As someone who had to Google a bunch of docker issues and constantly got redirected to locked down subreddits, I’m all for developers hosting their own communities. At least then they have an incentive to keep the communities alive.

I think that a lot of this recent push to monetize has surrounded the content on the site being used for AI models and big data with the intent to IPO. If all you can offer to consumers training a large language model is sexy photos of John Oliver and Olde timey speak. Then it becomes a lot less appealing as training data. I do agree that this will increase engagement, but if the alternative is hostile takeover maybe this is good?

My heart goes out to the devs. They have inherented the most tech savvy and generally resistant portion of Reddit. God save their souls