The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.
Unrelated to the article, but I’ve never heard of defector before, and I spend the last hour crawling through and reading a couple articles. Seems like a fantastic little site (and apparently worker owned?). I don’t care much about most of the sports articles, but the other stuff is great. Thanks for posting!
Yeah Defector spun off from the old Deadspin amidst clashes with their parent company over editorial independence (among other things). Drew Magary is one of my favorite writers, so I was mostly tracking it because of him.