@carnage4life

For sure. Long ago I saw a quote that went something like this: "Q: How do you define Web 2.0? A: you do all the work, we take all the money."

And that has worked to a surprising degree. But there are some brain genius execs out there that somehow forget that it's still actual people doing all that actual work. Maybe Musk's inability to write a funny tweet tells us something about why he doesn't value the work?
@cstross

@carnage4life You know, I see this ignorance from users of those platforms as well.

People come to Mastodon and request features but don't have any concrete ideas about how that feature would affect administration or moderation or operation. "Why do I have to donate to my instance, I thought this was free?"

All of these sites have whole classes of "users" that are misqualified and misunderstood by management and by other users.

I have a whole story about rolling out StackExchange at my job.

@carnage4life

Never had anything to do with reddit, but you've taken me WAY back to the end of the 90s, when I contributed a fair bit of typing to the "Internet Movie Database of U. Cardiff, Wales", thinking it would be maintained like a library service by Cardiff, indefinitely.

Of course, it was turned into a money-making site with my free contributions, quite promptly.

Never contributed like that again; just to local community, and open-source work, though I'm starting to trust Wikipedia