This article looks at Reddit as a “comment economy.” Beneath the rhetoric of community and information sharing, the platform’s economic incentives favor conformity, reaction, endless engagement, and compulsive commenting over independent thought, meaningful discourse, and the exchange of knowledge.
Reddit’s revenue ultimately depends upon the creation of, extended attention to and the scrolling through of massive amounts of comments. This produces advertising opportunities, data value, repeat visits and valuable user engagement metrics.
That’s pretty standard for an internet startup for that time. That’s a “we’ll worry about the consequences later” SOP that has only become stronger in the current climate.
They still allow some disgusting shit in the name of free speech, on the adult content side of things. As a public company, a lot of that is likely to be done away with in the coming few years.
No idea, but the nature of reddit makes it hard to monetize. I don’t think there’s a financial case for all those countries to have their own link aggregation type social media sites.