"It's old and crummy, easily one of the worst designed popular sites on the internet." I love Reddit's design, it's very effective and to the point. You don't visit Reddit to view Reddit, you visit to read posts and comments. The design gets out of the way and lets you do that.

Well, to start, it's not a place that people wake up in the morning and visit hoping they'll be drenched in video pre-roll ads. For that, we have Wikia. ;)

EDIT: I noticed that the article kindly compares reddit to Wikipedia, which Wikia is basically the for-profit sister of, in fact originally created by hosting content that was removed from Wikipedia and putting Google Ads on it. Both Reddit and Wikia have the problem of generating revenue from the people who create the content that the revenue is generated by, many of whom are children.

Reddit actually has one of the better mobile interfaces I've used (certainly better than, say, Hacker News). I'm referring to i.reddit.com, not the new one that they're trying to push on people.

Reddit is thriving on community and gigantic network effects. If I were them, I would essentially do what their new CEO is currently doing: ask the community what they think would work (he's doing regular AMAs and I expect monetization will come up frequently). That's probably why I'm not too worried about it currently.