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Advertisers want eyeballs, and will pay for it on the spot.

People aren't the customers of Reddit/Facebook, they're the product, that's why social media has such negative effect on mental health, the users aren't a concern beyond how many minutes they dump in for advertisers to pay for.

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But would you come up with the idea for Reddit if you approached it from an advertisement perspective? Probably not.

Reddit would be a fairly unique one - it would be hard for anyone to predict a single forum would take over for most other smaller forums. Then again forums in general were already very popular and I bet many made quite a bit from advertising.

They have and it's called Tik Tok, basically just make a platform more addicting

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