That's worth remembering, yes - without that we wouldn't have had Reddit in the first place.

Maybe we wouldn't have had Reddit, but I was perfectly content going to multiple phpBB boards when I was younger to discuss my hobbies.

Reddit always felt like a place to take from since it got lots of people by being centralized, but not really a place to contribute to unless you were contributing to the group think aspect of the community.

Communities specifically set up for answering questions or R&D were in my opinion the only valuable communities. Figuring out things or learning from the huge number of users was helpful, but it was never a fun place to just talk about any of my interests.

Which in this case is both greed and also bad

Well, capitalism is about choices. There are a multiple choices reddit could make, and there are multiple choices reddit users can make.

This is a fairly classic case of "you aren't the customer, you're the product", but that isn't the only way capitalism works.

This is capitalism and greed and disdain for the user.

I don't know if that will kill or materially damage reddit, but that combo kills plenty of regular businesses. (Salient difference is probably that user != customer, as with many internet businesses.)

I'm really not a fan of comments like these. There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism, and 'problems' like this could be solved vid regulation.

So no, the problem really is greed, and the extreme resistance to regulation in the US.