Not always, but it is when you go public. I work a lot at small businesses, lots of them have shareholders who are mostly hands-off, or would prefer a more conservative approach to protect their investment.

People who invest in non-public businesses are usually in for the long haul, and come with much greater risk.

But when you go public, your business just comes a commodity, nothing but a vehicle for a fund manager to use to try and get a higher return for their clients so they get more business and commission.

In theory, it's a really democratic system, but the reality is that we've lost track of what an investment is meant to be, and the number of private individuals actually holding shares in a company directly is very low, it's mostly fund managers who literally just want to pump their numbers for a few years, because long term, they never really beat the market.

I can imagine one reason being no support for in-line video ads, when scrolling down a subreddit or the homepage

Right now the ads are limited to a tiny image and a title on old.reddit. There was also a traditional squarish ad space on the right hand side IIRC but I've never seen an ad in there...

I really don't know. I definitely recall Spez saying it's safe. But it seems like we'd be wise to not trust a word he says.

Just fyi, when posting links to communities, you should just use the "/c/" without the link to the instance. Like this: /c/[email protected]

This is similar to how those links were done on reddit (/r/). The problem with your link is that it is instance specific, which is really helpful for anyone in your instance, but anyone in a different instance will be thrown out of their instance if they click it (they'll be unable to subscribe).