EDIT: I'm a dumbass and misremembered news stories from a few years ago as Discord having gone public. Their inclusion in this post is inaccurate as they are still a privately owned company - although I do believe their behavior as a company has become deeply cynically corporate in the same way as many publicly traded companies. But yes, I'm an idiot.
honestly why does any company ever go public on the stock market. I get that it's an influx of cash for little to no effort but that's because you are in effect signing away Your Soul. Discord used to be way better, but it seems the momen after their IPO they immediately went to shit and now it's This Nightmare. And now we also have Patreon considering the same thing and fucking over so many of their users and committing to pointless redesigns as well. What's up with that? Is Patreon on the verge of collapse or something? They've got it SO GOOD, they literally get FREE MONEY to sit around and skim off the top of autopay fan/creator contributions, their hosting requirements are minimal at best (even though they theoretically host video, most people don't use that feature and prefer Vimeo/YT, and even for the ones who do use it, the bandwidth requirements for serving it only to those who pay to see it are significantly less than any other video hosting platform).
So why do they need the influx of cash offered by an IPO? Unless they're horrifically mismanaged and still burning money despite all this - which there may very well be a case for, idk - this seems like their leadership doing the thing "because that's what all tech companies are supposed to do" or something. Or maybe the idea is to take that influx of investor cash, buy a new yacht, and then fuck off and leave the company to wither and die and slowly turn into something that doesn't at all resemble the original vision.
All I'm saying is that while capitalism is pretty much rotten to the core, it would probably be a whole hell of a lot better if we dropped a bomb on Wall Street and made trading stocks illegal.