That's the crux of my problem with facebook and google: companies making billions by freely using their users OC. For Reddit it is kind of okay because they are not yet building selfdriving spy, or selfSpying VR.
This is reddit: In 2008, MercurialMadnessMan launched a novelty account named "AmazonAffiliate." He would cruise around subreddits doing nothing but putting in Amazon Affiliate hyperlinks (with some bald-faced self-ironic shilling) for any product anyone mentioned. It was funny for a day or two. But he kept it up, and people would say "thanks!" About a month later, there was a giant dust-up in /r/modtalk (which, at the time, was the secret cabal, all of 50 of us or so) because he'd bragged on Facebook that it was making him $500 a day. So krispy, who didn't work there at the time, lit the fuck into him. qgyh2 lit the fuck into him. Several other people lit the fuck into him. He made the point that the money was there for the taking, why the fuck not take it? Q whined to Alex and Steve and ended up in the weird position of stuffing affiliate links into the banner of everyone who didn't have adblock. That money would go directly to Reddit. And there Q sat, making minimum wage for spamming the banner with clumsy Amazon ads, until Reddit really fucked up Self Serve advertising, one of the greatest shitshows in the history of online marketing. You haven't lived until you've paid $1500 to have a subreddit slag the shit out of your product, I tell you what. And thus did Reddit sit around, thumb-in-ass, for four years while they hemorrhaged cash out their non-existent affiliate links. Fast forward to yesterday, and Reddit is just now getting around to hiring a third party to do effectively what MMM was doing in 2008. This is the site the VCs think is worth $4 billion.
except of course that a) they told their users and b) they provide an excellent service for free so getting mad at them for needing to profit is more or less the same as getting mad at yourself for wanting reddit to still exist in five years edit: tag reddit please
You're mixing your provider here: Users provide excellent contents, plus selection to reddit. If reddit die, the next site getting the user base will be as good as them, because all the value is in the user-base. As it is for Myspace, pardon me... facebook.
Hmm, maybe. I didn't say provider, I said service. Someone has to pay for the servers, and yeah, someone always will -- but only because if you get big enough you can cash in on ad money. There's no light at the end of the tunnel, for anyone, if the users jump ship the moment their platform monetizes. Monetizing isn't inherently evil, it's life.