Advertisers want eyeballs, and will pay for it on the spot.

People aren't the customers of Reddit/Facebook, they're the product, that's why social media has such negative effect on mental health, the users aren't a concern beyond how many minutes they dump in for advertisers to pay for.

But would you come up with the idea for Reddit if you approached it from an advertisement perspective? Probably not.

Reddit would be a fairly unique one - it would be hard for anyone to predict a single forum would take over for most other smaller forums. Then again forums in general were already very popular and I bet many made quite a bit from advertising.

They have and it's called Tik Tok, basically just make a platform more addicting

But the users aren't the customers in those businesses.

The advertisers are.

Although you're technically correct [1], your objection is a bit tired – in particular because in this context, "customer" clearly meant "target audience for a product". Building something that attracts millions of daily visitors to a website is much harder than selling advertising space on that website.

[1] the best kind of "correct"

>landing millions of users can forgive the lack of a business plan _at that scale_

yeah, if your business plan lands millions of users you better have more than $40k ready to fund it. Since most people don't have that at hand it's actually a really problematic plan, because you've got to be able to secure the funding for it right when it starts to hit, if you don't you're done, if you do you might have to do it by giving up too much control, if you won't then you're done.

>>People want Reddit, people want FB and Insta. I think in OP's case his issue was that his content required funding to keep up to date and his user base couldn't support those costs with ads. With FB, Reddit etc. the end users generate the content.