He said that in regards to rolling his own version of Reddit. The parent comment proposes instead to repurpose the app as a client for similar but different already existing service.
It’s possible to run a profitable company that treats its customers well. It’s not possible to do that when you accept VC money or take the company public.
Big Apple fan here, but I’m under no delusion that Apple will always make great products or treat their customers well. The moment they struggle to maintain growth, they will resort to the same user-hostile tactics that have enshittified the rest of the internet. That will probably happen under a different CEO, but I think it’s unavoidable in the long term.
Any service that supercedes whatever next, will eventually be a protocol, and future generations will consider all the iterations in-between to be, dumb.
Some of the products are based on anti capitalist principles. Regardless of an amoral view of all this, combining capitalist ventures with egalitarian ventures seems wrong to me. To couple two wildly different ways of ethically interacting with the world and treating people not as commodities.