I can imagine that - I just never really felt the need to explore reddit, which might be my loss, and also why I don't get a lot of "how reddit is". I'm painfully out of touch for being so online (never did facebook or twitter at all), and really prefer stuff that is open...

So I'm aware I have a weird view of the online world - but I guess it's also why I'm incensed about killing third party apps. I hate the change away from protocols where you could choose how you interacted with the net to products where the UI changes on a whim, usually for the worse, and you're "running in place" just to do today what you did yesterday. What pisses me off the most is there's no reason the world needs to be this way - Companies sold new cars every year without swapping around the pedals ever other year. Most home improvements are improvements but aren't changing the UI for the house. LED bulbs don't actually require an app for instance. We've had chainsaws for decades and even the electric ones work the same way and look about the same.

I don't know why computers and the net can't be like that. Why can't I use Thunderbird or Vivaldi while you use Outlook and Firefox but we aren't cutting each other off? This is why I like the fediverse. It's why I liked IRC, and e-mail. It's one of my main reservations about even otherwise good tools like Signal.

And it's not like usenet providers or e-mail servers don't make money. But back to my main point that people won't pay for access, though I think if we went back to something more like usenet where you paid for "all the groups" rather than on a per site / per forum basic might work or again get bundled with your ISP like email and usenet were.