Conde Naste is a huge corporation, and if they want to let their purchase go down the toilet... well, I'm sorry, but I won't be picking up their slack.
I wouldn't donate either for those reasons, but one thing to keep in mind is that the codebase running reddit is open source: http://github.com/reddit/reddit
They pushed to the public Git in a month, but the donations users are making will go towards improving that codebase. It can be used to deploy your own (and hopefully more scalable) version of reddit.