IPO = Initial Public Offering, where shareholders offer to sell their shares to the public, shifting a company from a “private company” (it belongs to me, you, and that guy) to a “public company” (it belongs to anyone who pays enough for the shares).
The userbase has been always touchy when it comes to IPO, and rightfully so; they know that the new owners will only care about squeezing the platform dry. As such, I predict a new flood of Redditfugees to Lemmy and Kbin.
It’s gotten really bad. Since the protests a lot of subs seem to be just gone and a lot of the old subs that are still there are mostly just bots reposting top posts, with a bunch of bots reposting top comments. Someone made a bot who tracks those repost bots and calls them out (which Reddit could do from within their backend automatically), and some submissions had like 60-70 percent removed bot comments. And of course all of them had a bunch of gullible idiots talking to them.
You and him seem really confused to expect any actual data out of an anecdote, but you do you. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