One of the problems in starting any user-driven site is how to seed it with content when you have no users. Freely available federated community content effectively removes this problem. Anyone looking to build a New Reddit or whatever dystopian hellhole Meta is aiming for – they’d be fools not to try to exploit this. Imagine launching a new product that has nothing in it, versus one where you have, at launch, thousands of already active users and a body of interesting content, and it costs you nothing extra. Throw your megacorp weight around to position yourself as the de facto way to access that stuff, sprinkle in a little embrace-extend-extinguish, job’s done.

This is not to be taken as a tacit approval of the strategy, which I personally find repulsive. I’m beyond sick of the commercialization of everything under the sun and the weaponization of data.