As someone who was involved with many internet communities long before reddit, it sounds like the author is just experiencing the eternal September[0]. Pretty much since the day I found out about reddit in... 2008-ish?, everyone in the online communities I knew thought it was filled with awful pseudointellectual teenagers and college students, that the upvote/downvote system was horrible and encouraged people to post…
Reddit is hijacking content by requiring it to be hosted on it's own CDN... It's one of the main reasons why they put up walls. Many reddit users are actively involved in content and credit theft as well, but no one knows about how deep it runs. In a world where creators are going unviewed from IG to TikTok, there is literally an underground repost network that literally steals and reposts content to claim credit and…
does it require it or provide it as an option?
as far as I know you can submit image URLs just fine. gyfcat and imgur videos are regularly on r/all.
hosting multimedia content provides a better experience. does it have downsides? yes. just with google's AMP.
a bit offtopic, but tiktok creators' fund is already shortshelling creators. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAZapFzpP64
and this endless reposting of viral content ... well, it's ongoing since we have viral content. is it great? of course not, but it's not like the reddit CDN somehow changed anything with regards to this problem.
youtube has contentID ... "creators" are free to organize and advocate for reddit/IG/tiktok to introduce it (or lobby US/EU/China to mandate it or whatever)