As far as the big internet companies go, it is hard to think of any company whose leaders have so routinely been criticized as out of touch with their users and downright incompetent with the one exception maybe being Yahoo. It is a almost a miracle that Reddit has survived it all mostly for the better, but I wouldn't put money on that continuing forever.
That doesn't appear to be what users or mods want. Lots of people want more active development and moderation. Just this week there were large scale protest across the platform regarding Reddit admins not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous COVID misinformation. Then Reddit released a rather bad statement refusing to give into user demands. They almost immediately went back on that statement and banned a big misinformation subreddit. It almost feels like they make decisions in a way to ensure they piss everyone off.
If you don't know why your platform works, for the love of all that is holy don't mess with it!
Reddit “pays” moderators through cachet to do unreasonable amounts of work.
Then, Reddit runs ads between all the highly curated posts, earning revenue off the backs of these mods.
It wasn’t so bad a few years back. The ads were mild and there were zero dark patterns.
Today, the setup seems more off balance than Amazon delivery driving was this spring.
It makes sense an IPO would be planned, they are pumping revenue.