Reddit didn’t grow in it’s early days like it does today. To use an analogy for what you’re saying: think of a snowball rolling down a mountain and turning into an avalanche. It’s easy to forget that the snowball started it.

We don’t really have a choice, unfortunately.

This platform has the downside of day 1 bots, unlike reddit of yore.

Don’t worry, the enshittification of both is proceeding well.

Replacements are inevitable in time. This one is growing.

I think most people probably have a lifetime plex pass for their plex server, or they are using alternative servers.

Lifetime pass grants licenses to all clients, at least it used to unless this changes that.

My server has many users and nobody has paid anything aside from my original buy of $120 in 2019. So far that comes out to about $1.67/mo for unlimited users and unlimited updates.

I’m not saying I really like the updates though. I think they should have remained slim, but someone is trying to make more and more money by branching out into bullshit beyond private media serving. All that trash should be separate products that are divorced from the private media server / client product.

All this being said, check out Jellyfin, little reason to use plex over it for private media but it has some limitations if you need subtitles or cannot relocate file structures.