The earliest mention I can find of Reddit Inc.’s ambitions for an initial public offering comes from a Variety report in 2017 — the online community’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Steve Huffman, told a conference audience that taking the site public was the only “responsible choice” but that the “time frame was pretty far out.”

More than six years later, with an IPO finally looking imminent, he was certainly right on that second point. That first one, however, is still in doubt. There’s a reason the social network has taken so long to go public: There’s a good chance it might all fall apart.