There was a snarky comment in the IAMA when spez said "old.reddit.com isn't going away", and the person responded with a link to spez saying the exact same thing with the exact same words about the API 6 years ago.
Google's "don't be evil" had to go away too. Capitalism can't make room for considerations such as proliferation of evil.
Google actually never officially got rid of their “don’t be evil” phrase, even if I agree with you that they are far worse at adhering to it than they used to be, and I suspect too many of their current executives have no attachment to it beyond not wanting the pointless employee morale or PR hit of actually removing it.
The reason people think it got removed is two events:
One, when Google Inc reorganized to create its Alphabet Inc corporate parent in 2015, the “Don’t be evil” motto stayed with the Google LLC subsidiary that still today handles most of what we associate with the name Google. For Alphabet, they added “Do the right thing” instead of moving “Don’t be evil” to the new top of the corporate hierarchy.
Two, in 2018 they moved Don’t be evil away from the preface of Google’s code of conduct. But they moved it to the last sentence, which is at least far more prominent than burying it in the middle, let alone removing it entirely.
I used to work for Google years ago, before all of the events I’m discussing and with no personal connection myself to those events. (Obviously I’m speaking only for myself here and not for them.) I think nowadays their level of morality as an organization is slightly better than or comparable to most other prominent tech megacorps, whereas they used to be atypically much better than that. The same deterioration has occurred in how good or bad of an employer they are - they used to be great, but now they’re slightly better than or similar to most other prominent tech megacorps. Still not worse than their peers in either morality or employee experience. But as much as “don’t be evil” is still officially there. It’s definitely far less of a corporate focus than it used to be, which I find quite sad.
Google's "don't be evil" had to go away too. Capitalism can't make room for considerations such as proliferation of evil.