Reddit’s long-awaited IPO is nearing, promising to be the largest social media IPO since Pinterest. But in the company’s S-1 filing Reddit fails to fully address complications that arose from changes to its developer platform and API pricing, which late last year led to site-wide protests, communities going dark, site stability issues, and traffic declines as moderators and Reddit users alike protested how the company was putting popular third-party apps out of business with increased API fees, TechCrunch reported.

According to TechCrunch, Reddit’s API pricing change were part of the company’s broader plan to lock down its corpus of user-generated content, which has been used to train AI models. On that front, Reddit’s IPO prospectus touts the promise of this growing business, noting that it’s already made $203 million so far from licensing its data to other companies.

However beneficial to Reddit’s bottom line, the money-hungry move led to significant backlash among Reddit’s community. After they learned that their favorite third-party Reddit apps — like Apollo, Narwhal, and others — were soon to become victims of Reddit’s fee changes, community members and moderators organized wide-scale protests.

Beware the apes, Reddit told the world in its IPO documents, Gizmodo reported. Put simply, the company warned potential investors that one of its subreddits, the infamous r/WallStreetBets, could make its stock price and volume extremely volatile — and there’s little Reddit can do about it.

According to Gizmodo, Reddit listed r/WallStreetBets as one of the possible risks to investing in the company in its S-1 form on Thursday, referencing the subreddit’s role in the meme stock craze of 2021, where retail investors banded together to raise the price of struggling companies like GameStop and AMC. The goal of r/WallStreetBets back then was to screw over professional investors on Wall Street and make them lose money for betting against certain companies.

It’s entirely possible that everyday people on r/WallStreetBets, a subreddit of 15 million retail investors who refer to themselves as “apes” and “degenerates,” and other online forum do the same thing with Reddit’s stock, the company stated.

Reddit wrote: “Given the broad awareness and brand recognition of Reddit, including as a result of the popularity of r/wallstreetbets among retail investors, and the direct access by retail investors to broadly available trading platforms, the market price and trading platform, the market price and trading volume offer Class A common stock could experience extreme volatility for reasons unrelated to our underlying business or macroeconomics or industry fundamentals…”

ArsTechnica reported Reddit filed to go public on Thursday, revealing various details of the social media company’s inner workings. Among the revelations, Reddit acknowledged the threat of future user protests and the value of third-party Reddit apps.

In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Reddit acknowledged that another such protest could hurt its pockets: “While these activities have not historically had a material impact on our business or results of operations, similar actions by moderators and/or their communities in the future could adversely affect our business, results of operations, financial condition, and prospects.

In my opinion, it appears that the Reddit CEO decided to mess around with the site, and is now entering the “finding out” stage.

Hackers are threatening to release confidential data stolen from Reddit unless the company pays a ransom demand – and reverses its controversial API price hikes, TechCrunch reported.

According to TechCrunch, in a post on its dark web leak site, the BlackCat ransomware gang, also known as ALPHV, claims to have stolen 80 gigabytes of compressed data from Reddit during a February breach of the company’s systems.

Reddit spokesperson Gina Antonini declined to answer TechCrunch’s questions, but confirmed that BlackCat’s claims relate to a cyber incident confirmed by Reddit on February 9. At the time, Reddit CEO Christopher Slowe, or KeyserSosa, said that hackers had accessed employee information and internal documents during a “highly-targeted” phishing attack. Slowe added that the company had “no evidence” that personal user data, such as passwords and accounts, had been stolen.

Bleeping Computer reported that on February 9th, Reddit disclosed that its systems were hacked on February 5th after an employee fell victim to a phishing attack.

According to Bleeping Computer, the phishing attack allows the threat actors to gain access to Reddit’s systems and steal internal documents, source code, employee data, and limited data about the company’s advertisers.

As first spotted by Dominic Alvieri and shared with Bleeping Computer, the ALPHV ransomware operation, more commonly known as BlackCat, now claims to be behind the February 5th cyberattack on Reddit.

In a “Reddit Files” post on the gang’s data leak site, the threat actors claim to have stolen 80 GB of compressed data from the company during the attack and now plan on leaking the data.

The threat actors say they attempted to contact Reddit twice, on April 13th and June 16th, demanding $4.5 million for the data to be deleted but did not receive a response.

Bleeping Computer posted a screenshot of the information from ALPHV. Here are some:

“…I told them in my first email that I would wait for their IPO to come along. But this seems like the perfect opportunity! We are very confident that Reddit will not pay any money for their data.

“But I am very happy to know that the public will be able to read about the statistics they track about their users and all the interesting confidential data we took. Did you know that they also silently censor users? Along with artifacts from their GitHub!”

