Company A raises prices and reports record quarterly profits. Company B is aware of this because both the price raising and quarterly profit report for Company A are public. Company B raises prices too so that they can get also get more profit. Company C either does the same thing, or there is no company C because rubber stamped mergers and acquisitions for decades have allowed a handful of companies to dominate every industry, sometimes multiple industries.

None of this is a conspiracy. It’s Econ 101 level “how things work.”

They think that the people who are left are more valuable than we were. At least in terms of data collection and ad views, they are probably right.

In the long run, chasing away the power users will probably harm the platform, but it’s not immediately clear.

Reddit probably won’t implode like Digg did because they got a lot of users used to their terrible app, and power users can still use old.reddit and Revanced to patch the third party apps. But enough people have left Reddit that Lemmy is now it’s own thing, and unless Lemmy screws it up badly, it should only keep growing.

I joined Reddit 13 years ago when Digg made their site unusable. I joined Lemmy 1 month ago when Reddit made their site unusable (on mobile). History repeats itself…