Potentially investments in a site could have huge leverage because of the existing user base.
I (and most of my team) lost our jobs at one of the most well-loved open accessing publishing sites in the world because of a complex chain of events that was rooted in the site not having a sustainable funding source despite the fact that it was fantastically cheap to run if you divided the budget by the number of daily users. Fortunately they figured it all out and the site is still here and if you work in physics, math or cs you probably used it today.
Still it was painful to see “new shiny” projects that had 4x the funding but 1% the user count at most, or to estimate we could save users $500M a year with a $500k budget.
Thus you can overthrow SourceForge but cannot overthrow something profitable and terrible such as Facebook, Match.com or the “blob” of review sites that dominate Google, see
Part of the enshittification story is the tragedy of the non-profitable site that has a large user base. Here is a recent example
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41463734
Potentially investments in a site could have huge leverage because of the existing user base.
I (and most of my team) lost our jobs at one of the most well-loved open accessing publishing sites in the world because of a complex chain of events that was rooted in the site not having a sustainable funding source despite the fact that it was fantastically cheap to run if you divided the budget by the number of daily users. Fortunately they figured it all out and the site is still here and if you work in physics, math or cs you probably used it today.
Still it was painful to see “new shiny” projects that had 4x the funding but 1% the user count at most, or to estimate we could save users $500M a year with a $500k budget.
Thus you can overthrow SourceForge but cannot overthrow something profitable and terrible such as Facebook, Match.com or the “blob” of review sites that dominate Google, see
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488857