User Generated Content Platforms (UGC)

The usual cycle with social media sites is that they start out being very flexible and open, and are happy to have users even if those users are sharing content that sends other users off-site. But, over time, they try to get more content hosted on their own systems, and to promote it more relative to the competition. Google, while not a social pla... See more

The natural end state of marketplaces and social media is the eventual shift from user generated supply to professionalized supply/content. They can fight it for some time, but eventually there is no other way to keep scaling (or prevent power users from peeling off)

The existence of AI models means that openness is a bigger liability for user-generated content companies. The existence of a successful company in some category indicates demand for the content, so these are the easiest business models to drop into AI. "Quora, but there's no cold-start problem because our LLM can offer an instant answer" is one of... See more