Reddit has a unique and incredibly community. If you take the time and actually explore all of the amazing small subreddits that have developed their own cultures & rulesets and the content they've created, I doubt you would make this statement. There are great people in the specialist subreddits. Reddit is only worth as much as its community and that is _incredibly_ hard to reproduct and immensely valuable. Just look at HN. Dozens of people have come up with way better web apps to clone its functionality or have proposed redesigns. Nothing sticks and no one cares. The community is what makes sites like reddit & HN.
I'm a part of other great non-Reddit communities, some pre-dating Reddit, some that came later. Some of them have moved across forum software changes, URL changes, and ownership changes.
What is it that makes you think Reddit communities are a different animal? Were Reddit to disappear, I'm sure those communities would find new homes. From where I'm sitting, the problem with basing Reddit's valuation on those communities is that Reddit doesn't own those communities.
You can't always tell a community what to do (like how one can't build an HN replacement and expect the community to simply follow you there). If the steps Reddit takes to try to make a big return on investment anger those communities, the communities are free to leave. My view is that the network effects of Reddit are not nearly as strong as those of a Facebook or Instagram, and even those appear to be having some difficulty getting as much value out of their communities as they want.
>If the steps Reddit takes to try to make a big return on investment anger those communities,
Yes, but that won't happen. They've been incredibly hands-off for the past 7 years. They basically worked their asses off on too few engineers for years, and during all that time kept showing almost no ads, and if they did they did it on the far right where almost no one notices.
Just because they're raising capital now, doesn't mean they'll go out and fuck it up. Whatever outside money they take on, they'll be extremely conscientious about retaining control or their future stakeholders sharing their values.
No, it doesn't. Reddit is not a "community", and it does not have "a community". Reddit is millions of people, some of whom form communities in only the loosest possible sense of the word.
There's nothing inherently incredible about Reddit's "community", because Reddit's "community" is a mix of the same people that frequent 4Chan, SomethingAwful, and Fark. Reddit's user base includes people from nearly all walks of life: scum and villains, heroes, poor people, rich people, lonely people, and people who are friends with 500 other people on Facebook.
Reddit's "community" includes /r/askscience, /r/picsofdeadkids (you probably don't want to visit that), /r/bestof, /r/ShitRedditSays ... these things have nothing in common with each-other.
The only reason the various Reddit clones haven't taken off is because they aren't better. Reddit was not a Digg clone, Digg was not a Fark clone, Fark was not a Slashdot clone. Each of these offered a unique experience, some thing that the previous sites did not.
That's only one example of one of the hundreds of active communities on the site though. Steer clear of subreddits relating to charged topics and large subreddits and there are tons of good communities on reddit.