I would like to be astounded. But Reddit has taken $1.4 billion in venture capital, meaning they are expected to make VCs well more than that. And one way that can happen is aggressively juicing the short-term numbers and IPOing, so that VCs can dump their holdings before everybody realizes that they were sold a bill of goods. I suspect that they were thinking nobody would catch them like this. Or that even if they did, people would have forgotten by the IPO pop.

I think there's a fundamental conflict of interest in the business models of web communities. I saw somebody sum up Web 2.0 as "you do all the work, we make all the money", which totally applies to Reddit. Those communities can work well on a pay-the-bills basis. But investors generally don't give a shit about communities; they just want money. So from the perspective of the economic rational actor, the right thing to do is to strip-mine the years of goodwill built up, maximizing short-term revenue. That will set the business up for long-term failure, but by that point it will have been sold off.

That's an important part of the private equity playbook and has been for a while. A good example is Simmons Mattress: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/...

And Cory Doctorow has been talking about this as enshittification: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/