It’s okay to like them while they do good and then change your mind when they turn evil.

A perfectly understandable reaction, but the company will be happy about that. If you willfully destroy a product you bought, they already have your money, and now you need to buy another one.

The enshittification cycle:

Phase one, attract users by providing a good service.
Phase two, once the users are locked in, squeeze them for all they’re worth by selling them to business customers (advertisers and/or data buyers).
Phase three, once the business customers are locked in, squeeze them for all they’re worth by threatening to deny them access to the users on whom they now depend.

Spez seems to think Reddit has the pull to make phase 3 happen. I rather doubt it, but we’ll see.

It does make a certain amount of sense. Big profit now means you get a chunk of cash to invest in other quick profit schemes, and your wealth just keeps snowballing. It works as long as you don’t care that you never build anything that lasts.

It’s phase three of the enshittification cycle. In phase one, you attract users by providing a good service. Once they’re locked in, you squeeze them for all they’re worth by switching focus to business customers. Once they’re locked in, you squeeze them by threatening to deny them access to the users on whom they now depend.