IIRC it was Cory Doctorow who first coined that word. In the talk he gave at DEFCON he defined it thusly:
“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
This is more or less what happened to Reddit. First, it was a safe haven for people fleeing from Digg. A few people bought Reddit Gold, server time was paid for, and good times were had by all. Over the years, Reddit started adding increasingly bizarre ways to give them money to make someone else’s post shiny, and started featuring them increasingly prominently, but no one really minded. After all, Reddit was still a pretty fun platform. They had cool little perks of being on there the April Fools stuff and RPAN, which was a great little look into whatever other people were doing at that moment. It was a fun thing that happened until it became Twitch 2, got monetized to hell and back, and then stopped happening. But I digress.
Sometime in 2023, Sam Altman decided to use Reddit to train GPT-4. Steve Huffman, absolutely incensed that someone other than him was making money off of the volunteer contributions and moderation actions of Reddit’s userbase, decided to start charging for API access and began stripping anyone who dared to protest this of their moderator rights, instead installing people who agreed with him. Everyone with a brain started leaving, and Reddit comment sections aren’t looking too… well, human anymore. Reddit is about as dead as a platform that still sees millions of comments a day can be.
IIRC it was Cory Doctorow who first coined that word. In the talk he gave at DEFCON he defined it thusly:
“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
This is more or less what happened to Reddit. First, it was a safe haven for people fleeing from Digg. A few people bought Reddit Gold, server time was paid for, and good times were had by all. Over the years, Reddit started adding increasingly bizarre ways to give them money to make someone else’s post shiny, and started featuring them increasingly prominently, but no one really minded. After all, Reddit was still a pretty fun platform. They had cool little perks of being on there the April Fools stuff and RPAN, which was a great little look into whatever other people were doing at that moment. It was a fun thing that happened until it became Twitch 2, got monetized to hell and back, and then stopped happening. But I digress.
Sometime in 2023, Sam Altman decided to use Reddit to train GPT-4. Steve Huffman, absolutely incensed that someone other than him was making money off of the volunteer contributions and moderation actions of Reddit’s userbase, decided to start charging for API access and began stripping anyone who dared to protest this of their moderator rights, instead installing people who agreed with him. Everyone with a brain started leaving, and Reddit comment sections aren’t looking too… well, human anymore. Reddit is about as dead as a platform that still sees millions of comments a day can be.