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Comment by Zetice | Hacker News Reader

The "value" of Reddit as a website is vastly overrated anyway. There's nothing on Reddit that can't be obtained elsewhere, folks just get stuck in patterns that are familiar and presume it's because options are limited.

The world will continue to spin without Reddit, or if Reddit isn't popular anymore, or if Reddit kicks all of its current users out, and so on.

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Reddit’s value these days is as a super-forum. Instead of needing five logins and five accounts for separate hobbies, you can have one login, one account, and if you occasionally want to comment or ask questions about something else, you can do so without having to create another account. Doesn’t hurt that Reddit has a very good network effect.

That's how you use it, but I'd argue that 90% of Reddit's users don't operate the same way, considering they don't even have accounts to begin with.

In fact, I would even argue that Reddit is actively trying to push users who use Reddit this way off of the platform, as they're not as easily monetized. Reddit is notorious for having low conversion rates on its ads and extremely high ad blocking rates.

I'm definitely a push-away user. I'll never pay them money to use their site and I rarely comment in the ten years or so I've had an account. Same goes for HN; I would never pay money to use this site - I would just find a new site to frequent. I understand this is unfortunate for the website operator but I consider operating a web server at this point a labor of love, not a business model.

> but I consider operating a web server at this point a labor of love, not a business model.

Hey, at least you're open about your entitlement!

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