On Wednesday, social media platform Reddit announced it filed with the SEC to go public.
San Francisco-based Reddit was founded in 2005 at a time when chat forums were immensely popular. The Reddit platform is an aggregation on thousands of chat forums called “subreddits” where users post a comment, photo or video and others upvote or downvote the post.
As traditional internet forums died, Reddit grew in popularity and today boasts over 50 million daily users and some 100,000 unique communities. Whether it’s ghost sightings, cute pets, news, memes or even life advice, there is a Reddit community for everyone.
The platform has also been the birthplace of popular internet movements, most recently the Wall Streets Bets movement. The movement started with users from the r/wallstreetbets subreddit purchasing GameStop stock, raising the stock price from under $20 to $346 per share. The community also organized to purchase AMC Theater stock and other stock options.
Reddit is also responsible for popularizing the ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA), a question and answer blog in which celebrity figures field questions from users. Other phrases to come from the platform include “to the moon” and “read it on Reddit.”
While the platform was criticized for allowing far-right communities a platform in recent years, it has since cracked down on conservative subreddits that promoted hate speech. It also banned r/The_Donald subreddit after the January 6 insurrection.
Earlier this year, the company announced that it was raising up to $700 in a Series F funding round led by Fidelity Investments. The round also raised Reddit’s valuation to $10 billion.
In an interview with The New York Times following the investment, CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman stated the company intended to go public at some point but wanted to expand its user base outside of the U.S. first.
“The first priority on the product is just making Reddit awesome. We want to build what is best for new users, because over time it will be best for everyone,” Huffman told The New York Times.
The number and price of shares for Reddit’s initial offering have not been made public.
