But neither Reddit nor 4chan really have the feed optimization that you'd find on Meta properties, YouTube, or TikTok.

I'm certainly not going to disagree with the notion that ad-based revenue adds a negative tilt to all this, but I think any platforms that tries to give users what they want will end up in a similar place regardless of the revenue model.

The "best" compromise is to give people what they ask for (eg: you manually select interests and nothing suggests you other content), but to me, that's only the same system on a slower path: better but still broken.

But anyway, I think we broadly are in agreement.