in theory, you can exclude anything that is a text post, but a lot of the content posted on sum subs that you want are self posts. like sports post games, weekly resets in games, or transcripts of twitter threads.
It became a problem because it meant they were forced to bow down to advertisers instead of leaning into user funding. Discord has leaned into user funding very heavily, but I don't know of any other social media that is more funded by its users than it is by ads and is regularly used/promoted, at least in the US.
mods had unilateral control over their communities until very recently. short of doing anything illegal or breaking TOS, mods could ban whoever they wanted for any reason. what stopped this was the fact that communities would riot if mods were to ban random users they simply didn't like. look at places like /r/latestagecapitalism, /r/blackpeopletwitter, /r/witchesvepatriarchy, or /r/conservative, they will all aggressively ban users or block users from posting if they do not go through verification or disagree with the group think. and the community loves it because they're stuck in their echo chambers.
Reddit hires staff to do moderation
and if your neighbor hires a lawn care service, you should be paid?
Right, but you also can't create a work agreement where one was explicitly denied. It's like mowing your neighbors lawn then asking them to pay you, but they told you they wouldn't pay you if you did it before you started. It's the same with the 3rd party app devs too. While I think reddits actions are insane and detrimental to the health of the site, they are fully in their right to deny those devs access to their API and their site as a whole.
and reddit has it in their TOS that no one who is a mod is an employee of reddit.
they don't have a contract, they're screwed.
the whole point of joining a "sub" is so that the community can gather relevant information on that topic and post it there. then the community also judges that content with the voting system. the goal being that everyone creates various information pipelines relevant to themselves that they then share with the community to form an additional pipeline. it's not like i don't go to direct news sources, but typically i would hear about virtually every topic they cover 12+ hours before on reddit. i typically get more in depth information about the topic, but reddit makes me aware of it nearly instantly.
The idea of link aggregators is to operate like a daily newspaper, not a magazine at a doctors office. I don't want to see the same stories I read all week, I want to see the new things that are happening in the world, and in 2023, things move very fast. I'm still seeing posts about subs starting to close from the begining of the protests.
You can always trust a large cooperation to keep your data secret more than any random individuals. They have accountability for losing your data, much more so than the people on the fediverse. A big data breach leads to class action for reddit, here it just takes down an instance and lowers the validity of the technology.
The difference is that you can take reddit/Twitter/Facebook to court over violating your privacy, you won't have anywhere near that kind of luck with fredeverse hosts. If you notice, there isn't really a TOS, those are filled with regulatory agreements from governments that says what they can and can't do with your data. Here we're hanging with our ass in the breeze. Best solution right now if you want to receive DMs is to use an encrypted app and block all DMs here.
Does it let you use it on specific users? Some bots would be useful to put it on. I know of a few that post relevant videos automatically or aggregate game API data that would be good to add to a few subs.