Article Directory
Reddit's IPO Proves the Users Were Never the Point
So, Reddit finally did it. They put on a suit, shined their shoes, and begged Wall Street for a payday. The "front page of the internet," the last bastion of weird, user-generated chaos, is now just another ticker symbol ($RDDT, if you care about that sort of thing).
And I have to say, watching the whole spectacle unfold was just… perfect. It was the most predictable, soul-crushingly corporate ending to a story that was always pretending to be about community. The IPO went live, what, last week? I think it was Thursday? Or maybe Wednesday, my calendar’s a mess. The stock popped, the suits got rich, and everyone who actually made the site worth a damn got a front-row seat to watch their favorite dive bar get turned into a TGI Fridays.
This is the inevitable lifecycle of every cool thing on the internet, isn't it? Seriously, does anyone actually believe the fairy tale anymore?
The part that really gets me is the PR spin. The absolute masterstroke of corporate gaslighting was offering some of their top users and mods the chance to buy shares at the IPO price. They framed it as, and I’m paraphrasing the corporate-speak here, "rewarding the dedicated members of our community."
Let me translate that for you. "Rewarding" them means letting the people who built your entire company for free—the people who moderate your forums, create the content, and generate the data you’re selling to AI companies—have the privilege of giving you their own money. It’s like a landlord "rewarding" a tenant who fixed the plumbing for free by letting them pay next month's rent on time. This whole thing is just shameful. No, shameful is too polite a word for this. It’s a calculated insult dressed up as a thank you note.
Of course, the reaction on Reddit itself was exactly what you’d expect: a howling mob of self-proclaimed geniuses and bitter veterans all screaming into the void. I spent a few minutes scrolling through the threads, and it was a goldmine of impotent rage. You had the r/wallstreetbets crowd vowing to short the stock into oblivion, users promising to delete their decade-old accounts, and endless, endless posts about how CEO Steve Huffman—I think that’s his name, the “spez” guy—is the ultimate villain.
It reminds me of this city council meeting I went to once to complain about a pothole. This guy gets up to the mic and starts screaming about how the new stop sign on Elm Street is a deep-state conspiracy to control traffic flow for the lizard people. The whole room just kind of… short-circuited. That’s the Reddit userbase right now. They’re furious, they’re loud, and they’ve finally realized the game was rigged from the start, but they have no idea what to do about it except post memes. And that's Reddit in a nutshell, I guess. A bunch of people screaming about a system they willingly participate in.
So what happens now? The same thing that always happens. The site will be slowly sanitized for the advertisers. The algorithms will get more aggressive. The weird, niche, and potentially "brand-unsafe" communities will get choked out in favor of bland, mainstream content that can be easily monetized. They’ll try to squeeze every last drop of engagement out of the user base until it’s a hollowed-out shell of what it once was, and then… I mean, just forget it.
Are you seeing this pattern too? It’s the same playbook every single time. A platform is born from genuine community, it grows, it gets popular, and then the money men show up and tell the founders it’s time to sell out.
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe this is just how the world works and I’m the only one dumb enough to still get annoyed by it.
Honestly, I'm Not Surprised
This IPO wasn't the death of Reddit. It was just the official announcement of what we all knew was true for years. The users were never the customers. They were the product. The loud, chaotic, brilliant, and often idiotic unpaid laborers who built a billion-dollar platform so a handful of people in suits could get their big payday. The mask is just off now. That’s all.
Reference article source：
