That is not rly correct. They provide the source code if you subscribe which is enough to honor GPL. The part about not distributing the code and not building a fork / competitor is against the GPL. GPL would even be honored if they print out the code and sent it to you per mail after you asked for the code. GPL does not mean you have to host the code on a public site.

I don’t really get how people think Reddit
is winning. Sure traffic is back to normal or even higher, but that really doesn’t matter. They want to go public and for that to work they have to be lucrative for advertisers.
No one in their right mind wants to advertise like normal on current Reddit. Sure they still have users but now you advertisements are not targeted and you basically advertise on a shitpost site.

From a money perspective this is a huge problem for Reddit because for a investor in the current market situation that is not rly something you want to invest in. Remember it is a forum that hasn’t made a profit in nearly 20 years and a relevant percentage (active posters) of the userbase is trolling right now.

It currently looks like a lose lose situation (Reddit and the users don‘t get what they want).

No, this just proves what everybody knows that has worked with ChatGPT. It is a nice tool if you want to write a story but everything else is just a time waste. Contrary to the media belief 99% of ChatGPTs answers to business related questions (including coding) produce a partially wrong or completely wrong answer.
You rly can‘t trust the answers ChatGPT gives you at all.
And coding … Copilot is already not good (in coding but very useful for auto completion) but ChatGPT is actually worse. ChatGPT fails even on easy coding tasks in most languages and even the JS solutions are mostly horrible.

Sure the code is also a problem, but in the here and now the biggest problem are devs that just believe whatever ChatGPT prints out and in the end you have a PR full of code (including deprecated extensions and packages) from yesteryear.

But self hosted models would be awesome nonetheless.

The majority aren‘t bots. Most of them are legit no lifers to whom Reddit going down the drain would be a huge blow. I mean you work full time as a cashier for taco bell and you are not really happy with that situation. Some people go to school again, learn a skill… others spend all their time one Reddit stockpiling karma. Those are the people who really hate lemmy and anything that could remotely make Reddit worse, because they are heavily invested in the platform for the wrong reasons.