This would be fine if they just plain and simple catered to a group. What Reddit does though is they are actively hostile to one group.
I'm somewhat in the boat the parent is. I see the incredible value in something like Reddit - or maybe the Reddit of old. Where niche communities can self police and create a space for information and content that isn't found anywhere else.
Unfortunately everything has to be monetized. The people who own Reddit want to make money and therefore they try to toe the line of using just enough dark patterns to force the tiktok group to use the Reddit app and not to terminally piss off the nice groups.
What irks me is they're selling out their business to a userbase that is just as quick to ditch them when someone makes something that gives them a faster/strong hit of dopamine.
Not everything has to be monetized. Reddit is a data store of links, text posts (EDIT: as well as images and video per FalconSensei), comments, user identities, and associated meta data. Let's Encrypt runs on a budget of $3MM-$4MM/year. OpenStreetMap's budget is a few hundred thousand dollars a year. The Free Law Project could store and serve all of PACER for a similar amount. HackerNews is hosted on a single server. You could run a clone of Reddit off of the Internet Archive if built properly.
Funding is needed, monetization at all costs is not.
I feel like your argument is making the case for "Nothing has to be monetized", rather than "Not everything has to be monetized".
Not everyone is going to share this altruistic approach to running a business. The majority of monetization probably does, plain and simply, come down to greed. But outside of that, you have ambitious people who envision so much more than what they currently offer—which may require large scale growth.
Regardless, I'm sure the majority of people's morality will be skewed when the service you offer grows to 430+ million active monthly users [0].
Each user goes from being an individual to just a single part of this mass-collective, where the difference between making $1 and $2 off each user is so mind-boggling high that it's hard to keep morals in check.
I guess there's a reason sociopaths do so well in business.
You're not wrong. I think there's a certain flavor of Trotsky's "Eternal Revolution" at play when you have an industry based off of zero marginal cost economics, with the battle always raging between those who can deliver on a shoestring (and are satisfied staying small) versus those who are attempting to capture the entire TAM (or the appearance of attempting to capture the TAM to pay themselves well from investor funds) and milk it for all it's worth.
The defense against sociopaths is eternal vigilence.
I'm somewhat in the boat the parent is. I see the incredible value in something like Reddit - or maybe the Reddit of old. Where niche communities can self police and create a space for information and content that isn't found anywhere else.
Unfortunately everything has to be monetized. The people who own Reddit want to make money and therefore they try to toe the line of using just enough dark patterns to force the tiktok group to use the Reddit app and not to terminally piss off the nice groups.