Yishan posted a couple hours ago that Reddit's business model is built upon flamewars. Basically get people heated up and then they gild the comments they agree with.

https://np.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3dautm/conten...

...come to think of it, this explains a lot of the Reddit drama. The Reddit Gold was flying left and right during the black-out (despite pleas not to give any money to the site), and then every time an admin, CEO, former CEO, or board member pours gas on the fire, their revenue goes up. It's brilliant! They've figured out how to make money off of hurt feelings and angry people, and now have an incentive to cause as much drama as possible.

I thought they were having advertiser issues, but maybe I'm out of the loop here.

reddit also, as far as I know, fares rather poorly on the $/view metric. (It's not quite that simple, sure.)