Initial Public Offer. Basically, the company going public on the stock market. They tend to try and look "shiny" before going public to make them attractive to buyers who want to make money from investing into the company.
In my experience (from working a place that has done this) they will do some waves of layoffs and make some operational budget cuts, as well as sometimes freeze some capex spending so the books look juicier. This includes things that may cause long-term harm, for short ish (under a year) gain.
Script is pretty similar with most companies that do this in tech, with predictable results.
To be fair, most tech companies had layoffs in the last six months and it seems that most were bigger cuts. Also, my best guess is that Reddit has been unprofitable/burning cash from the beginning (~18 years) - that can't and won't last forever.
Honestly, I never really figured how something like reddit (or most social media) was going to be profitable to begin with. At least in a long term sense. They're entirely dependent on ads, but ads don't make a lot of money unless you're running the network. So you end up being an ad business, not a social media business. But of course, no one wants to watch an ad before / after every post - yet that seems to about be where reddit is coming to. And these people don't want to pay to be on social media, or else things like "The Well" would have been much bigger than they are (how many people are clamoring to pay $15 a month lol).
I just also think, if you haven't found a way to make money in 18 years, it seems like a foolish bet that you'll be able to keep running the same kind of business and now find a way.
This is also very true. Tech sector has been doing layoffs and admittingly these ones are pretty tiny in comparison to some other places, which is another factor why I think there will be more. And burning cash is quite true, which is part of why their investors are probably pushing hard for them to be ready for an IPO.
Agreed. I think the post-IPO layoffs will be aggressive in Reddit's case.
It's not clear to me how reddit could possibly "grow". They've hit peek influence, and ad-revenues haven't really been a growth factor that has excited investors. They're not really a technology powerhouse like Facebook or Google - all they have is their central product. So, when the IPO drops, all I can see for reddit is a future of aggressive layoffs and strong enshittification of Reddit as they seek capitalistic eternal increasing growth.
Yeah Reddit would make an excellent private company with the right owner and likely some re-structuring, but as a public company ooh boy.
Outside some niche subs I'm not on there more than once a day just to see if my lemmy subs missed something, and it's my last form of social media outside discord/matrix, so if lemmy does take off enough I'll probably only be there for the odd technical search, which I suspect lemmy will take care of in time.