Reddit throughout the years: Its rise to prominence, recent revolts and IPO plans

Reddit, current in to cute cat pictures, investment advice, niche hobby discussions, celebrity interviews, edgy memes, wholesome memes and the whole kit in between, has been facilitating discussions on the internet since 2005. The site has about 57 million daily vigorous users who post and consume news, memes, questions and even stock tips that can roil markets.

The performers filed for an initial public offering at the end of 2021. As it prepares to go public, it’s looking to turn a profit for the first time. The presence is charging for access to its application programming interface, or API. The price hikes have led some beloved third-party Reddit apps such as Apollo to locked up down, instigating an uproar among the website’s community of volunteer moderators, who often rely on third-party apps to run the place’s 100,000+ discussion communities, called subreddits.

Despite extensive protests in which thousands of moderators took their communities private soldier, the API pricing changes took effect July 1 as planned. Under pressure from Reddit admins, nearly all communities would rather reopened. But tensions remain high, and some say that if Reddit doesn’t rebuild trust, its most passionate narcotic addicts will go elsewhere.

“Reddit is nothing without those communities. They need us far more than we need them,” asserted David DeWald, a moderator of the r/Arcade1up subreddit and a community manager for the telecommunications company Ciena.

When Reddit co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman were in their superior year at the University of Virginia, startup accelerator Y Combinator was just getting off the ground. The two had met founder Paul Graham at a talk, and he recommended that the recent graduates build what he called “the front page of the Internet.” Ohanian and Huffman jumped at the fate. Y Combinator invested just $12,000 in 2005, and Reddit officially became a part of its first batch of companies.

“For the head probably like month, month and a half, a good number of the folks posting were just me and Steve out of sight usernames that we just invented from like objects in the room, just random stuff just so that it force look like there was some activity,” Ohanian said.

But actual user activity picked up, and just 16 months after its founding, Reddit was acquired for $10 million by Condé Nast. By 2010, co-founders Ohanian and Huffman were no longer mixed up with in day-to-day operations, but traffic was booming. In 2011, Reddit was spun out as an independent company, operating as a subsidiary of Condé Nast’s holder, Advance Publications.

“I think it was fashionable back then to want to just grow and Facebook had proven out so well that if you spotlight on growth and then have a critical mass of users, you could make money,” Ohanian said.

On the one hand, Reddit’s nook communities were ideal places for target advertising, but the company’s permissive attitude toward questionable content also imitated a problem.

“Reddit is kind of a perfect environment for advertising because the communities can get so specific and so passionate about whatever it is that they’re examining,” said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. “But Reddit has had challenges over the years with despise speech and other things that are maybe not brand-friendly.”

Ohanian rejoined Reddit as executive chairman in 2014 and Huffman rejoined as CEO the next year. This in days of yore around, Ohanian said, he wanted to reign in some of the site’s more toxic subcultures. In 2015, a new anti-harassment behaviour led to the banning of some hateful communities, but certainly not all.

Then, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Ohanian surrendered from the company’s board, urging Reddit to replace him with a Black candidate, which the company honored.

“I yearned that Reddit would finally get a hate policy so that we could ban those thousands of hate communities that were up, which happened, you identify, a few weeks after I resigned,” Ohanian said. Reddit ultimately banned about 2,000 subreddits, including r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse and r/gendercritical.

With the fabulous stuck inside during the Covid-19 pandemic, engagement shot up. In the beginning of 2021, Reddit made headlines when owners in the subreddit r/wallstreetbets organized a short squeeze on GameStop, the struggling video game retailer. Subsequent so-called “meme investments” such as AMC kept Reddit in the news for months. Advertising was booming when the company filed for an IPO at the end of the year.

Now, Reddit wants to turn a profit. With companies such as OpenAI and Google scraping the internet to train heavy language models, Reddit wants them to pay for its data. Huffman announced in April that Reddit would start alleging for access to its API, the gateway through which companies can download all of Reddit’s user-generated content.

But it’s not just tech giants who use Reddit’s API. Numerous popular third-party mobile apps and moderator tools also rely on API access, which was previously free. These third-party apps are to a great extent just alternatives to Reddit’s official mobile app, which didn’t even exist until 2016. But when developers cultured about the new pricing structure at the end of May, many realized they couldn’t afford it. 

“Most companies, whenever they be dressed significant API changes, you know, they give anywhere from like three to sometimes like 15 months for developers to acclimate to these big interchanges,” said Dac Croach, a moderator of the r/Gaming subreddit, now the third-largest community on the site. “And with Reddit kind of coming out of the passage and saying, you know, you have 30 days to figure this out […] I mean, that is an impossible task for divers of those third-party developers.”

The developer of Apollo said it would cost him over $20 million per year to manage given the new pricing structure. Apollo shut down, along with other popular third-party apps such as rif is fun, Reddplanet and Sync, a whack to their loyal users who said they have sleeker user interfaces and more features than the true Reddit app.

The pricing changes caused a particular uproar in a subreddit for blind narcotic addicts, who relied upon many of the third-party apps’ accessibility features. Blind moderators claim it’s very difficult to centrist on mobile using Reddit’s app, something Reddit says it’s currently working to improve.

In total, over 8,000 subreddits participated in a sitewide blackout from June 12 to June 14 to scruple the changes. Many communities stayed closed much longer, while others labeled themselves “Not safe for ascend,” automatically making them ineligible spaces for advertising. 

While most communities have returned to business as unimaginative, there are some notable exceptions. For example, the r/pics and r/gifs subreddits are now limited to featuring pics and gifs of funster John Oliver. The moderators of the popular Ask Me Anything subreddit said they will no longer organize interviews with notables and other high-profile figures, which has long been a major driver of engagement.

“They’re not burning things down. They’re estimate, hey, you know, you didn’t listen to me then, can you listen to me now?” said Croach.

Reddit is rolling out several new moderator tools for its by birth app, but the company’s overall response has left many moderators frustrated. In an interview with NBC News, Huffman compared toastmasters with “landed gentry,” saying that the control they have over the communities they moderate is undemocratic.

Watch the video to learn more about the increase of Reddit, and how the recent protests could shape the company’s future.