Reddit's Stock Price Collapses After Site's Entire User Base Votes To Short Itself

WALL STREET — Reddit Inc. shares plummeted 34% in early Thursday trading after the platform's own users, in a move described by economists as 'breathtakingly self-defeating,' organized a massively upvoted campaign to dump every share of the company they technically keep alive with their presence. The post, titled 'Hear me out,' garnered 2.4 million upvotes before Reddit's own moderation team deleted it, which subsequently caused a separate post about the deletion to receive 3.1 million upvotes and accelerate the sell-off.

"We've modeled a lot of market scenarios here at Goldman," said Dr. Prescott Finglesworth, Chief of Theoretical Investor Psychology at Goldman Sachs, staring blankly at a wall of red numbers. "Bank runs, short squeezes, flash crashes. Never once did our models account for a publicly traded company being kneecapped by people who were, at the time of the transaction, also debating whether a hot dog is a sandwich. We simply did not have a column for that."

The broader tech market volatility appeared to accelerate the chaos, with investors already jittery from declining outlooks across the sector. Reddit's weak earnings forecast, which projected revenues of 'vibes, mostly' for the next fiscal quarter, reportedly caused three hedge fund managers to retire on the spot. One was found in a Wendy's parking lot in Stamford, Connecticut, feeding his Bloomberg terminal to a duck.

Shares of competing platforms briefly surged on the news before also declining, apparently after their own user bases heard what Reddit was doing and decided it sounded fun. Twitter, now legally named a series of punctuation marks, saw its valuation drop a further 11% after users there voted to replace the CEO with a pelican. The pelican has not commented but is, by most accounts, performing adequately.

Reddit's interim Chief Financial Officer, a man who asked to be identified only as 'ThrowawayFinanceGuy8847,' held a brief press conference Thursday afternoon in which he assured shareholders that the company had 'significant monetization opportunities' it had not yet explored, including, he noted while refusing to elaborate, 'the big one.' He then took three questions, answered all of them with a link to a subreddit, and left through a fire exit.

At press time, the original post had been restored, awarded seventeen different community medals, and locked for 'being too real,' while a follow-up thread asking whether the whole financial system was, itself, a sandwich had crested one million comments and shown no signs of slowing.