They maintain they are a platform because their ultimate monetization strategy is porting their architecture to other websites to use for comments, aggregation and hierarchy. They were going to be Disqus 8 years before Disqus. This is why Conde Nast bought them, this is why they got real serious about Fuck Sears. You build Reddit into your knowledgebase and it's almost like you don't need to hire tech support. Your users do it for you. Unfortunately the codebase is unwieldy as fuck and has essentially no immune system. So they've been biding their time, incubating and training, until they have something robust enough that it can fly the nest and go alight on someone else's servers (for a licensing fee, of course). Unfortunately for them, in the interim "Powered by Reddit" has come to read a lot like "Ebola Inside." I think they started pivoting towards "community" back when they bought RedditGifts, but they didn't really have a clue how to run a community. They certainly don't want to staff up into one.