This is pretty much what I was going to say. I don’t think that people understand quite how the pseudo libertarian tech bro mentality still permeates this space, and in particular with reddit. The site has always been this way, so if you’ve been around for a while, you’ve been around to this play out many times. Free speech is some absolutely inviolate principle that requires reddit to platform pedophiles (jailbait) and pics of dead kids, until it’s not because it gets bad press and starts to affect financials and some overlord steps in, and then, just like in the real world, when my libertarian ideal starts to negatively impact me, it goes out the window. Repeat ad nauseum.

These people also tend to think that every bit of success they have is only because of them, even though in the case of reddit, most of the success that it’s had has happened in spite of them. One of Reddit’s defining aspects used to be ama’s. Reddit fired the person responsible for making them great. Reddit completely missed mobile even more than Twitter did, and then when they finally got there they did it poorly and can still attribute most of the success to third party developers. Nothing really since the core product stabilized in like 2008 has been meaningful, it’s been about the community the entire time.

I would still be willing to bet that spez and reddit think that their rugged individualist genius is the reason that reddit is as big when that’s all largely happened in spite of them. None of them will admit the truth - they had a good basic idea at the right time, and they’ve succeeded since based on the backs of a bunch of people they’ll never give credit to, and as soon as they stop listening to those people they fade from relevance. And even though they have plenty examples to look to (the juxtaposition of this compared to twitter is really something) they don’t learn from it.