The company, which generates its revenue primarily through advertising and also offers premium access for $5.99 per month, has yet to turn a profit
Ya, this seems like a bad investment. And the need to turn a profit will likely lead to a worse and worse user experience as Reddit tries to monetize them.
Al the "disrupt the system" tech is just something that people use because it operates at a lose. The vast majority of the time the changes to turn a profit kill the platform.
Twitter has been around forever, and never turned a profit.
That didn't stop an egotistical idiot from spending billions in it tho. Because he thought he was smart enough to easily do it.
I moderated a very small local county subreddit. It was a ghost town behind another larger county subreddit so when the blackout occurred, I just went dark. Received the same threatening dm everyone else received, then eventually removed as moderator. I suspect I have since been shadowbanned. I can't prove it, but replies to comments made are late now and after the conversation has moved on. Vote count also sits at one for 24 hours or so. Again, pure speculation. But something is weird and reddit has definitely changed in the last year. Coinsiding with this change, the user base has become significantly younger very quickly.
The rise in interest rates and the end of easy VC money has swung the dial back to: Companies actually need to generate profit and not just show user growth to be attractive to investors.