Reddit Is Letting Power Users In on Its IPO. Not Everyone’s Buying::Reddit says it wants to reward users by letting them buy into the company’s public listing. Some say it’s too risky—others say they won’t pay a company they’ve already given hours of free labor to.
They’re just trying to get people to tie their real names, addresses, email, and financial information to their profiles, especially the ones with established post histories going back years.
They can figure some of that out, but all rolled up and verified by the account holder?
That makes their data on users waaaaaay more valuable to the people who buy data.
Now this is one part where I believe them. Public companies have strict controls on their investor relations. I can believe that they are going out of their way to keep their investor info separate from their user info. They will probably get fined by the SEC if they don’t.
That doesn’t make it a good investment, of course. I don’t want to be King Steven’s exit liquidity.
I actually got an email from Reddit about the offering today. They specifically, in bold, say they don’t have access to this information as it is only provided to the plan administrator.
You would still have to be idiotic to join this IPO.
They specifically, in bold, say they don’t have access to this information as it is only provided to the plan administrator.
I seriously doubt it, because if someone isn’t verifying that you hold the account it was sent to. People could “sell” their invites and I feel like this is already walking a fine line with the SEC with the whole “early access” thing.
It would be trivial to write a bot that pm’ed accounts that met this metric to receive an invite offering a tiny amount for their codes.
Hell, someone could do that and never follow thru with buying accounts as it would make some users more likely to buy.
This whole thing is likely to go horrible, because reddit never thinks shit thru.
This is really nothing special in the world of IPOs, companies offer their initial shares to specific parties before the public is able to puchase them. These are typically investors, employees, etc.
It would be a pretty big problem if it was found that the financial company administering the IPO was to share personally identifiable information to Reddit. SEC rules actually have teeth, so I wouldn’t be too worried about them lying about it. It does look like you have to provide them a name to register so sure they might have that associated with your account if they don’t already, but it does help prevent selling the opportunity to buy.
It isn’t helpful to spread FUD here when you are discussing something like the offering of securities products which have very defined procedures that the offering party must follow. This is one area you don’t want to fuck around and find out about.
I got an invite, too. I reported of as spam.
I also got one. I have a little bit of money sitting in a brokerage holding account, and I was already thinking of buying a single share as a joke (so I had the option to heckle them “as an investor in the company”). But I wouldn’t do it via their stupid IPO insider process. That requires the buyer to share some PII with reddit. And I don’t trust them as far as I could throw them.
I’m guessing I know why I didn’t get let in on its IPO.
Dang, and you seem really torn up that you cannot throw your money in the trash :)
They sent me an offer. I ain’t buying
There have been quite a few comments like yours here. Is everyone on Lemmy a former ‘power user’. That would be great.
In another thread a former mod said that both they and their bot had been given the offer.
Someone replied to me in another thread and said that they were giving invites out in stages based on number of mod actions or karma. The first cutoff was “only” 200k karma. The lowest was 20k.
I was thinking of signing up just to see the information but then I read the prospectus and realized it was a losing investment, plain and simple.
I had two accounts over the years that I’ve gotten to higher tier levels.
It was honestly pretty easy back in the day. There were a couple of topics that I could pretty consistently get 5k+ karma from. Large subs with well known view points. Play into those and you take in massive amounts of karma.
They are going to try and fleece users even more by doing an IPO way too high. Its going to get shorted into oblivion and then settle in at about -70% of IPO value.
