There were us knowledgeable early adopters who were ridiculed endlessly by … pretty much everybody … who actually worked to build the thing. Then the companies came… and brought with them the ignorant, unthinking majority of the lowest common denominator who believe everything they’re told to believe. I call it stolen. The consumer class that followed the corporations didn’t build this place, nor did they represent what we had built.
I get what you’re saying, having just nuked my nearly 12 year old Reddit account yesterday. Things changed a lot, and I’d definitely say most of it was for the worse.
However, I don’t know if this, for lack of a better term, superiority complex, is particularly helpful The fact is that early adopters and enthusiasts made Reddit a cool and useful platform, and so more and more normal began using it. The only way to prevent that from happening is to make a platform actively unappealing, and I wouldn’t say that’s exactly a good idea. The best thing, IMO, is to stay isolated from monetization incentives and ensure that communities of like-minded people can be formed and interact with each other in a healthy way, both normie and enthusiast.
I mean, if Reddit today magically became a non-profit, reduced the API fees to cover only costs, and eliminated active monetization schemes, that wouldn’t suddenly revert the user base back to the way it was a decade ago. The presence of the “ignorant unthinking majority of the lowest common denominator who believe everything they’re told” is not dependent on the pursuit of profit.