Reddit's debut will mark the first major tech initial public offering of the year and the first social media IPO since Pinterest went public in 2019.

Social media company Reddit filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday after a yearslong run-up. The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “RDDT.”

Reddit said it had $804 million in annual sales for 2023, up 20% from the $666.7 million it brought in the previous year, according to the filing.

The company said it has incurred net losses since its inception. It reported a net loss of $90.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2023, compared to a net loss of $158.6 million the year prior.

Its market debut, expected in March, will mark the first major tech initial public offering of the year. It’s the first social media IPO since Pinterest went public in 2019.

Reddit first filed a confidential draft of its public offering prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in December 2021.

  • Chef@sh.itjust.works
    109·
    9 months ago

    I will short the ever-loving shit out of that stock. This is a no brainer.

    It’s a TERRIBLE investment. The business model is completely flawed and dependent upon assumptions that there will be only positive growth in the user base.

    Google is going to use Reddit to train its AI. That software is going to immediately become a smug, whiny, racist, pedophile femboy.

    I look forward to capitalizing on this completely predictable sunbaked diaper.

    • Billiam@lemmy.world
      52·
      9 months ago

      Except the stock market (and all the cultists who worship it) don’t inhabit the same reality as the rest of us.

      It doesn’t matter if Reddit is a good investment or not- what matters is if Reddit feels like a good investment to those assholes. The market can remain irrational a lot longer than you can remain solvent.

    • BaldProphet@kbin.social
      22·
      9 months ago

      I’ve never shorted stock before, but I’m really tempted to start now. RDDT will become the inverse meme stock.

        • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
          12·
          9 months ago

          Better than a true “short” is to buy a put option on the stock for 100 shares. You buy a contract that lets you buy someone else shares at a lower price. If youre sure the stock is going to decrease, you pay a minor amount to make more money when it does.

          You can then opt to exercise this and get cheap shares, or more likely, sell the put contract directly for profit.

          You can also sell a call option that says you will provide 100 shares at a higher price. If you think the stock is going down, you will never have to actually fulfill this, so the money you made from selling the call is pure profit.

          The positive with options is that they limit your losses if youre wrong, unlike shorting where technically your losses can be unlimited. Options are also easier to get into than shorts, which generally require specific brokers that have minimum account size.

          The negative is that options are time limited. They last only a certain amount of time you specify when you buy. You can be 100% right about how the market will move, but if you get the timing wrong, you still lose money

          • BaldProphet@kbin.social
            11·
            9 months ago

            I think this is what I had in mind when I said I would consider shorting RDDT. Gonna watch and see what happens with the IPO first, though.

      • TheOneCurly@lemm.eeEnglish
        17·
        9 months ago

        Shorting an IPO isn’t really available to most investors. Liquidity is super low and most brokerages won’t be able to offer it for a while.

        • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          9 months ago

          It’s also pretty common in the short term for a stock to ipo and be trading below the ipo price for a few months, so there’s lots of demand for shorts.

      • JDubbleu@programming.dev
        7·
        9 months ago

        On top of what others have said keep in mind shorting isn’t just you saying the stock will go down, it’s you saying the stock will go down more than others think it will. Tbh I wouldn’t even touch anything to do with shorting or options if I were you. It’s incredibly risky and should only be done by people with more experience than you and I.

        • SoleInvictus@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 months ago

          Absolutely correct. I played around with options several times during the height of the pandemic and lost over 99% of my investment. I think it was about 99.3%. It’s straight up gambling.

          Shorting a stock can result in you owing more than you’ve already spent. That’s back alley gambling.

          Keep in mind there are literally thousands of Redditors who have the same idea.

    • queerly_hot@kbin.social
      21·
      9 months ago

      pedophile femboy

      you don’t need to continue this bigoted line against queer people, intentional or not.

      • LufyCZ@lemmy.world
        34·
        9 months ago

        Are you actually serious?

        If you read the whole thing, it’s clearly supposed to be a mashup of different aspects of reddit.

        • Chef@sh.itjust.works
          39·
          9 months ago

          I’m the original commenter.

