Reddit made an initial public offering filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday ahead of its highly-anticipated stock market debut.
The social network plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “RDDT.” Its listing – expected in March – would be the largest IPO by a social media company since Pinterest went public in 2019.
How social media’s biggest user protest rocked Reddit
The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined, Reddit said in a statement.
The IPO filing revealed that Reddit sustained $90.8m in losses in 2023, as its revenue grew by roughly 21%. The business estimated that its US average revenue per user or ARPU, was $3.42 for the last quarter of 2023 – a decrease of 2% year over year…
https://www.reddit.com/dsp
They just sent out the emails for offering their 75k most valuable users advanced purchase. It’s based on your total karma and/or your total moderator actions. It’s that latter where I think they’re really going to get fucked. Volunteer labour is such a massive part of reddit not immediately being consumed by redditors and bots. If I took on a dozen moderators for a smallish subreddit like /r/snackexchange, maybe one of them would stick around past a month. Of those who did they either treat it like a 24/7 on-call job or they do advanced labour like programming 3rd-party tools. It’s absolutely terrible work and the only reward for it is more work, now with extra enshittification from investor pressure.
Lose those mods and it’s a doom spiral for the entire website. What’s the Plan B? Hundreds of paid customer service agents doing that work or trying to do the mod coups that failed last year because the new guy sees he’s being fucked just as hard as the old guy? Organic user traffic is going to plummet once that quality filter is gone and they see the
version of the front page. The next wave of admin crackdown to enforce investor demands is going to provoke another mod strike and compounded with the stock price falling I think reddit might be going the way of Digg very fast.
edit: Also, the top tier for moderators is 5k actions. The loyalty of someone willing to do 5k un-fun things is now dependent on the value of a stock for a company that can’t turn a profit, and they can’t turn a profit without making things massively worse for the person willing to do 5k acts of labour for them. There is no way to make any of those 5k acts of labour fun and any attempt to short of being paid is a pizza party NFT which will only piss them off more.