Reddit didn’t really use to feel like a for-profit platform. We always knew there was corporate somewhere far away in the background but otherwise the communities and mods were making the entire website.

We now know how foolish that was of course.

That’s because the official Reddit stance was that the communities themselves belonged to the moderators so it wasn’t that you were doing with for Reddit, they were just providing you with a tool to build a community.

Of course that was clearly a lie, and as soon as moderators exercised their own power by protesting, with the support of their communities, Reddit was like “jk never mind, actually we own the communities and you’re disposable”.

I really don’t understand why anyone would volunteer for a corporation for free, that doesn’t pay you, doesn’t care about you, and will drop you like hot garbage if it benefits them. There was a myth of ownership over the subreddits, but that myth is gone.

reddit was/is not really a for profit corporation as they burn money every day. So they paid for the platform people could use to build their communities and people were willing to do it for free. Now reddit wants to make money and sell all those communities to the fancy new LLM companies.