          While you found my intention to be pretty clear, I can also understand the responder’s concern.

          I’ve never had to live my life being called a pedo because of my sexual or gender identity. It must be exhausting to have to constantly defend yourself against those awful accusations.

          I can empathize with someone seeing those two words together and getting upset.

              • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
                6·
                9 months ago

                Sometimes it’s better to do it that way, to address a powderkeg comment downthread than directly respond to it.

              • j_roby@slrpnk.netEnglish
                5·
                9 months ago

                You’re not wrong, and maybe they should have initially responded to the person who called them out. But this whole conversation could’ve turned into a dumpster fire in a number of different ways.

                I believe the response given was absolutely worth commending. It showed compassion and maturity - things that are all too often lacking in internet discourse.

          • Miaou
            2·
            9 months ago

            I cannot emphasise with a person too dim to understand context however

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      54·
      9 months ago

      I don’t think we have to make sure.

      Spez doesn’t care. He’s made his money. Reddit can just die as far as he is concerned.

      And neither he nor anyone else there seems to be interested in improving the user experience.

    • mommykink@lemmy.world
      20·
      9 months ago

      Make sure what tanks? The IPO for reddit? The website whose CEO was a moderator on r/jailbait, the community for sexualizing minors?

      • loobkoob@kbin.social
        17·
        9 months ago

        The website whose CEO was a moderator on r/jailbait, the community for sexualizing minors?

        I thoroughly dislike spez, and I think there are a lot of reasons to be critical of him, but this isn’t one of them. He was made a moderator of /r/jailbait at a time when people could be added as moderators without being notified or needing to accept any kind of invitation.

        I’d rather see him criticised for the many awful things he’s said and done over the years than for some non-reason like that.

        • SuperDuper@lemmy.world
          13·
          9 months ago

          Cool, now explain away his decision to make a custom award specifically for the main mod of jailbait.

          Also, fuck no I’m not giving him the benefit of the doubt over his own jailbait moderator status. No way he and the rest of the staff were not aware of that at any time.

    • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
      10·
      9 months ago

      If you think it’ll tank, you’re just as deluded as the people that came here in the Exodus (myself included) who think Reddit is dying.

      The vast majority of people still use it and it will make money.

      Edit: Just look at how pretty much all the largest corporations can treat their customers and still make money. Reddit will force ads down everyone’s throats and sure some will leave, but the vast majority done care. Also, you have to factor in selling data for AI and and targeted ads etc.

          • foggy@lemmy.world
            8·
            9 months ago

            If you haven’t, peep his Instagram.

            Dude just travels and takes epic photos. Living is best life.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
              7·
              9 months ago

              I find it really hard to hate Myspace Tom. He’s very rich, he’s worth $70 million. He didn’t try to maximize that into $700 million or over a billion, stepping on everyone he could along the way. He just made a website a lot of people enjoyed, ended up making a decent chunk of personal income from selling it, and then just spent the next 20 years just seeing the world and taking photos.

              As far as I know, he isn’t giving millions to the Sierra Club or whatever, but as far as people that rich go, he seems like he’s as not-evil as possible.

            • otp@sh.itjust.works
              4·
              9 months ago

              Living is best life.

              Living is indeed best life! Of course, living is only life. But only life is best life.

      • Hubi@feddit.de
        13·
        9 months ago

        Reddit has never been profitable and I don’t see a reason why it would change now all of a sudden.

          • MagicShel@programming.dev
            7·
            9 months ago

            I strongly suspect trying to monetize their users to be profitable will necessarily make the user experience suck enough to drive people away. The only missing piece is a viable alternative, which will take some time but it will arrive. Maybe Bluestacks or whatever garbage will capture their users. I’m staying here, though. The pace could be a bit higher, but I don’t really miss the tens of millions of users.

            That said, I’ll argue with myself and say I can’t believe Twitter is still hanging on, but it’s killing Musk to keep it on life support.

          • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            9 months ago

            Objectively, Reddit is no different than slashdot, fark, digg, etc that came before it. If they fuck up the user experience, the users will move on.

