Let’s be clear on this, if you have ancestors that lived in the U.S. over 150 years ago and had any wealth in the first half of the 19th century or earlier, you are likely descended from slave owners. This is just a sad fact of our history and it seems to be being used for political means. It’s just as accurate to say that all of those legislators come from old money.
Maybe I’m being a little sensitive due to knowing that my family also owned slaves at one point - and having had that sinking feeling when meeting someone of African descent that shares my last name knowing how they likely got it. But I feel like this article minimizes the truth. Slaves weren’t just owned by the ancestors of political elites. I get that’s not stated that way, but it’s important to remember that almost 1 in 5 people were slaves by the time slavery was abolished.
A better option might be to require third party developers to use a Reddit based advertising API with the benefit of free API usage and revenue sharing. Everyone’s happy. Third party developers would get paid for ads, they can show more ads and use other ad providers along side Reddit if they want to, the API gets paid for by advertising revenue for all of the third party apps, Reddit gets to track it’s users by requiring API Ad calls to send a user id, etc., etc…