alt Hacker NewsThis comment assumes both that Reddit is harmful and the outcomes were predictable. The former is debatable, but I am sure the latter is not true; the founders of Reddit didn't know what they were building.
They thought it was a social bookmarking thing for people to find and share blog posts. It didn't even have comments for the first half year. For two more years, self-posts only existed as a hack where the poster had to predict the post's ID to make it link to itself. User-created subreddits didn't show up until about 2.5 years after the site launched.
I’m pretty sure all endless scroll social media has been scientifically proven to be harmful. Reddit also runs a 1:1 copy of TikTok.
I don’t really care to defend the morality of extremely wealthy VC firms like YC. They know the enshittification process that happens with 100% of the companies they fund.
They could create companies with charters and ownership structures that ensure they exist to better the world and make good products as their binding guiding principals, but they choose not to.
More fun with this subject: https://theonion.com/sam-altman-if-i-dont-end-the-world-some...