I wasn't really trying to move somebody else's goalpost, but here's an attempt to bridge the gap anyway, at least as far as "should be free" ("must be free" fol

I wasn't really trying to move somebody else's goalpost, but here's an attempt to bridge the gap anyway, at least as far as "should be free" ("must be free" follows if you're sufficiently authoritarian/utilitarian, otherwise it doesn't /shrug): Network effects tend to pick extreme winners and losers. From most user's perspectives, there isn't much of a choice. I have an iPhone for a totally stupid reason: My family's chat is an iMessage group and they coordinate photo albums with Apple's shared albums thing. I use reddit for literally no reason at all except that other people use it. I assert that it would be better for me and most to use an equivalent networking facility maintained by a non-profit entity, and that if there were some kind of cross-site replication such that you really could choose which option to use, a very large number of people would pick the option that didn't present inline or otherwise invasive advertisements, and (indirectly) the option that had free API access, via something like Apollo (software that's simply built better than its competitor on its OS). So not only do I believe non-profit-reddit (hey, that's "NPR", complete with donation drives) could exist, I believe it would be better for its users and so it should exist. But I also believe it can't really exist as long as somebody is throwing a bunch of (indebted) money into winning the network effects war. So I believe that for-maximum-profit-reddit should not exist. But I admit the belief feels empty since I'm not authoritarian enough to take it all the way to "reddit must not exist". So I'm just sad instead.