Search for help on programming and chances are the first five results you get back from your search engine of choice will be from Stack Overflow. If you ask the Internet something more niche, such as how much do sea turtles grow in a year or what fertilizer should you use to make the leaves on your basil grow more luscious and juicy, many of the responses will come from Reddit (that is, unless you use Google, in which case your first 10 results will be ads).

The point is that Reddit, originally designed to be a user-powered news aggregator, has become an excellent resource for specialized, obscure, often wacky knowledge and in-depth discussions. One hundred-percent of the content is generated and curated by the users, and the combined effects of splitting topics into subreddits, peer-moderation, and the upvote-downvote system itself often manages to keep content relevant, interesting, and helpful.

Alas, decadence arrives to all proprietary platforms. In a process technically known as "enshittification" (a term coined by Cory Doctorow [1]), as a centralized and corporate-owned platform grows and requires investors, and, hence, a viable business plan to keep it economically viable, more and more anti-features are introduced. Typical anti-features include ads, premium features, limitations on access to data, etc. The user experience gradually worsens until the platform reaches a breaking point, and the community – the only real, organic valuable asset a social platform has – leaves. It is happening at breakneck speed on Twitter, it is happening bit by bit on YouTube, and the process started years ago on Reddit.

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