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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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At some point I realized that I feel sorry for this guy. Even assuming he grows up enough to realize what he did, if he reforms, if he becomes like-able enough to make real human connections, if they’re disconnected enough to not know how he made his billions, still they will eventually learn the true story from someone and won’t ever see him the same again.
Try as he might, he will never escape his betrayal, because there is no next-town-over at such a scale of global connectedness. He is doomed to, at best, acquire friends that are like him, which is to say he will never have any real friends again until the day he dies. It’s a cautionary tale as old as time and yet he chose it. He chose the truest form of poverty we know.
I don't think people at that level have friends, more like business aquintences. And all they do is work; feed their net worth value must increase addiction.
Yeah, we have “every great fortune” truisms to that effect. I just can’t help feeling that his case is special. Somehow even worse than Zuck. Haven’t put my finger on it.
Maybe it’s because what he fed into the monetization machine was community itself? Or because it was such a direct betrayal of the open ethos at the core of the original platform? I’m not sure.
It's special bc Reddit had a lot of close-knit communities that felt like they were more than just another social network. Facebook was always just some company building things, but Reddit seemed like it really was about the people. Spez looked at that and said he'd rather just have a lot of money. I mean... has he even done anything interesting with his money?
btw I don't mean to bring you down, but billionaires always have hangers-on who honestly think the billionaire is some kind of genius and who genuinely want to be just like them, even apart from catching what few scraps they might get off the table.