I'm beginning to use "going public" as my indicator to stop using a product. My decade-old reddit account was recently deleted for this reason, as they were showing all the signs before they announced their intention to go public.

I'm really hoping DigitalOcean and Gitlab prove my theory wrong. You would think that private companies would be more prone to unethical practices.

Right. They need to show growth every year in search advertising. One way to grow is to put more ads in more places. Of course, even before going public, they still had to grow (so that they could go public), but they had natural growth then.

Does anyone else fondly remember the early 2010s. When companies at least pretended to "Make the world a better place". Now it seems they're just racing to see who can be worth the next N trillion dollar company.