A business can be lucrative without being profitable. Profitable means the business itself is making a profit; that is, expanding its revenue. Reddit doesn’t need to do that in order to make everyone who works there money. They just need to keep the servers open and do a little maintenance. Reddit probably could be profitable as a business if it weren’t so lucrative for its CEOs, who presumably eat all the profits.

I agree, though. Profit and growth are poor measures of a business doing what it should be doing, which is providing a valuable product to consumers. Honestly, these days they’re probably a measure that a company has stopped providing value.