People will be quick to blame private equity. The private equity playbook is quite literally to cut costs, raise prices and load up with complicated debt then s

People will be quick to blame private equity. The private equity playbook is quite literally to cut costs, raise prices and load up with complicated debt then sell the business before the complicated debt explodes. That's just scratching the surface. We have ample evidence of what works for sites that contain what is essentially user-generated content. All social media sites, Wikipedia, Ancestry, numerous others. Gracenote/CDDB [1] was one of the earliest examples on the Internet. The model that works is Wikipedia. This is all so painfully obvious when you examine such enterprises through the lens of the workers relationship to the means of production. Users here are the workers. They're creating the value in these sites. Without these workers these sites are worth nothing. Wikipedia works because it is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation. This isn't quite being owned by the workers but it's a lot closer than any for-profit enterprise. Oh and simply being a non-profit doesn't solve the problem either. Every social media site will go through this: increasing value extraction to maintain profits that will ultimately destroy the site. Ancestry isn't a socia media site but it follows the same pattern. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote_licensing_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracenote_licensing_controvers...