Especially since the whole site is based on the free work of the mods and the users submitting content. The whole thing is like a Ponzi scam where the users and the mods are the lowest tier in the scam and reddit's admins and all the sites that get traffic through reddit are at the top.
There were so many ways reddit's owners could have gone about this and actually made money while making the userbase happy and not antagonizing their free labor.