Reddit power users balk at chance to participate in IPO as Wall Street debut nears

Sarah Gilbert spends a lot of time on Reddit. For the past three years, she's helped moderate the r/AskHistorians subreddit, which has 2 million members and was the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation. She's been a lurker on the forum since 2012.

But when the subject turns to Reddit's upcoming IPO, Gilbert's excitement wanes. The 19-year-old social media company set aside 8% of the shares in its offering for certain users and moderators, along with some company insiders and their friends and family members. Airbnb, Rivian and Doximity employed a similar model when they went public, as a way to reward power users or early customers.

Reddit's initial public offering is different. While its predecessors hit the market during a record IPO stretch in 2020 and 2021, Reddit's planned New York Stock Exchange debut this week will be the first major tech offering of the year, and lands after a major reckoning in the industry that was highlighted by tumbling valuations, reduced investment and an emphasis on profit over growth. The two venture-backed tech debuts of 2023 — Instacart and Klaviyo — failed to pop, a sign that getting in at the IPO price no longer equals free money.

It's not just market conditions that have Reddit moderators like Gilbert forgoing the investment opportunity. Reddit has long had a rocky relationship with moderators and the site's most dedicated users, or Redditors. Following a user protest last year stemming from a policy change that forced some third-party developers to pay more for use of the company's application programming interface (API), Reddit CEO Steve Huffman compared site moderators to "landed gentry."

Gilbert, who works as a research manager at Cornell University's Citizens and Technology Lab, said