A decade ago, no one in their right mind would have put "Reddit” and "publicly traded company” in the same sentence.
At the time, Reddit was known as one of the darkest parts of the internet — an anything-goes forum where trolls, extremists and edgelords reigned. Light on rules and overseen by an army of volunteer moderators, Reddit — which once hosted popular communities devoted to nonconsensual pornography, overt racism and violent misogyny, among other topics — was often spoken of in the same breath as online cesspools such as 4chan and SomethingAwful.
Few could have predicted back then that Reddit would eventually clean up its act, shed its reputation for toxicity and go public, as it did on March 21 at a $6.4 billion valuation.