Reddit goes public today. Users are wary of what comes next.

Reddit was launched in 2005 by current CEO Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian as a place where users submit content — news articles, funny photos, cat videos, random observations — to be supported (“upvoted”) or buried (“downvoted”).

Since then, Reddit has become best known as a collection of communities called “subreddits,” where people discuss everything from the Vancouver food scene to serious personal struggles.

“People go there to literally get support to help them stop drinking, to help them stop doing drugs, to connect with people who are going through similar challenges,” said Sarah Gilbert, research director at Cornell University’s Citizens and Technology Lab. “Because it’s largely pseudonymous, that allows you to participate a little more openly.”

Even if you’re not a die-hard Redditor, there’s a chance the site has helped you because its years of posts on basically every subject frequently appear in search results. No wonder, then, that Google and companies like it have found Reddit to be a treasure trove of training data for chatty AI models — something that has naturally rubbed some the wrong way.

“Reddit users highly value privacy, which makes sense, given that most people contribute pseudonymously,” Gilbert said in a statement earlier this year. “We also found that how they feel about data use varies by context. For example, we found that users would be uncomfortable with use of private data, such as direct messages.”

It’s the first time a major social media company went public since Pinterest’s 2019 IPO.

Reddit set aside 8 percent of the company’s total shares so that certain users — some of whom managed sprawling communities for free — could buy shares at the same price available to institutional investors.

Omar Abbasi, a 34-year-old Bay Area software engineer, received one of those offers, partly due to his unpaid work as a moderator for Reddit’s sprawling gaming communities. He turned it down.

“It was a bit much from a risk perspective,” he said, recalling how Facebook’s share prices stagnated for more than a year after it went public in 2012.

For some, though, the Reddit IPO is a potential turning point for a platform that some users say is more conducive to conversation than alternatives like Facebook or X.

“There’s a culture in the community there to try to uphold what is true,” Abbasi said.

It’s that distinctly human judgment that has turned Reddit into a “trustworthy-ish source of information,” Gilbert said, in contrast to the misinformation found on other platforms.

The company’s IPO filing gives a few hints. For one, Reddit will have to get serious about making money — something it’s struggled to do consistently since its beginning. Last year, the company reported a net loss of nearly $91 million.

High on the list of the company’s business priorities is drumming up additional interest from advertisers, and Reddit has already started to push in that direction. Over the past few weeks, the company launched new ad formats that resemble real user posts, and tools to help brands flesh out their presence on the platform.

Business-to-business overtures like these may help Reddit shore up its finances, but Gilbert says they also risk alienating the people who come to the platform for authentic interactions.

“Redditors hate when they think something is an astroturfed advertisement,” she said, referring to the act of positioning paid ads as grassroots commentary. “That generates a lot of pushback.”

Reddit admits it is also exploring ways to make money off certain interactions — like requests for Photoshop help or watch sales and trades — that currently happen in dedicated subreddits on the platform for free. That could occur through developing tools, for example, to help paid transactions happen on the website or in the app.

The company’s IPO filing offers clues to other ways the platform might change. For instance, if there’s more content that isn’t “valuable or appealing to other Redditors,” the filing notes, that could make the entire platform less appealing to people and advertisers alike.

Meanwhile, some moderators have already seen a surge in that low-quality content from bots. A Reddit flush with new capital could invest more resources into filtering out bots, but it’s not clear how likely that is.

Many users remain skeptical of the site’s future. Abbasi, in particular, is holding out for the possibility that Reddit CEO Huffman might quit his job and leave the company in the hands of leadership that “gives users the tools to contribute in a positive way.”

Reddit declined to comment.

One thing that sets Reddit’s users apart from those of other social media platforms is their willingness to revolt in the face of frustrating management. The most recent example was in June, when more than 8,000 subreddits went dark to protest changes that effectively spelled the end of third-party Reddit apps. The process was messy; at one point Reddit threatened to remove moderators from communities that temporarily shut down.

In the end, Reddit leadership got basically everything it wanted, but the standoff soured the company’s relationship with some of its moderators. However, if users felt strongly enough, another revolt could follow.

Users can try to rebuild their communities somewhere else, though that can be difficult. For one thing, there’s nothing quite like Reddit out there — in a way, it’s a throwback to an earlier age of the internet, when conversations unfolded mainly across specialized message boards and forums rather than town squares like Facebook or X.

“The network effect is huge,” Cornell’s Gilbert said. “You need to have people who are curious and asking questions, and then you also need people who are willing to provide answers who actually want to be there.”

Even so, Gilbert isn’t ruling out that possibility. She says the service Reddit provides “is what’s needed,” but Reddit Inc. doesn’t necessarily need to be the one to provide it.