And, he only got away with it until he was able to pivot to advertising. Sure, small social media companies (even relatively large ones like Twitter) also want to sell ads, but the more user data you have, the more you can convince people that your ads are nearly mind control. Meta can do that because they control Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They got all the users because the users were hooked before they started selling the ads, and now network effects mean they don't want to leave.

All of that sucks in user data which they can then sell ads against. Reddit would just be one text-based ad site where people use pseudonyms. It's never going to be able to compete with Meta for ad dollars.