Reddit IPO'd last Thursday. $34 a share, top of the range they'd been floating, and it popped something like 48% by the close. I've had an account since sometime in 2012 (this blog and my Reddit habit are basically the same age, which is a weird thing to realize) and I still can't decide how I feel about a website I use to argue about keyboard switches and bread recipes now having a stock ticker. RDDT. It exists. Fine.
Here's my actual problem though, and its not really about the IPO itself. Its about Apollo.
If you don't remember, Reddit killed third-party apps last summer by jacking up their API pricing to something no indie developer could realistically pay. Christian Selig, who made Apollo, did the math publicly and it came out to tens of millions of dollars a year for an app that mostly just, you know, let you scroll Reddit without ads and with actual customization. He shut it down June 30th. I'd used Apollo daily for something like four years at that point. Widgets, custom themes, the works. The day it died I switched to the official app for about six hours before installing a workaround to get old.reddit.com loading properly on mobile, which is what I'm still doing, almost a year later, out of pure stubbornness.
So when I see headlines about Reddit "unlocking value" for shareholders, I keep thinking about the fact that some of that value got unlocked by strip-mining the third-party developer ecosystem that made the site worth using in the first place. Not a hot take exactly, this got said a lot back in June, but its worth remembering now that the company is actually cashing checks off it.
Anyway. The weirder part of this week wasn't even Reddit, it was watching Trump Media start trading two days later, on Tuesday, after the DWAC merger finally closed. Ticker DJT. It jumped something like 30-something percent intraday and still closed up around 16%, which put the market cap somewhere north of $8 billion. For a company that, per their own filings, pulled in about $4 million in revenue last year and lost something like $58 million. Four million dollars. That's a mid-size regional car dealership's annual revenue, not a social network's.
I don't say this to be political, I genuinely don't care about the app itself one way or the other, I say it because as someone who's watched tech valuations do strange things for over a decade now on this blog, this is a genuinely strange one even by that standard. Reddit at least has real numbers behind it: hundreds of millions in ad revenue, tens of millions of active users, a real (if not yet profitable) business. You can disagree with how they treated developers and still admit the company does something at scale. DJT is, as far as anyone can tell, a valuation built almost entirely on attention and loyalty rather than anything resembling a product moat. Both stocks might be bad buys. But they're bad for completely different reasons, and lumping "social media company goes public" into one story misses that.
I don't have a stake in either one, for what its worth. I don't buy individual stocks, mostly because I've watched too many friends get burned chasing the exact kind of hype cycle that both of these IPOs are riding right now, just from opposite directions. Reddit's hype is "finally, a real tech IPO after a two-year drought." DJT's hype is, well, something else entirely.
What I keep coming back to is smaller than either story though. Its just that Apollo's icon is still sitting in a folder on my phone that I haven't deleted, next to a bunch of apps I don't use anymore, and every so often I tap it out of habit before remembering it doesn't do anything now. That's the whole thing that stuck with me this week, more than any stock chart.