To those of us who remember them, internet forums were amazing. You'd have one or a handful of cool people who'd pay for hosting, and then you'd have a complete

To those of us who remember them, internet forums were amazing. You'd have one or a handful of cool people who'd pay for hosting, and then you'd have a completely free to use web forum for whatever niche interest you had and wanted to learn more about, converse about, meet others over, etc. Then, companies like reddit came on the scene with tons of borrowed money. Suddenly those forums were less attractive because, why pay money to host it somewhere on vBulletin when reddit was free? Just make a subreddit. And reddit was cool with that, for years. That's what it was for, afterall, and it barely ever made any damn money but the users didn't care. Why should they? It's not their problem. And Imgur came alongside it, too, to provide image hosting. Then, the money dried up. Interest rates started creeping up. Suddenly all these services that had been free to use^1 for a decade or more suddenly had to put on grown up pants and be profitable, and not just regular ordinary profitable, but VC profitable. They had to go public and be big corporations and be worth billions of dollars. Then the enshittification starts. Service quality suffers. They start walling things off that had been free for again, a decade or more. Staff get fired and replaced. Companies are bought and sold. And soon all these "FREE" services are not only not free, but are markedly shittier than they were before. And before the free market peeps come roaring in to explain how nothing is free, yes it was. It was free for YEARS, no not for everyone, you needed someone willing to buy an instance on a hosting service or whatever. But these sites came in to service a userbase that was already getting everything they needed for free, also for free, but centralized. And then once everyone moved over, only then did they put their hand out and demand money for doing exactly what enthusiasts already were, except they did it with massive platform sites that were bloated as fuck, mired in technical debt, subject to constant and often unwanted changes, scrutinized by advertisers with zero investment in their users who could blow away everything they'd put together in an instant because it was unsuitable to run Toyota ads beside. So yeah, I get it, Reddit needs to make money. But maybe that being the case, they shouldn't have gone into a business that was demonstrably, provably unprofitable. 1: Yes yes you aren't the customer you're the product congratulations for having the most obvious observation about the economics of social media hot off the presses from 2011. Good for you.