            • Jaytreeman@kbin.social
              3·
              9 months ago

              The value in reddit is the user base. It’s multiple times bigger than your examples.
              In most conversations you’ll still see people using it for niche communities. It’s almost too big to fail

              • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                9 months ago

                I think the fact that you say “still” is pretty telling. They’re already pushing users away and making the experience worse and they don’t even have investors chasing quarterly reports yet.

              • SkippingRelax@lemmy.world
                2·
                9 months ago

                Niche communities tend to have few users though, and it doesn’t take long for people to get organised, pack their shit and move to another platform

      • Yrt@feddit.de
        6·
        9 months ago

        As sad as it is I think you’re right. The same was said about facebook and even though they had a bumpy road it’s bigger than ever before. Nothing being sold at the stock market follows any logical rules, it’s so much emotion that sells stuff. And as long as it makes money, nobody cares about racism or pedophilia or any other bad thing. I thought that’s why we hate capitalism that much.

        • SkippingRelax@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 months ago

          Facebook went public at a time when they were THE social media site and everyone’s aunty was on it.

          I’ve been on reddit for probably 12 years and know few people irl that use it (not usa mind you). Moreover they don’t really have a plan and they do have competition. Ignoring for a second that 99% of lemmy users are probably disgruntled ex redditors. Why should anyone invest som ofnl their savings in reddit going public, besides playing wall Street bets? Is there anything there to believe in? Do they have a credible plan to increase users and monetise that increase? In other words, any “step 3: profit” to buy into?

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      9 months ago

      It probably will. An IPO in a post ZIRP world for a company that isn’t profitable and isn’t a new high growth company isn’t likely to be a popular stock.

  • Mostly_Harmless@lemmy.world
    30·
    9 months ago

    Interesting. Today Reddit sent a new TOS letter to an old email address (I don’t have any Reddit accounts because fuck u/spez). The username it referenced was created today. I’ve never used this address with Reddit and don’t have any confirmation emails in my box or spam indicating someone else tried to create this account. I changed the password and deleted the account, but I have to wonder if they might be trying to boost their subscriber numbers for an IPO.

  • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
    13·
    9 months ago

    Don’t you usually get to black before the IPO? We’re not really in growth stock rates these days.

    • Sarmyth@lemmy.world
      9·
      9 months ago

      There was another article today about them getting a contract from Google to train their AI on their content for millions a month. This should close the gap and lead to a possibly positive year for the first time ever this year.

      They saw a 20% increase in revenue, likely due to consolidating people on their app, getting them the ad revenue boost. That impact is only a little over 6 months old. I’m curious what a year looks like.

      • waratchess@lemm.ee
        9·
        9 months ago

        The article I read said that Google will be paying 60 million dollars per year, so that still leaves them 30 million in the red considering the 90 million net loss of 2023.

        • Sarmyth@lemmy.world
          3·
          9 months ago

          If the 20% revenue boost was a result of the api changes, the difference may be made the difference of 6 vs 12 months of the increase. Also, other LLM data buyers may become customers now that they know it’s for sale and the approximate cost.

        • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
          2·
          9 months ago

          That’s actually not so bad, I still think they could have gotten more with that Google deal, at least 5x what they got, but it subs like Google is going to be boosting their traffic too which will likely be a benefit.

    • Jaytreeman@kbin.social
      4·
      9 months ago

      The vast majority of companies arent profitable with their IPO. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.
      The total IPO/year has tanked too.
      All I’m getting at is that overall trends no longer apply as business and how stocks are approached has changed a lot

    • SuperDuper@lemmy.world
      14·
      9 months ago

      Spez is straight up luring the userbase into a rug pull scam.

      Plenty of rubes will fall for it and the stock will be overvalued for a short period of time, then the institutional investors will pull out, then the rubes will panic sell, then institutional investors will slowly buy back in a little bit and it’ll eventually reach some kind of baseline but never get back to where the redditors bought in at.

      I just hope I can get some good puts in before the rug pull happens.

    • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      IIRC Vonage tried that too, because the folks in charge knew the IPO was going to fail spectacularly and wanted more rubes to put in some money.