[falcolas]

I think the admins will care more about the appearance of "business as usual" in the face of an IPO than the opinions of the users who would notice a moderator replacement.

In their eyes, this is all nothing more than a tempest in a teapot; a small pothole on the road to public investor dollars.

[phpisthebest]

the API thing was that, it is moved beyond that now, and admin action on that level will make the API issue an after thought...

If they do that, forget IPO, there will be no more reddit at all.

right now they already missed the IPO point years ago, today for a company to have a successful IPO they need more than good MAU numbers, and this API change was never going to get to the profitability numbers they need for a good IPO

Their IPO dreams were fucked long before today

[falcolas]

The internet forgets too quickly. And so long as Reddit can present a "everything's awesome" front, their IPO will likely take off.

Having /r/Pics down permanently because of a protest would be a problem, but a poorly moderated /r/Pics would not. The quality would just go down, and Reddit would get a good justification for locking it down.

"No, /r/Pics wasn't shut down because of the protest, it was shut down because there were too many law-breaking posts. And you know how tough we have to be on those kinds of posts."

At least, that's my take on how most investors would look at it. Investors love companies who focus on profitability, regardless of their long term perspective.

[phpisthebest]

There seems to be a disconnect to what I am saying...

You seem to believe a low quality /r/pics would bring in traffic, even more weirdly you seem to believe the admins shutting down /r/pics because of illegal content, is better for profitability then it being shut down because of a protest, not sure how that works....

Traffic, and users drive profitablity, High Quality User Generated content drives that traffic and attracts users

If reddit loses high quality user generated content, there is no traffic, and thus there is nothing to sell to be profitable, no ads, not API, nothing

it would not matter if /r/pics was shutdown in protest, or shutdown because of poor moderation, it is still shut down, and thus no profits from it.

investors love companies that are profitable, especially right now when the cost of capital is very high. "focusing on profitability" is not the same as delivering profitability. Investors right now want results, not power points about how they project the results being

[SpicyLemonZest]

They seem to honestly believe that increasing monetization is an equally existential question for the platform. IPO or no IPO, they can't run off of VC funding forever, and they say they aren't currently profitable.

[Atotalnoob]

Because spez 10x their headcount