Honestly, I don’t know on this one. It’s tough to guess on internet companies, especially social media.

I think they’re facing pretty strong headwinds that have nothing to do with how we may personally feel about the company. Going off of memory, their valuation was slashed between their first talking about an IPO in 2022 and April-ish of 2023, which is when they started with the push towards monetization and which eventually led to shutting down the API to third party apps. I’m not sure where the $18B falls on that spectrum. I’m also not sure about the underlying metrics, like revenue per user, costs of acquiring new users, and so on. I don’t know if their growth has slowed or accelerated since the API change, but I also don’t think there’s a real competitor at this point (lemmy hasn’t reached critical mass and community fragmentation will probably mean it never will).

On the other hand, I’ve felt since last April or so that the stakeholders are looking to exit. It really feels like spez mismanages the company and is just looking to cash out, take the billion or two and move on to his next thing, after which it will be run by a b-school type who will run it into the ground.

All of which is to say I wouldn’t buy it for my retirement portfolio, but I also wouldn’t short it on opening day. I do suspect they’re underinvested in trust and safety and will run afoul of regulatory bodies, and Reddit is not the household name that Twitter is, so they’ll be easier to ban from markets.