To Joe's point in the original article, from a risk management standpoint it makes a lot more sense to build your business around something like e-mail than a proprietary messaging standard. The optimistic view here is that these companies are doing a fantastic job of making the case for Federated social media and open, interoperable protocols.And so there's a large space of things that you can legally do, that will still erode the trust that is foundational to that social contract. Your product fundamentally relies on a social contract. It creates a ton of value and lock-in, but it also binds you to the whims of your users. This is the double-edged sword of network effect. But fundamentally, the users are a core part of their product. Reddit and Twitter are corporations, and they're free to change their product or business model however they see fit.Something that has become increasingly obvious to me is that a lot of modern tech company's only path to profitability is monopoly, and I think that's a big problem.These companies are now scrambling to actually run viable businesses, and I find it extremely difficult to muster sympathy for them. The glut of hyper low-interest money sloshing around in that ecosystem chasing anything with a hint of potential returns has definitely enabled a lot of free beer for users, but has also enabled a lot of profit-free business models. These companies have been running extremely loose ships for awhile now.In an attempt to capture that value by removing the "open" bit, I suspect most of these companies will find that much of it evaporates in their grasp. Much of the value of the web has been created by open APIs.I've been bouncing a lot of ideas around in my head on the Reddit API stuff and the larger changes in the Silicon Valley/VC-backed tech macroenvironment, so let me just throw them out there as best I can:
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