Sure feels like they timed this IPO pretty badly. I think the ideal time to strike on this would have been a few years ago... Based on market conditions anyway. Reddit itself may just not have had their ducks lined up enough, but that's their problem, not the stock market's.

• Tech stocks trading sideways for the last year or two
• The interest rate money printer got shut off and cash is not cheap anymore
• Seemingly all the major new tech stock investment interest is circling around stuff like AI
• Federated alternatives are slowly building steam and people seem to have gotten pretty salty about corporate social media
• The pandemic is more or less over and people have pulled back from being chronically online somewhat (this is my guess, I don't have data to back it up)

Also what exactly is the monetization strategy? Ads I guess? More catering towards creating corporate "synergy" with the Reddit community? Selling user data/content? So basically making the place suck considerably worse for users is what it looks like to me.

Monetisation?

Licensing the site to AI when there’s finally a ruling they can’t just scrape the internet for training data while ignoring copyright.

I was told reddit has already been scraped for AI and all sorts of stuff. There is very little new value to sell.

Except AI models may end up having to start again with licences or public domain data.

They are currently breaking the law and delaying legal action as long as possible in the hopes they can repeat the trick with a new data set.