Reddit’s strategy is genuinely brain dead. Just think of the shit they’ve been up to:

• Jacking up API prices to unreasonable levels and killing off third party apps that brought millions of users on to your platform
• Continuously make the UI shittier and shittier to the point where it’s unusable
• Do the same with the app
• Kill off old Reddit which is the sole reason millions of users still use the site
• Add awards and expand the feature to basically become paid reaction emojis
• Remove awards even though they were one of the biggest revenue streams
• Announce it was a mistake and add the awards again
• Add avatars that nobody asked for and make some of them paid
• Add a premium subscription that does nothing and do absolutely nothing to improve it
• Add a bunch of useless features that nobody uses like Reddit live

Truly the works of geniuses.