[brico]

because they are very concerned about annoying/destroying the community.

in the hands of a purely profit-oriented company they would make enormous amounts of money and milk the site until its demise a couple of years in

[swombat]

Dubious. Reddit's users are viciously anti-commercial. I doubt you could make that much money from traditional advertising there...

[brico]

the core surely is anti-commercial but the main subreddits like r/funny or r/pics and the like are so huge that the majority consists of "normal" internet-consumers that visit other sites as well and are used to commercials, the reddit-frontpage is mainstream, it's no longer an obscure site that some nerds know about

and in addition they could have very targeted advertising for the highly specialised subreddits.

but aggressive money-making surely would destroy the community and turn the site into a superficial link-collection with comments in the style of youtube but you could milk it for a couple of years and earn a lot

[kami8845]

the reddit hivemind HATES being monetized with a fierce passion, unless they feel they're actually getting something invaluable in return they will complain about even the tamest of ads