When a meme platform becomes about me, me, me

THIS month, Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum will collide with Wall Street yet again as the social media platform hurtles towards its long-awaited initial public offering (IPO).

In 2021, the popular r/wallstreetbets subreddit became the poster child for the stock market fever dream, as its millions of users drove “meme stocks” to all-time highs. Now, though, some of its users are threatening to kneecap the IPO, with the forum’s top comments featuring urges to bet against the offering.

This is ironic, given the platform they were using to voice their discontent. And as with anything populated by sleep-deprived anonymous users and rocket emojis, the sentiment might be disproportionate to actual real-life outcomes.

Even so, the restive atmosphere on r/wallstreetbets and elsewhere on Reddit is a good illustration of what happens when a price tag is put on something that did not explicitly have one before. Earlier this year, Reddit agreed to license its data to Google in order to train the latter’s artificial intelligence (AI) models. Overnight, posts and comments contributed by Redditors suddenly acquired a dizzying price tag – a reported US$60 million a year for Reddit.

This sense of vertigo must’ve only intensified when Reddit made its IPO filing last month. The company is giving selected moderators and users the chance to buy into the offering at the IPO price.

The bulk of offerees will be determined by how much “karma” users have earned on Reddit forums by posting and interacting with other users. Overnight, too, these karma points – predominantly a proxy for reputation and contribution on the site – acquired the cold, hard definition of Benjamins, in an offering valued at about US$6.5 billion.

The idea of aligning a Redditor’s interests with ownership is a good one in theory. Ownership has a way of making a pro-consumer Joe Average magically see the pro-capitalist point of view. Where previously objectionable, suddenly the idea of more ads, more data mining and more monetisation of users becomes palatable.

But in so doing, Reddit risks blurring the lines among its stakeholders even further. As it is, those lines have begun to resemble Rorschach inkblots instead. One is hard-pressed to think of any other company that has so thoroughly conflated product (the users’ data), unpaid labour (the users’ moderation efforts), and a sense of community (the deep relationships formed within forums) into one giant and perfectly overlapping Venn diagram.

If this sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because we’ve seen something similar before – in every instance where a company insists that its employees (or worse, its consumers) are part of a “family”.

Sure enough, on Reddit, users – fractious even at the best of times – resemble squabbling members of a family pulling in different directions over the company’s future. Some deride the firm’s loss-making status, while others fear how Reddit will change in its pursuit of profitability.

It doesn’t help that the average Redditor has something of the outlaw about them, especially where r/wallstreetbets diehards are concerned. In previous years, they have mobilised around their rallying cry of “Apes together strong” to move markets and stymie short-sellers. In a surreal development, this movement had propelled Reddit into the financial mainstream.

Now, as Reddit prepares to be listed, it will find out if the same primates will torpedo its crowning mainstream moment.