I think it's more just because we're early adopters and the first wave of refugees.

We're building something here - and right now, for some it's a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn't just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)

Admins go bad, already some of the instances I'm on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.

But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can't go far before we leave... What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we're missing out on content elsewhere.

And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We're going to face difficult times, but it's a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn't start or end with a reddit clone.

And I think that's why we care - because this time is different. It can't go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it's built from all of us

This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital

Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone

The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money

But what if they had turned around and said, "fine, we'll start hiring you guys. You'll get paid hourly, but you'll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs"?

Most of them wouldn't be into it - they don't actually want to work for Reddit, they just don't like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they're not doing a job, and they generally don't want to be (there's a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)

When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don't try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don't break their tools and ask when they'll get back to work