Short answers, pulled from the story.
Reddit was founded by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in June 2005. The idea emerged after the two attended a lecture by entrepreneur Paul Graham in Boston during their spring break; Graham then invited them into Y Combinator's first class, which provided the funding to build the site.
Reddit's initial public offering opened on the 20th of March 2024, at $34 per share and a $6.4 billion valuation. The company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange the next day under the ticker symbol RDDT, opening at $47 per share and closing its first day at $50.44, giving it a market cap of $9.5 billion.
Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired magazine, acquired Reddit on the 31st of October 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million. The site later became an independent subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications, in 2011.
Subreddits are user-created topic communities whose names begin with "r/", such as r/science or r/gaming. Reddit has approximately 138,000 active subreddits out of a total of more than 1.2 million. They were introduced in 2008; when the site launched in 2005, no subreddits existed.
In April 2023, Reddit announced it would end the free tier of its API, which had been free since 2008, forcing multiple third-party apps to shut down. Developer Christian Selig announced on May 31 that the pricing would require him to cease development on the popular app Apollo. Moderators staged a protest blackout from June 12 to 14, and the dispute drew widespread comparisons to a labor strike.
Reddit estimates its volunteer moderators collectively work 466 hours every day, which the company values at $3.4 million in unpaid labor annually. That figure represents roughly 2.8% of Reddit's annual revenue. Moderators are unpaid volunteers; only Reddit admins are company employees.