Coins can be used to buy either their premium subscription (no ads and a few other things) or can be used to "award" posts/comments. You can select which award you want to give, there are multiple that are by reddit and there are awards that are subreddit specific. An award can also give the awardee some coins (e.g. you pay 200 coins and the awardee gets 100).
Yeah, my understanding is they were pretty much breaking even after the original introduction of gold when they had a skeleton crew of ops people, a ceo and a couple of backroom staff. They've massively expanded and even yishan forced the company to SF since then, so I'm pretty sure there's no way the extra award types have kept up with that expenditure.
Like I think Reddit of ~2015 was a relatively sustainable lifestyle business, but the traffic numbers were way higher than that so there's the big push to turn it into another facebook/twitter.
ouch, they'll probably have their pornhub moment at some point when credit card companies will notice that they have a lot of unmoderated adult UGC content.
That's a massive risk for their business. My guess is that they are going to get rid of the nsfw subreddits like tumblr did.
Coins can be used to buy either their premium subscription (no ads and a few other things) or can be used to "award" posts/comments. You can select which award you want to give, there are multiple that are by reddit and there are awards that are subreddit specific. An award can also give the awardee some coins (e.g. you pay 200 coins and the awardee gets 100).