I'm convinced Reddit will never IPO because it will have to open its books, and that a large chunk of their revenue comes from direct payments for astroturfing. It must be at least tempting for them - and it's not like anyone would notice on r/politics or any of the other big subs.
I can sort of understand the mentality, but right now Reddit looks like a terrible IPO prospect. It isn't profitable, it's poorly managed, lacks transparency, depends on volunteers to function on a daily basis, and when they make a move to make themselves profitable their user base rebels in a fairly public and humiliating way.
All of this in the post-Fed rate hike world where money isn't free. Besides I feel it's important to remember that Reddit has been talking about an IPO for many years, and I doubt it's going to happen now.
Careful, Reddit is rumored to IPO later this year so they've been turning the enshittification screws. Expect to see less and less legitimate opinions, more and more corporate manipulation and ads, and likely a lot of LLM-generated astroturfing as the profit engine dials up to 11.
When you can find older stuff or well-reasoned opinions on Reddit, it's a goldmine. But sadly that doesn't justify the pricing Reddit's owners surely want to see in the IPO so it'll likely get crowded out by short-term profitable long-term garbage priorities.
It feels like the more a company tries to pump value for shareholders, the less value is left over for users. Reddit has been very obviously working towards an IPO for some time and you can see it in the worsening user experience and onerous (prudish) moderation policies pandering to advertisers.
Shareholders are parasites on a company as their interests are one dimensional in favor of themselves. Gotta get that big IPO payout though.
Has reddit managed to drive away enough of the original user base that they'll get through an IPO without a massive user revolt? The redditors of ~5 years ago would've loved to thoroughly tank an IPO via displays of just how volatile user-controlled content can be. They loved embarrassing Reddit (the company).
Additionally, Reddit equity is a seedy investment in the very best of market enviroments. Reddits content AND audience is the antithesis of what makes a user base valuable for advertisers. Piracy, NSFW, tech-savy enough to block ads, notoriously stingy etc. pp. Its user base also has a long history of revolting against any sort of attempt to change this set of facts.
Reddit sharply declined in quality over the past years. the neverending attempts to change its nature, in an attempt of ad-friendly sanitation; executed with unrivalled heavy-handedness, nipped any chance of revival in the bud. This is in addition to the feefdom-ness of moderators and a long history of mismanagement by spez himself. Sometimes mismanagement as in censorship. I finally gave up on making myself miserable with Reddit and its echochambers on a daily basis after they priced their APIs to death. That is one stupid decision on a long list of similarly misguided attempts at trying to sweeten the rancid Reddit equity deal.
It is wild that a company that is nearly two decades old and seemingly has never been profitable is doing an IPO. Who is going to buy their stock? What would make someone think that Reddit will suddenly turn things around in year 19 and actually become profitable?
Some mods have already openly discussed taking their subs entirely private and invite only in the event of an IPO. Reddit gets no ad revenue from private subs.
Reddit shouldn't even try to go IPO. It's basically a collection of forums. They should be a private company that makes a small profit hosting the forums instead of trying to be like Facebook
There’s plenty of reasons that Reddit would be a terrible public company and self-promotion rules are pretty low on the list.
Much bigger problems are the inherent anti-ad ethos of its users due to being more tech savvy than the average internet user (and by that I mean savvy enough to install an ad blocker), the massive bot problem, active user angst for any site changes regardless of revenue or interaction impact, all of which generalize to, “we’ve been around for nearly 15 years but have never managed to be cash flow positive”.
I think they really missed the boat for an IPO(and subsequently dumping the shares on retail chumps). The tanking equities market, rising rates, and recession fears mean there’s little to no chance of it happening any time soon.
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