Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing controversy. People who aren’t generating the company any profit are shouting the loudest. I don’t think there’s much of a loss here.
The era of free money was always going to end and now it’s over.
You're right about the era of free (well… really, really cheap) money being over. I think we're going to see that social media as we know it (which has _only_ existed in the era of cheap money) isn't nearly as sustainable without a bunch of VCs willing to shovel money into a furnace in hope for unknown future returns. There's going to be a contraction.
My own speculation is that a majority of the content is produced by people using Reddit in a browser on a laptop/desktop machine. It's much faster and easier to produce content in this mode.
To your point about paying full price —- it would be interesting to have a breakdown of the number of “evergreen subscribers” vs “fair weather subscribers,” but I’m not sure Netflix would be willing to share such a breakdown. This would tell us whether a majority of its subscribers think of the basic value of the service.
