While I appreciate that businesses are in existence to make money, things like Reddit aren’t strictly a business, like your local grocery store, for instance.

The grocery store has employees, products, and creates its own products (bakery, deli, etc) by paying its employees to do so. They do NOT rely on non paid, non employees to generate the ENTIRETY of the “product” that makes them exist. They pay taxes, employees, rents, vendors, etc. in other words, overhead.

Reddit relies solely on non paid, non employees to create, maintain, and expand things that, while intangible, make Reddit exist. Reddit itself doesn’t create anything people go there to see. They just provide the infrastructure.

So all that being said, yeah, sure, Reddit should be able to at least cover their limited costs, without issue. That’s not what Reddit is talking about though. Reddit it talking about destroying the things (3rd party apps) and people (mods and users) strictly for, what they see as huge profit (IPO).

This is like when there were a bunch of really great forums, and then IB started buying them all. Immediately they went to shit, and have pretty much all been left to rot, if they are even still hosted. A lot of magazines went through the same thing too, at least in the car community. Profit over everything, and then inevitable failure.