This entire thread is proof. The entire thread is platforms that people liked started to suck as soon as they decided to make a profit.

Sure theoretically profitable businesses can be good for people, but I’m not holding my breath for an example.

> The problem with doing things for the good of people in a general sense is that you still need to have a functioning economy where scare resources are allocated somehow.

Scarce resources is a cute textbook term but very few things in society, especially on the internet, are scarce. Profits must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is your customers. So it’s almost tautological that profits are bad for customers.

Reddit was built on free content from unpaid users being moderated by unpaid mods for the benefit of the community. Reddit is discovering that they can’t charge for a scarce resource they don’t own. The scarcity wasn’t internet bandwidth or servers or engineering efforts. The scarce resources were community contributions by users and mods.