For me the big takeaway here is that as long as we choose to participate in a system that is ultimately driven by a profit motive we are going to be the means to that end. Kbin, lemmy, calckey, whatever other flavor of the fediverse you may be using, doesn't have that feature. As the people who chose to be mods for free on Reddit demonstrated, people will dedicate alot to a thing that feels like a community or a movement. Not so much to a thing that feels like a commercial enterprise. So yeah, Spez is a self serving idjit. But maybe he did us a favor by motivating us to find something better.