I came here to comment the same thing.

Often times businesses won’t just release CCTV footage to just anyone but if you call the police to report the incident 99% of the time they will give access to the police.

It’s possible that the cameras caught a license plate.

So sure, To be valued by Reddit, you must pay $50 per year - and if you don’t, then you’re not a customer, you’re a commodity. Creators do so because they feel compelled to create and share, Mods do so because they have a personal need to contribute whether they get paid or not.

Reddit will allow you to remove ads for $50 a year but they don’t actually value their users at all. We already knew that of course but it became blatantly obvious during this whole situation.

Reddit provided the servers, the infrastructure, and built functionality to allow communities to form on Reddit and for that they do deserve credit. However, the value from Reddit doesn’t come from commodity servers but rather all the content that the users have contributed over the many years.

Ol’ Spez talks about that content as if it was his, as if Reddit created it. They have zero respect for you whether or pay $50 a year or not.

I prefer the world the way it was before all the consolidation.

Same here.

I remember when individual website forums were the absolute best way to find answers and connect with people of like-minded interests. The system wasn’t perfect but it at least meant that problems from one forum/community would not spill over into another.

Reddit then came along and basically became the forum of forums and replaced a lot of those communities. Having all those communities in a single place did have some benefits. One for example is that it allowed obscure communities to form by the single fact that there were so many communities all gathered in a single place. Unfortunately we all know what happened there.

I’m really hoping the fediverse suceeds and helps us retain a lot of the benefit of a place like Reddit while at the same time shielding the community from a single entity/person exerting control over everything.

That’s a good point. The parallels between Twitter and Reddit are numerous.