Engadget reported that BlackCat captured information through a scheme that saw employees receive “plausible sounding prompts” to visit a website designed just like Reddit’s intranet gateway. One individual fell for the trick, allowing hackers to steal their login details and second-factor tokens. The person then self-reported their mistake, and it’s believed that the security breach didn’t compromise Reddit users’ personal information.

In my opinion, this entire problem could have been avoided if the employee had taken a moment to consider whether they were facing a phishing attack. This makes me wonder if Reddit did not bother to teach their workers not to click links in any email they receive.

At midnight on Tuesday, the moderators of the Reddit community r/Gaming decided to go dark, CNBC reported. Dac Croach, who goes by the username Dacvack, and the subreddits’s other leaders hit the private button, initiating a 48-hour shutdown for the group’s more than 37 million members, along with anyone else who tried to access the community.

They were joining a large-scale protest against Reddit, which was about to implement a business change that would dramatically increase the price for third-party developers to use the company’s application programming interface, or API. In the preceding days, the r/Gaming moderators had run a poll indicating that users would support a shutdown. They discussed the results on Slack, and then went offline.

According to CNBC, the widespread protest of one of the internet’s most-trafficked sites started early this week and quickly expanded to more than 8,000 subreddits, including the widely popular r/Funny, with over 40 million members, along with r/Music and r/Science, each boasting over 30 million users.

Techradar reported that Reddit’s CEO wants to bring an end to the Reddit Blackout, but not by agreeing to reverse the company’s upcoming API changes. Instead, he has suggested that users should be able to vote out the moderators leading the protest that’s keeping large chunks of Reddit in the dark.

Thanks to the blackout, Reddit (and by extension Google) feels like a shell of itself for many users. The initially two-day-long protest has been extended by many of its subreddit communities, with 4,906 still set to private or restricted – including Reddit’s largest community r/Funny. While private users are unable to post or read content from the subreddit, restricted subreddits have merely banned new posts (but old posts can still be read).

TechCrunch reported that Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is not backing down amid protests against API changes made by the platform. In interviews with The Verge, NBCNews, and NPR, Huffman defended business decisions made by the company to charge third-party apps saying the API wasn’t designed to support these clients.

According to TechCrunch, the Reddit co-founder also talked about protesting moderators, changing site rules, and profitability in these interviews. The platform is facing one of its strongest backlashes from the community, but the CEO seemingly doesn’t want to budge.

In response to Huffman’s comments, TechCrunch reported, that moderators are trying to find ways to make blackouts effective. Alternatively, some communities are also setting up servers on alternative sits like Lemmy and Kibn.

NPR reported that Reddit, which was founded in 2005, has long relied on advertising. It, along with peer social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snap, YouTube and others, has been dealing with a slowdown in digital ad spending, which has pressured the companies to find new ways to generate revenue.

Personally, I think that the people who participated in the blackout are not going to back down. The longer the protest lasts, the less likely that companies who want to place ads in Reddit will choose to do that. I think the CEO probably made a big mistake when he jacked up the price for third-party Reddit apps.

The popular online forum Reddit experienced outages hours after thousands of Reddit communities launched a protest against its policy to charge third-party apps for data access, NBC News reported.

“A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some unexpected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” Reddit said in a statement to NBC News.

During an outage Monday morning, the website’s front page showed empty Reddit posts with the message: “Something went wrong. Just don’t panic.” Users were unable to load posts on it until the platform resumed working again.

According to NBC News, the #RedditBlackout hashtag started trending on Twitter after the blackout began, with more than 4,238 tweets associated with the term as of Monday. Reddit was trending with more than 112,000 searches on the social media platform. Twitter users as early as 9 a.m. noted that Reddit was experiencing technical issues.

One user’s tweet about the Reddit outage received more than 80,000 views within an hour. “Nice to see even Reddit itself getting in on the Reddit Blackout today,”, the user wrote.

The Verge reported that in an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff, CEO Steve Huffman addressed the recent blowback directed at the company, telling employees to block out the “noise” and that the ongoing blackout of thousands of subreddits will eventually pass.

The Verge received a copy of an internal memo sent Monday afternoon to Reddit staff. Here is part of the memo:

“…Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do not anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you team.

We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are to stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail…

…I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful or wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations…”

In my opinion, this memo is a bit shortsighted. The CEO thinks that this will blow over and things will go right back to “normal”. Based on the sheer number of subreddits that have gone private, it appears that many people are not thrilled with Reddits’ decisions right now. As such, I think the private subreddits could stay private for a long time.