Probably the more significant factor is the bottom line. Reddit doesn't make much money from advertising. They have 4 salaried (I assumed) full time employees,

Probably the more significant factor is the bottom line. Reddit doesn't make much money from advertising. They have 4 salaried (I assumed) full time employees, a bunch of servers, and other miscellaneous expenses. It's not like they're a startup looking for that burst of growth to take them to the next level. What you see is what you get in terms of revenue. Conde Nast isn't going to start dumping more money for nothing, it needs to see some sort of return on investment to justify that. Their "donations" experiment was really just a test for a subscription based model for premium users. This is a business model struggle, not a leadership/vision one IMO.