• Reddit has this week officially filed its paperwork for an Initial Public Offering (IPO).
• In its S-1 filing with the SEC, Reddit says it will allow some users and moderators to also purchase shares during the IPO.
• The company will trade as RDDT on the New York Stock Exchange.

Following several years of will they won’t they, Reddit is finally preparing to go public, with the front page of the internet filing its S-1 paperwork with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for its Initial Public Offering (IPO).

The announcement comes on the back of news that Reddit is selling user data to Google in order for the latter to train its AI models.

Given that users are the ones that helped build Reddit into the sizeable and influential platform that it is today, as the company readies to go public, a selected number of its community members will be allowed to purchase shares as part of the IPO.

Reddit confirmed as much in the aforementioned S-1 filing.

“We are going public to advance our mission and become a stronger company. We hope going public will provide meaningful benefits to our community as well. Our users have a deep sense of ownership over the communities they create on Reddit. This sense of ownership often extends to all of Reddit. We see this in our users’ passion for their communities, their desire for Reddit to be as amazing as possible, and in their disapproval when we let them down. We want this sense of ownership to be reflected in real ownership—for our users to be our owners,” CEO Steve Huffman noted in a letter accompanying the S-1 filing.

“Becoming a public company makes this possible. With this in mind, we are excited to invite the users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to buy shares in our IPO, alongside our investors. Of course, we would love our investors to be users as well. Additionally, being public lets us raise capital and offer liquidity to our employees who have worked tirelessly to build Reddit. It also comes with additional disclosure obligations, which aligns with our values around transparency,” he added.

At the time of writing, it remains to be seen how many Reddit users and moderators will be able to take part in this IPO, but participation will depend on how active you are within the community as preference will be shown to those with higher rankings or social currency within the platform.

Following the completion of the IPO, Reddit also plans to portion off a part of its common stock for projects related to its community.

“To help further support the positive impact of our communities and invest in new opportunities that align with our mission, we have reserved about 1% of our common stock to fund community-related programs,” Huffman concluded.