I’m not sure how you can say Reddit deserves none of the credit for creating Reddit. It has to be at least as valuable (from a revenue perspective) to create the site as it costs to design and run one of the most trafficked site in the world otherwise no company would just magically appear in its place.

You almost act as if some people stumbled upon great software/infrastructure and improperly started charging people to use it. This isn’t some mountain spring some company claimed and is now charging the tribes down stream for access.

The communities on Reddit aren’t the valuable part. I don’t visit 99% of the subreddits. The valuable thing is I can go on one site, find a subreddit for everything I’m interested in, participate with the same account and have no learning curve/same UI/UX as the other communities I’m a part of. You can try to argue that those communities being there is what’s valuable to me, but without Reddit they all wouldn’t be on the same site.

Your argument reads as some poor adaption of the labor theory of value. Right now Reddit isn’t profitable, as long as these economics hold, no one is going to fill in for Reddit if it were to close. And all the mods and users can’t change that.