I wonder how much the company is the community. That is, hoe much power users like gallowboob are made up of in house admins to provide front page content. We know that the early days of Reddit required admins to make conversation with themselves to show the site was active and I've never been convinced that such a practice isn't at the core of the business model.
Not at all. Reddit can't monetize memes. Imgur already took care of that. As a former power user, guys like gallowboob are just playing a really lame version of pachinko. The zen koan that is reddit can be expressed in one simple contradiction: it is an algorithm designed to maximize the spread of lowest-common-denominator content serving a userbase that prides itself on its selectivity. This leads to tension and an escalation on both sides. The algorithm wants to be fed. People like gallowboob want to feed it. Those that value the community know that this road leads to 9gag so a balkanized nightmare of rules and exceptions is the result.
/r/knitting is a good community and I do not even knit. /u/weffey showed me the way there as she is huge into knitting. And /u/Gallowboob does not even live on the same continent that reddit is based on and so there is no way he is top down driving content. He is just some guy that happens to be unemployed at the moment and is playing the reddit game. Not the game I like but he does it well and he is a smart, good guy from what I can tell from the conversations we have had. CenturyClub is pretty funny as it is filled with people that think they are important contributors and valuable members and in one sense they are. Gifs and shit post comments are necessary to provide content that people can make puns about. Just not my thing.