The culture at the time was "growth is money" and "we can figure out how to monetize later."

Today we have the knowledge that monetization requires enshittification, but I think there were dreams that monetization could succeed without enshittification, and now those dreams have died.

People said "but how are you going to monetize" and everyone said "we'll figure that out later."

So even if it was true back then (and it was), spez was probably 20-25 when he sold his soul? You don't exactly have the benefit of worldly wisdom when you are that young.

So while what you say might be true, there is still the question of what culture your from, how these ideas enter that culture, and when those ideas are introduced to the people in that culture.

There is the subjective experience of "collective consciousness" to deal with and subjectively, I think that "growth is great" was louder than "short termism is bad".

We were drunk on VC funded growth, and now we are dealing with the hangover and asking how we got ourselves into the position. Getting drunk was great. The hangover is not.

and a love of r/jailbait

Reddit does not have a good track record of supporting free speech outside its zeitgeist. In the past, it has banned subreddits that were politically conservative, not toeing the party line on transgenderism, or hosting pandemic skepticism / conspiracies. The bans were usually executed in the name of stopping threats or "hate speech", but to my eye, the rules and punishments were applied unevenly.

Isn't it a bit hypocritical to ban people from r/conservative for not toeing the party line and then complain about that same behavior being applied to themselves?

I considered those actions to be protective of free speech rather than in violation of it.

And yes there is a difference, there was a "Never Trump" movement led by conservatives which obviously wouldn't have been popular on places like r/the_donald. It's not a giant monolithic block.