So Reddit priced its IPO today at $34 a share. That values the company at something like $6.4 billion, and starting tomorrow morning it'll trade on the NYSE under the ticker RDDT. Nineteen years after Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian started the thing, it's finally going to be a public company. I feel like I should have a bigger reaction to that than I do.
Mostly what I feel is a little bitter, if I'm being honest, which isn't a very sophisticated way to react to a stock offering.
Here's why. Back in April 2023, Reddit announced it was going to start charging real money for API access, and by June the actual numbers had leaked out. Christian Selig, the guy who built Apollo, did the math in public and said he'd be looking at something like $20 million a year to keep the app running at the usage it had. Twenty million dollars, for an app built by essentially one person and a couple contractors. He shut it down on June 30th, 2023. I remember exactly where I was when it stopped working, sitting on my porch, refreshing the App Store page like that would somehow change the outcome. It didn't.
I'd been using Apollo for probably four years at that point. Before that it was Reddit is Fun, which I paid for too, because apparently I have a long and expensive history of paying developers for the privilege of using a website through a nicer window. When Apollo died, a bunch of the big subreddits went private or read-only in protest for a few days that June, r/pics and r/aww and a bunch of the tech ones I actually read. It did basically nothing. Reddit rode it out, some mod teams got replaced, and here we are, less than a year later, watching the company that broke third-party apps ring the opening bell.
I'm not saying Reddit doesn't get to go public. Companies go public, that's the whole point of companies eventually. But the S-1 they filed a few weeks ago was a genuinely rough read if you squint at it. Reddit has never posted a full-year profit, not once since 2005, and the accumulated deficit in there is somewhere around $2 billion. The entire business is ads plus, now, licensing deals to feed user posts into AI training sets, which is its own whole can of worms I don't have the energy to open tonight. The pitch to investors is basically "trust us, we'll figure out profitability eventually," which is a pitch that has worked for a lot of companies and sunk a lot of others, and I genuinely don't know which bucket this one lands in.
What I do know is that the old.reddit.com interface I still browse on desktop looks exactly the same as it did in 2015, and the mobile experience I'm stuck using now, since RIF and Apollo and Sync are all gone, feels worse in ways that are hard to describe precisely but easy to feel. More ads wedged between posts. More "recommended for you" garbage I never asked for. A comment section that takes an extra half second to load every single time, which sounds trivial until you're doing it forty times a day.
Anyway. Tomorrow some bankers are going to ring a bell and a bunch of employees who've been sitting on RSUs for years are going to have a genuinely great day, and I don't begrudge any of them that, people should get paid for building things. I just keep thinking about Christian Selig's tweet from that June, the one where he said Apollo brought in effectively no revenue and never had ambitions to be some giant business, it was just an app made because he liked Reddit and thought it deserved a better front end. That's such a small, specific kind of loss compared to a $6.4 billion valuation, and it's the thing I actually think about when this comes up, not the ticker symbol.
I'll probably still be on old.reddit tomorrow when the stock opens. Some habits are stickier than the apps that used to make them worth having.