There were many obviously lucrative paths Reddit could have taken. They have incredible amounts of data on users who self-select their own interests. They were making money selling subscriptions even. They could have monetized all sorts of things in non-annoying ways, like secret santa (pay to verify users or have direct anonymous shipping?), subreddit sponsorships (want to own /r/steam, Valve pays for it), etc.

Instead they wanted to be Facebook Jr, killed all of their interesting and niche aspects, ignored the things users and mods were asking for, and hamfisted general ads in people's faces while adding expensive, unneeded (unwanted!) features like live chat and video hosting.

Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid.

> Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid.

No, it's what happens when your investors are VCs who need to 10x on their wins because most of their investments fail. As a result, stable, long-term profitability isn't the goal; big IPOs are, or at least explosive growth. There's no room for a company which is moderately successful when VCs are involved.

They didn't need to take money from VCs. They would have been fine as they were -- they were making enough money from Reddit premium subscriptions to pay hosting costs (before they pivoted to hosting all their own media instead of just text). All they had to do was monetize the subreddits, license branding, and do some event stuff. All of the founders would have been 10millionaires. They got greedy and took VC money and every decision since then has been objectively terrible for anything but engagement metrics.

Oh slow & proper growth is frowned upon - taking other people’s money & trying to grow fast isn’t sadly. I’ve been in that situation w/ a business partner & the moment I realized my partner was trying to push me out I was like f* this & you - I’m out. I have no tolerance for bs & I saw it early enough to check out before having invested more than 2-3k of my own money. Sadly a good bit of my time but I was furious & done w/ it.

This would be true if Reddit was ever profitable, which it was not. Hosting images was an expensive decision, and they weren't making much money before then.

I think this is just the way of the world. Usenet -> Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Discord -> ???

They weren't profitable because they kept spending money on growth.

Reddit made a lot of people rich and never promised to make more people rich indefinitely, it is spent.

Twitter was in mild loss. It did not needed that much to break even ... and Musks moves were ridiculous.