I would love to see reddit being more like a wikipedia than a facebook. If they cut the sales team out and ask for donations like WP does, they would do just fine. I was on reddit before I was registered on FB and quite frankly I love reddit.com way more than FB for many reasons. It's a shame that they go down the hypergrowth-unicorn model.
While I would love this and ultimately believe it would be the best route for Reddit, there is just too much advertising potential for people to not want to throw money at it.
The "reddit hug of death" is a term that was coined because of how much traffic a front page hit could deliver - to the point where it crashed the server or over-exceeded bandwidth capacity for sites.
The issue is that I don't see a lot of potential where investing money into Reddit that helps the users, only the advertisers, which makes their announcements seem extremely patronizing as they try to convince Reddit users why it is better for them.
I usually like to pay for a premium account on other sites even if I wouldn't have to, but for some reason I don't do it on Reddit. In hindsight, my gut feeling was right, because they are in fact backstabbing butts in seats who sell out to greedy investors at first opportunity. Rich assholes who think they can make another Facebook are the easy way to get a "hiring spree". Gold was the slow and horribly marketed way.
I think twitter might fall into the same category as well. They form a sort of crucial social infrastructure. If they can't be supported by ads while maintaining their integrity, it may be important to keep them around through some other means.
