Musk and Hoffman seem to be intent on waging war with their own product. They both get a lot of unpaid labour producing their content and then complain that the unpaid labour isn’t paying for the privilege.
Also, Musk is waging war against advertisers. Running a site that is controlled by advertisers is the epitome of extreme centralization, since the site's income can be halted if an advertiser gets upset. Musk is charging on Twitter so the users aren't the product.
As for reddit, I think limiting API access to accounts with reddit gold seems like it would've been fair. That would've solved the income issues (the stated reason for the API changes), but then reddit wouldn't get all the telemetry data associated with users on their first party app.
It seems like Huffman (spez) got greedy and wanted gold subscriptions, and the telemetry data from their first party app. It's usually one or the other (ads vs. user payment).
I also want to end this by saying that I'm not trying to start an argument, but I know a lot of users on this site are very trigger happy with the downvote whenever anyone speaks objectively about Musk. If you don't agree with me, just chime in and we can discuss it.
A number of ways this could have been handled better in no particular order:
1. Give more than 30 days notice to third party app developers.
2. Mandate that third-party clients display advertising as delivered by the API and return telemetry.
3. Keep the API changes but exempt paying subscribers.
4. Refrain from making bad-faith lies about the developer of the most popular application, which he then had to disprove using call recordings, and then after that, don't try to play off your actions as misunderstandings or mistakes.
5. Don't lie about deliverables for years and years to the point where the community memes on you for your history of lying.
6. Don't fuck around in the production database to edit comments critical of you.
7. Be a little forthright for once.
I think the adage is a little wrong. In Twitter's case users are still part of the product as the existing network effects and ability to communicate with users are part of the product, and thus it's users are. Not to such a significant degree as when advertisers are sweeping up every bit of data about you, but still to some degree.
This is a nitpick. I'm speaking from the POV of keeping the site running, or not resorting to changing the site's essence to please advertisers.
Reddit is 18 old, and you're telling me that they are just thinking about making money now? How come 4chan and Wikipedia are both profitable, but not Reddit? And how is it a problem with their users and not their management?
reddit has 1.7 billion visits per month[5], with an astronomical amount of persistent storage, with the content never being deleted. reddit is ranked #18 globally.
4chan has 51 million visits per month[4], has very little persistent storage (posts are deleted once the thread slides to the bottom of the board list), and strict size limits for the posts that exist at any given time. 4chan is ranked #708 globally.
Wikipedia does get 4.7 billion monthly visits[3], but they do have a public list of large donors[1], and the entire wikipedia catalog can fit onto a 20gb microSD card [2]
So I can't give a solid answer, but it seems like the other 2 sites you mentioned have a slightly better design when it comes to infra costs.
1: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/don...
2: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...
3: https://www.similarweb.com/website/wikipedia.org/#overview
This sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. But Google and Facebook started out without a profitability plan.
