He was conning himself too. He was too excited to be doing something that he didn't care to listen to warnings or heed regulations. He wanted to be a trailblazer, but his eyes were bigger than his plate, if you will.

Liability waiver are not the end all, be all of legal action. If the company was negligent that is not going to be covered in the waiver. There are also other caveats that may be relevant to if the waiver is valid and enforceable. I'd be curious about which jusisdiction's laws apply.

I don't think it makes sense that the down arrow counts towards negative reputation but the up arrow does not count towards positive reputation. Either only have positive reputation linked to boosts or have negative and positive linked to the arrows on comments and threads.

If the blackout does not continue I think spez will think he's won. But I think the real pain will be when third party apps shut down. There will be a loss of users, but that won't hurt too much. If moderators don't want to use the official app or desktop site to moderate or decide to leave entirely then reddit could get out of hand. Just look at Twitter - with a relaxing of moderation there has been more trolls, spam, and hate. That type of change may lead to losing the more mainstream, casual user.

I don't think so. I think corporations will always want their hand in a pot and will have their things. I think we've seen there's always going to be people who don't want anything to do with that - digg to reddit, twitter to mastedon, reddit to here. And I wouldn't be surprised in a few years if this platform and similar ones face a crisis of identity like that. Small, independent communities are great and can gain value as more people join. But once enough people join other interests can overtake the original goal. What we've learned is that no platform or protocol is forever.