Not giving away the service for free? It's a for-profit company
You have it turned around. The real product is something Reddit's getting for free right now... thoughtful replies to questions and moderation.
The only real "service" Reddit provides is a place for people with common interests to communicate. It's that communication, and the moderation keeping things on-topic, that make Reddit useful and interesting. The real things of value come from the stuff people post and their comments. That can all happen somewhere else.
For example I mostly follow technical subreddits and in each, there are between one and a small handful of passionate people who submit detailed answers to peoples questions about that topic. They're often the moderators there too. Most of them are pretty offended by Reddit's recent behaviors and they're likely to just leave. Reddit can't just find some random person off the internet to provide that valuable content.
I've already deleted my 11 years of posts and comments. Sure some of that was just drek, but there was a lot of useful information I had provided in my areas of interest.
With the content and moderation provided by the passionate people, all the really useful subreddits go away or become mostly useless. Sure /r/pics and /r/funny will still be around but at that point, Reddit just becomes another Digg. And we'll just find somewhere else to be helpful.