There's zero value in Reddit Gold. It's such a meme. Access to a private subreddit.
Give posts badges? Who cares. They're ephemeral. Up today gone tomorrow.
They need to rethink this bullshit instead of just selling more ads.
Discord Nitro's perks seem just as valueless as Reddit Gold to me. The top listed features are ephemeral stuff like custom emojis and stickers and super reactions. You could argue stuff like 50+ MB uploads and HD streaming is more valuable but few users would really use those features often.
Like Discord, Reddit is a community, there's limitations to what you can charge for because you don't want to raise the barrier to entry. I suspect Reddit Gold and custom emojis actually earns Reddit and Discord quite a fair bit, I think a key difference is that Discord has 750 employees to feed while Reddit has 2000.
And I agree on the company size: it is hard for me to understand what those employees are doing to make reddit run, considering the nature of the platform.
I think discords model is fundamentally better because however useless the paid features are,2 there actually are features to speak of. HD streaming, higher upload limits and global emojis are fundamentally not that important, but you do get something out of paying. You also feel like you're sponsoring several free users, while paying for reddit gold just puts a shiny badge on a post, gives you access to a useless private club that has no direction (which is by design) and removes ads for a month.
The trouble is, Reddit is not such a business.
I think people underestimate this. I'm always much happier for my cash to go to a business that I like. Where "like" includes both quality of product and their ethics/attitude.