[ajacksified]

When I worked there, it mostly came down two two things that leaked into every product: anti-abuse (spam mostly), and ads/tracking.

Anti-abuse is useful to keep secret because it includes tools that make spammers think they're successful. I think it's a little more nuanced than the "open source code is more secure argument", which I totally agree with - but the anti-abuse includes active mitigation measures that constantly evolve; and in this case, obscurity to how this all works is actually valuable.

A reddit-specific ad or metrics implementation isn't useful to anyone else, and it was a tough sell that the codebase should be made more complex only to accommodate configuration for a small handful of users. I know, because I made the argument that we should when I created the open-source reddit-mobile repo, which was originally broken up into plugins like the reddit python codebase. Eventually it just wasn't feasible to maintain as a 2-5 engineer team rebuilding a 10-year-old website in a couple of months. That's a story for another time.

Personally - I find it sad, and I think it got rid of one more thing that made Reddit special. Unfortunately, the only metric you can attach to this is "how much longer does it take us to ship shit", and thus, it died.