Only if the film industry can figure out how to tank Reddit's stock price when it doesn't. It's a misalignment of incentives. Unless Reddit is exclusively associated with piracy and bad actors, most advertisers will probably ignore the bad press* and keep giving them money.

* I'm not even sure it'd be bad press. Internet users aren't overly fond of film companies and we're talking about a meme factory against the people who said "You wouldn't download a car."

Once they're public, everything is going to change.

At that point it becomes "building value for the shareholder" and "minimizing risk for the shareholder".

Except in this case, users are the product, and if you ruin the experience for the user then you've ruined your own product, thus defeating the shareholder.

The only thing Reddit offers is a user community on a mega-forum.

I'm firmly of the belief that all users should wipe their post/comment history & delete their accounts before this happens. User-content is what provides reddit their value, but once they go public it's (almost) guaranteed to become steadily worse & less useful as shareholders squeeze the life out of it.

Is this the first major public forum to go public?