How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
IMHO one of the biggest mistakes made early on in the development of the Internet is that everything should be free and ad supported. That is how we ended up social media that is destroying our socitey in the name of driving up engagement and thus ad revenue. I think things would have been much better if every one was just expected to pay a few bucks a month for the services they use.
I’ll have to disagree. Products being paid wouldn’t have stopped
the internet becoming centralized around fewer and fewer services
forced those services to have had upheld their quality and promises
Cable TV started under the pretense of having no ads other than each network’s own, and to have access to pay-per-view events (which is sports and we can stop pretending sports didn’t sell cable).
And yet Cable, despite exploding more and more on widespread adoption, still became the same if not WORSE than public TV.
The paid-ternet would be the same or worse than what we have. And I know Facebook’s dream goal is to make a paid-ternet. If I die and become a cyberghost, I’ll haunt the hell out of any server rack where that goal is making progress and make sure it never succeeeds.