The Changing Landscape of User-Generated Content: Navigating Platform Dependence and Alternatives

Companies such as Twitter, Reddit, and StackExchange have experienced significant growth and profitability thanks to user-generated content. In return, users have been rewarded with small dopamine boosts delivered through the means of purely virtual concepts like follower counts, post likes, points and badges.

However, a new player has emerged in the scene: AI that has been trained on the very same user-generated content. And aforementioned platforms now find themselves robbed. What an ironic twist of fate. In an attempt to profit more, save their behinds and not get wiped out (nothing new in tech world) they have decided to charge exorbitant fees for their API access. With that decision they are killing a complete ecosystem of hundreds of small apps and services that were actually contributing to the advancement of these platforms. In a sense, they are shooting themselves in the foot.

To all content creators and third party app developers: it is crucial to seek out truly open-source and decentralized platform to share your content or build services around it. I cannot point out a specific one at the moment - in my humble opinion, the right one is yet to emerge.

Moreover, all should consider duplicating their social networks content on personal blogs, where you have full ownership of your content and control over revenue models.

As world economic globalization is ending, it is time to make us less dependent on centralized proprietary platforms as well.