What if they bought HN? Then throwing money at the problem would probably be a good thing for them.
And in the meantime, reddit's community was completely unaffected by the changing of hands.
Last I heard, CN still owns reddit even though the site now operates independently, so CN still has the chance to recoup their investment, but this will take a more profitable business model without sacrificing user trust. Valuations on sheer page hits or user counts are faulty with a capital F U if you can't figure out how to make money from them.