It's really interesting. A bunch of news came out today about Reddit doubling down on their position which is what I expected. I was thinking about the MAU problem, and I think the problem is not so much the ability to handle that scale from a tech perspective, but the cost of doing it. It really isn't hard these days to handle that kind of scale, but it comes with a big cloud bill.

From there I started wondering if there was a way to distribute the costs to the users, and I think there is a way to do that, but will users really pay because of abstract ideals? I don't think so, and I think this is the fundamental problem. Users really want these types of communities and social media, but the vast vast majority will not pay for it, so you get forced into the ad model. Overtime that turns into what we're seeing with reddit, in order for reddit to grow, they have to find ways to grow the ad model and locking down third party apps becomes an existential thing for them. Not sure how we get out of this bind, or if it's just noise, people will complain but they won't pay directly so the complaints will never affect any change.