Reddit’s decision changed it previous equation with mods, and redefined the limits of power.

Reddit, since inception, had never made specific hire fire decisions for mods, especially for purely monetary reasons.

This makes it less volunteer moderation, and purely unpaid labor.

NB: I would add return on investment to your cabinet of villains.

Reddit’s writers and content producers, i.e. users, are still unpaid. They’re just also being used to train LLMs aimed at reducing the number of independent bloggers and writers.

I guess. They have very different histories and it's not like programmers are strangers to doing "free work" (i.e. the entire open source community until the Github era). the narrative would be flipped 30 years ago. I'm not quite sure how that is relevant.

>If the only way people will "allow" a valuable service to live is as their bitch, the entire internet is welcome to go die in a fire while we dream up some new answer for the future of this world.

sure. pay your labor. I don't think we disagree.

But the issue isn't that reddit doesn't make millions. It's that it's obsessed with spending 10's of millions in hopes of making hundreds of millions off of content provided via free labor. I just want to browse some news and discuss with people. HN doesn't cost millions in server costs and performs that perfectly for me.

If I had a nice cozy forum I wouldn't mind a subscription to it. I paid my 10 bux to SA back in the day and I donated to Tildes for a few years. But I do agree many would rather let the internet burn than pay for a site directly.