Paying back big loans when they come due is always painful but calling them parasitic would be incorrect. Fundamentally reddit like many other website business models was based upon borrowing from the future. That is infamously basically the digital start up business model: offer unsustainable goods to build a user base under the expectation that it will pay back later. Much goodwill was based upon the assumption that it will do so, goodwill which helped fuel the growth in the first place. With a structure like that there is hardly anywhere to go but down. Maybe it could establish its own market section when at a large enough scale but that is unlikely.

Calling it parasitic is to operate under naive assumptions that free lunch is somehow the natural state of being in a fundamentally entropic and uncaring universe. The enshitification is the result of a devil's contract as that which livestock effectively enter: to be fed crops, and protected in the now in exchange for later certain doom. There were always the "wild" alternatives of free software and DIY but they aren't popular at all in comparison.

Because to continue the metaphor, the wild can hardly feed itself. There is no salary paid for maintaining your own Mastodon or message board, hell it doesn't even pay for its own server bandwidth let alone salaries for the work involved. Traditional message boards are pretty much extinct, choked out by spammers and lack of interest.