I’m pretty sure Reddit used to be profitable. There used to be a bar on the right-hand side that showed how far each day’s Reddit Gold purchases had gone towards covering the day’s server costs. When I first started using Reddit, it’d typically be about a third of the way full when it reset, but a few years after the at, it was filling up after about eight hours, suggesting they were covering the server costs three times over, which should have left plenty of money for staffing costs as they didn’t have many staff back then. Eventually, they got rid of the bar. Later, they did things that would have increased costs, like hiring people to make New Reddit and the Reddit App, and hosting images and videos themselves instead of leaving it to imgur, and I guess these were enough to make them no longer profitable and force them to aim for faster growth.

I use infinity for reddit, not sure if ad tracking is there but images take forever to load

This. Iv also noticed whenever using reddit (which i almost never do at this point) there is a big red banner at the top warning of server errors.

Not to mention the IPO has them cutting costs everywhere to make them look profitable.

Can you elaborate on this? No doubt you are right, but specific examples of how cost cutting leads to (the false appearance of) profitability here would be helpful.