Control of Reddit is fully in the hands of the VCs now. You've got Ellen Pao (ex-Kleiner Perkins), Sam Altman (Y-Combinator) and Alexis Ohanian (Y-Combinator) in direct control of five dozen untenured, unempowered serfs. When Marissa Mayer bought Tumblr and said she wouldn't fuck with it, people believed her; when she burned Tumblr's community into a gif engine it was immediately obvious that Tumblr's monetization strategy was immune from its community.

About 15 years ago, just before the last tech bubble burst, I was working for an ISP in London, doing sysadmin stuff on their forums (vbulletin), running their IRC server that was hooked up to DALnet, amongst all the other stuff as well expected of a sysadmin of that era. (Radius, LDAP, MySQL, blah blah blah).

Before the company was bought by a large italian carrier, and before the bubble burst, we had somewhere around 600,000 customers (which was a big number back then!), with a vibrant community that was flourishing on the vbulletin forums, and with a fairly large number who liked to engage in IRC.

The company spent no money on hardware at all for the entire time I was there. They were also running around and spending most of their time trying to figure out how much we were worth. At some point someone valued the company at over $800 per customer - $0.5Bn valuation, roughly. For a company that wasn't public, just a privately own company, a subsidiary of several other well known companies (hence being evasive who they are not that it probably matters anymore).

Anyway, the management was throwing millions of dollars every month at marketing, sending out CDs to every man woman child and rabbit in the United Kingdom. They spent no money at all on hardware to support the influx of customers we were getting, even though we were hemorrhaging customers hand over fist because apparently it was an acceptable level of churn.

All that mattered was, each user was worth $800 a year to someone, if only we can figure out how to extract that money from them.

Of course it was bullshit. Just as we were being shopped around to be sold, the arse fell out of the market, and we ended up being sold to aforementioned italian carrier for ~$50Mn. (Can't remember the exact figures but the orders of magnitude should be about right)

Sorry, I've rambled. My point, MBA types don't see a community. They see dollar signs. They see a user base to be converted into a revenue stream. They will not care if they lose 20%, or even maybe 50% of the community base as long as they can extract some magic amount of dollars from the remainder.

According to https://www.reddit.com/about/, they handled 3,176,546 logged in users last month. Somewhere, someone has put a dollar figure on how much on average a reddit user is "worth", lets say $1000 a year, and they looking at the resultant $3Bn potential (bullshit) dollars, and wondering how, exactly, they can extract even just 10% of that.

They will not give a flying fuck about whether or not the community will survive the experience.