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.
Funding is needed, monetization at all costs is not.
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.
[0] https://redditblog.com/2019/12/04/reddits-2019-year-in-revie...
The defense against sociopaths is eternal vigilence.
Reddit knows it's going to be impossible to design a single app to cater to all types of users. They know there is always going to be a group of people that complain about one feature or another so they in-turn expose the API that we can build out own. Now if a group of users has a specific workflow they like, they can build an app that will specifically cater to them.