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View submission: An Update Regarding Reddit’s API
In TikTok's case, the vendors aren't devs, they're content creators. People were given an audience by TikTok in exchange for keeping people watching TikTok, and they built their livelihoods around that (the same way a dev might for a platform's API).
And again, the whole point of enshittification is that the platform is great to vendors, until they aren't. Reddit being great to vendors, especially their biggest 3rd party devs, doesn't disprove the pattern. It just means we're still in step 2, where they want more vendor lock-in (if the cycle is actually happening, which it seems to with every social media site eventually).
I'll check out Malcolm Gladwell's talk, but your description sounds like it's largely compatible with what Doctorow describes. User's choice is one of the biggest things Doctorow focuses on in his article, and how it largely becomes incompatible with maximized profit.
There's nothing here!