Reddit’s stock market debut expected on Thursday has been a long time coming. The ad-supported home of over 100,000 forums first announced its intention to go public in December 2021. Over the course of the unusual years-long delay, Reddit revised its initial investor pitch 10 times, leaving a trail of edits that provide a look at the company’s past struggles, current vulnerabilities, and future ambitions.

The many drafts show how CEO Steve Huffman dialed back warnings that too much content moderation can be “autocratic,” and that he and other Reddit leaders culled priorities for the company as pandemic-fueled growth waned. Here are seven takeaways from a close reading of the submissions.

Video U-Turn

Reddit is known for hosting text-based discussions, but its initial paperwork to go public claimed the platform’s relatively new live video and audio chat room services were core to its drive to win more users and advertisers. “We’ve learned time and again that whenever we add new surface areas of creativity on Reddit, that users not only use them, but they use them in ways that are surprising (and delighting!) to us,” the pitch said.

Reddit had drawn inspiration from streaming platform Twitch and the pandemic audio chat hit Clubhouse for what it called r/pan, or public access network, and Reddit Talk. Reporting in WIRED’s recent deep dive into Reddit’s past and future found that the company sank considerable resources into the two projects. Some of the more than 60 current and former Reddit workers and moderators contacted for that story described the tools developed to police bad behavior on the video and audio services as inadequate. (Advance Magazine Publishers, owner of WIRED’s publisher Condé Nast, owns a roughly 30 percent stake in Reddit.)

Reddit over the past two years shut down both r/pan and Reddit Talk, in part due to their moderation challenges, WIRED reporting shows. By the end of last year, mention of live video and audio had been purged from Reddit’s IPO pitch.

A CEO Who’s Sorry—But Not That Sorry

Reddit’s 19-year history has been a roller coaster of scandals over unsavory content, abrupt leadership changes, and user revolts. In earlier versions of the IPO paperwork, current CEO Huffman struck a contrite note. "The list of our mistakes over the years is long, and so is the list of challenges we’ve faced,” he wrote. “We lived these challenges publicly and have the scars, learnings, and policy updates to prove it. Our history influences our future. There will undoubtedly be more challenges to come."

But Huffman, who cofounded Reddit back in 2005, also boasted that Reddit is different because it is “free from the airbrushing and filters of social media” and criticized what he sees as over-the-top meddling in online discussion. “Centralized, paternalistic, or even autocratic control—from a company or a government—not only does not result in the human connection, authentic conversation, and community engagement that we think people want, but often backfires,” he wrote in one draft. In another he added a warning that “pressure to compromise Reddit’s democratic nature to conform to mainstream views” could be destructive. None of Huffman’s lines about Reddit’s mistakes or his concern over control made the final cut. Reddit declined to comment, citing an IPO-related “quiet period.”

Signs User Growth May Be Stalling

The number of people visiting Reddit’s site or app each day is increasing. That’s helped by a surge in traffic triggered last year by the platform forcing apps that provided alternative ways to view posts to start paying to access Reddit content. Many of them shuttered, and although some users staged an online blockade, many have adopted Reddit’s official apps to maintain access.

But some of the user figures reported by Reddit suggest its growth could be stalling. The company’s IPO papers have said since late 2021 that over 500 million people visit at least once a month—but nearly three years later the figure cited hasn’t grown.

Some current and former employees say Reddit may have upgraded its measurement tools, suggesting the earlier figures may not have been accurate. Reddit’s latest IPO filing says daily and weekly figures are how it measures growth. The company grew to 76 million daily users in December and has continued growing this year, it says.

The amount of time Reddit reports that users spend with its service hasn’t significantly budged either. In September 2021, the company said that US users on average engaged for 28 minutes a day. It ticked up to 30 minutes that December. In December of 2023, the company specified a figure only for “logged-in” US users, though it clocked in at a similar 25 minutes to 30 minutes per day.

Other data suggests that the stock of content on Reddit for users to peruse has been roughly constant recently, despite users’ continued activity. Reddit gained 1 billion posts and comments per quarter in 2022, closing the year with 17 billion pieces of content on the platform in total. But that figure fell to 16 billion last September, potentially reflecting improved measurement or the removal of problematic content, before ending up back at 17 billion last December.

Overseas Struggles

When US internet companies go public they often claim that luring users from overseas will provide powerful growth. Google and Meta now serve billions of people around the world.

Reddit’s overseas prospects look less rosy. Even as it pushes into new countries, such as France and Germany, the dominance of English-language content on the platform appears to be growing. Reddit reported that over two-thirds of all posts in late 2021 through 2022 were in English. By the second half of 2023, that grew to over 90 percent of all posts.

That happened despite Reddit investing in contractors and translators to encourage more content in French, German, and additional languages other than English. One translation project led some Reddit users to think their communities were being run over by spambot rings. Current and former employees say it’s possible that Reddit’s ability to measure non-English content evolved, and that English content hasn’t become more dominant.

Dependence on Google

Like for many online businesses, Reddit’s traffic relies in part on referrals from search engines—primarily the dominant player, Google. In early draft submissions, Reddit shared figures showing its reliance on search engine traffic falling through 2022, dropping to a low of about one in five users coming via search results.

That was generally seen as a good sign because it suggested Reddit had a loyal user base and was becoming less dependent on Google. Responding to its search algorithm updates that slashed traffic to Reddit had previously triggered moments of “all hands on deck” crisis at the platform, a former employee says.

Reddit stopped disclosing figures on search traffic in more recent updates, but there are signs it's becoming more dependent on Google again. The platform’s IPO filing from last month says that in the second half of 2023, about 75 percent of new users added were not logged in, who “typically come to Reddit via search engines.” Reddit says logged-out users spend less time on the service and are less lucrative. Former employees say that’s because logged-out users tend to visit individual posts and then leave, which usually have fewer ads than news feeds that logged-in users curate and scroll.

Bringing More Brands Onto Reddit

After teasing it in an IPO filing last month, the company this month launched Reddit Pro, a free service that provides a dashboard to help businesses understand what’s trending, the audience their posts are reaching, and, of course, pay to boost the reach of their posts.

Brands such as Taco Bell and the National Football League have been testing Reddit Pro. It’s possible the new service could be a precursor to allowing businesses and organizations to open up communities in their name using the convention b/ or o/ to stand out, some former employees say, as alternatives to Reddit’s longstanding use of r/ to denote different communities.

They say Reddit Pro could spur increased advertising, but might not provide companies the kind of real-time view into customer activity and opportunities for customer service and promotions that brands once got from Twitter. That’s because Reddit conversations can be scattered across different communities and are generally less fast-paced.

The new venture also could threaten the millions of dollars in annual revenue Reddit has generated for years by licensing posts and other data to social media analysis companies such Brandwatch and Sprinklr, whose tools companies use to understand how they are being talked about online, according to former employees. If Reddit Pro offers good enough data, some companies might stop paying for tools like Brandwatch. Sprinklr declined to comment about Reddit. Brandwatch didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Acquisition Ambitions

Reddit’s IPO filings show that it plans to add a new class of stock, creating a pool of shares that don’t come with voting rights in board or shareholder business. The company says they could serve multiple uses. Those include providing a new form of compensation for employees, but also aiding dealmaking so that Reddit can acquire or invest in other companies.

Using these “Class C” shares that way would help Reddit grow its business and services without weakening Huffman's voting control. Reddit acquired a handful of AI companies during the pandemic to build tools, including for targeting ads and improving content moderation. Perhaps another buying spree could come post-IPO.