lmao. Reddit had $456,000,000 in revenue in 2021. It would've been profitable long ago, except it's CEO spent millions and millions of dollars on buying and shittifying an app for it, chasing reddit NFTs and reddit crypto, creating a 'new' user interface that every user loathes, creating a streaming platform that died within a year, deciding to pay large infrastructure and bandwidth costs by changing to self-host videos and images after a couple decades of successfully out-sourcing that to other platforms, destroying AMAs, happily platforming and aggressively resisting de-platforming child porn, white nationalists, insurrectionists and other questionable groups, aggressively alienating the people who were happily creating and running the forums, creating new 'games' to be run for one single day, and a whole bunch of other stupid or questionable shit.

Huffman's been happily cruising away on infinite VC money for, what, eight years now? And he woke up one day six months ago to realize that he'd paid tens of millions of dollars for multiple incredibly rich companies to mass-harvest one of reddit's two prize assets, and he fucking panicked. Man has no vision beyond whatever shiny new techbro ponzi scheme is currently popular, except he gets on them too late and in ways that won't work, and he has absolutely no business trying to run a business - he just lucked into it and he knows that no one will ever hire him to run one again so now he's desperately trying to make a silk purse out of a pig's ear so that he can IPO and cash out before he gets (rightfully) fired.

Reddit was sustainable back before they started chasing profit and hiring absurd amounts of staff. They used to be able to cover their server costs with gold alone. It was only once they hired literal thousands of employees that they started needing to needle their users for money