stock. Reddit has few tangible assets other than their data, which is of questionable value at best. It’s basically like owning stock in a piblic library

          • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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            19 hours ago

            Homie? I assume you are just looking to hear “reddit bad” and… it is.

            But if you are actually attempting to discuss things in good faith? You are just describing stocks and you should REALLY educate yourself on the subject if you ever intend to invest beyond retirement and mutual funds… which most people shouldn’t in the first place but that is an even bigger tangent.

            • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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              5 hours ago

              I am looking at it froma purely financial standpoint. The inky thing Reddit really produces is semi-anonymous data that is tied to an email address. The quality of that data is iffy at best, while they have massive expenses just to keep the site operating. They can charge for their API calls, but they will never be able to use that to generate actual profit since no one will ever pay for it at that price point.

              Something like Reddit or twitter are useful if they are owned by powerful individuals or corporations that wish to influence the public. It is worthless as a strictly financial vehicle because it produces no profit and has assets that are not not equal to the cost of maintain them. You would only buy stock in reddit in the hopes that some billionaire thinks they can do a better job running it than Elon Musk did with twitter. Otherwise reddit stock is just a volatile place to park your cash in the hope that you can sell it for more later.

              Which takes me back to my original comment about the kitten stomping factory. It gives value to a select group of people with a specific aim, but it is worthless as an investment vehicle because it owns little, produces nothing, and has massive liabilities. If you want to exert power and influence, it’s useful. If you only care about making money, it’s useless. People who buy and sell stock are mostly only interested in making money.

              • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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                4 hours ago

                I am looking at it froma purely financial standpoint.

                Then let’s do that.

                Reddit has three official and one implied revenue streams.

                Of the official, we have:

                Ad sales. This is where most “user data” actually comes into play and is the idea of building a profile of each user that can be used to put them into categories for targeted ads. That might be a simple as “likes video games, hates women, curious about learning to pee while sitting down”. Or it might be “doesn’t realize that guy at the bar took off the condom and is now pregnant”. This is demonstrably profitable and doesn’t seem to be effected.

                The next is people buying reddit premium because they are idiots.

                The last official oneis the actual topic of this thread. Reddit sells API access to, among others, companies training LLMs. ChatGPT has, allegedly, stopped using them. Thus, one of their major sources of revenue dried up and their stock dropped as a result.

                As for the rest:

                Otherwise reddit stock is just a volatile place to park your cash in the hope that you can sell it for more later.

                Ah, so you DO know what the definition of a stock is. You just refuse to accept it because the word “reddit” is involved.

                The vast majority of stocks are horrible to even consider purchasing as an individual. A general rule of thumb is the only ones you should even consider buying are those with dividends where you just buy a few shares and every couple years check your investment account and transfer the excess to your savings.

                The rest you rely entirely on mutual funds (and similar). Where the idea is that an investment group has a large pool of money and they try to stay ahead of minor fluctuations and often outright bet against themselves. So you might have some funds earmarked at assuming reddit will go up and other funds that take the Oracle announcement as a hint that OpenAI spending on Reddit might decrease and sell the stocks ahead of time to buy shares in coca cola instead or whatever.

                But the thing to understand is that that is happening to basically every single stock. Because the fundamental idea of the stock market is about leaving others holding the bag.