They are probably betting on Google still displaying reddit at the top of every search so that normies keep coming in. They seem to have ignored that Google searches now just give you a stitched answer of bullshit Gemini put together so that normies don't ever click on reddit links.

This is the image of corporations shooting themselves in the foot while passing the same gun around 🤣

The thing with reddit, and why it used to be so much better than other corporate media, is that they've always under-monetized their users. Facebook and such earned at least an order of magnitude more per user.

If reddit loses half of its user base and doesn't gain a single user, but 10x's their revenue per user, well, they're still making 5x more money.

That’s the thing with money and companies. The only thing that is important is gains in the current quarter. Nothing else matters

Unfortunately that's not how it works. Once you have a sufficiently large userbase, the network effects are enough to sustain them. A ton of people use facebook still and that has been a logged-in experience forever. Same with instagram.

Userbase doesn't matter this much this days. What matters is raw data, the best data the better. Random people from the internet bring shitty data, data of logged in users is better.
And if the userbase drops, they can add more bots, who cares, line goes up.