You know, it could be. Most of Wall Street is a needlessly complex game of making money out of nothing.

But imagine if you took reddit and gave it over to someone trustworthy. Some kind of actual business genius that could navigate the investors and the communities and make them benefit each other in symbiosis. That many eyes is worth a hell of a lot of money. Get that marketing data out of there quietly, get those ads in there tucked in the streams in a way that they could be teased out of the stream and open the API back up to everyone. (even google? especially google) Push the advertisers to make relevant shill posts instead of ads.

There's little damage there that couldn't be undone, but the bar to finding a person that investors would allow them to fix it is damn high.