Reuters/BI
- Reddit's upcoming IPO will give its moderators a chance to buy stock.
- But on the popular r/WallStreetBets and r/stocks subreddits, lot of users aren't interested.
- "Can we pre-register to short?" one Redditor asks.
Reddit announced it is going public, with an IPO planned for next month under the ticker RDDT. And on Wednesday, it announced a $60 million-a-year deal with Google to license its content for AI training.
It's offering something unusual: the chance for moderators to buy stock. The possibility of a bunch of Redditors holding stock is enough of a risk for volatility that they had to mention it in their IPO filings. (lol)
But are Reddit's power users actually interested in buying Reddit stock? Let's take a peek.
r/WallStreetBets is a subreddit with 15 million subscribers devoted to meme-heavy stock chatter, best known for being the 2021 GameStop stock craze. The reaction is … cool, you might say.
"Can someone teach me how to short an IPO?" one user posted on r/WallStreetBets about Thursday's announcement.
Another user — a moderator with a Karma score of over 300,000, posted a screenshot of the message he received from Reddit about being part of the Directed Shares Program, wondering if he should invest.
"Hard pass," replied someone.
"The question is, should we eat where we shit talk?" another mused.
"Only if you want to sell it to me for half as much the week after," said another.
Over in r/stocks, the sentiment was equally unenthused.
"short it to the point it delists."
"Shorting it."
"So we can pre-register to get shares ... can we pre-register to short?"
"This is a septic tank filled with the dumbest monkeys, led by dull incompetent hacks with a lust for power. Hard to monetize."
Of course, a small sampling of possibly teenagers posting about a stock is not necessarily good forward-looking advice. (Please, for the love of God, do not use this for any sort of stock advice.)
And complaining about the social network you're currently posting on is one of the top activities for the extremely online.
As far as what this means for Reddit's IPO, who knows? But for now … lol.