When I learned that Reddit was becoming a public traded company, I immediately left the communities that I was a moderator of because it makes no sense. It's going to be a public company just like Facebook, Twitter, Google. Why should I be working for free for a massive, publicly traded company, and advancing or making their product more profitable? It's Like doing charity absolutely for free, for a massive company in corporation. It makes simply no sense! Why do people do this?
Edit: to the people asking why anyone would be a moderator before the IPO is simple. It wasn't a publicly traded business, it was more of a discussion board. Now, it's a full-blown stockholder driven corporation They are infusing with ads, transactions, machine learning. It's like expecting people to work for Netflix completely for free