Couple guys make a website.

The website grows due to a combination of luck, timing, and good ideas.

Someone notices, correctly evaluates the sites potential, and informs someone with enough power to do something about it.

Reddit is bought by a large corporation.

After many board meetings, marketing expert presentations, and analysis- they decide to run with the idea that it is "a little site run by some hip young people" even though they know that is the furthest thing from the truth.

Reddits popularity by this point has skyrocketed out of control and due to many factors, the IQ of the site gets lower and lower making it more and more vulnerable.

This entire time, said corporation and its cronies have studied and built timelines and frameworks to put into place to keep up the illusion while simultaneously making a power grab to control every aspect of the site.

They even make it seem like they no longer own reddit by officially separating it as an entity- but only on paper.

They turn every aspect of the site into a way to make profit, gain influence, or swap services with other large corporate entities as well as entities in the government sector.

As more and more promises are made to these entities, the powers that control reddit are now put into the position of making changes/altering content/setting up contingency plans/ etc... in order to keep these entities happy.

And damn the average user, the marketing people (correctly) assume that by this point, the average user will gladly stay with reddit due to its addictive properties and more importantly, because the average user is too stupid to notice anything is happening.

And here we are.