// content access

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Oct 7

Reddit Kills RSS Feeds, Forcing Users to Its Platform

Reddit's removal of RSS access—a 20-year-old standard that let users read content in third-party apps and aggregators—concentrates traffic and advertising inventory on its own properties. The move mirrors Twitter's API restrictions and reflects platforms dismantling the open infrastructure that once made the web modular. Users lose optionality; Reddit gains the ability to force algorithmic feeds and inject ads into every consumption point. The decision also suggests Reddit views its upcoming IPO as permission to extract more value from its communities, even at the cost of alienating power users who built the platform.

theme-brand platform strategy competitive positioning content access

Aug 19

Meta's Web Scraping Advantage While Google Faces Negotiation Pressure

Source: Search Engine Journal

Meta has built an asymmetric position in AI training by vacuuming up web content at scale while publishers focus their licensing demands on Google, which actually negotiates and pays for data access. This creates perverse incentives where the company taking less friction from publishers gains the most training material, while Google—despite being the bigger negotiating target—faces rising compliance costs that Meta sidesteps entirely. Publishers may eventually recognize that Meta's free-riding extracts more value than Google's paid agreements, but regulatory and market pressure has so far landed on the wrong actor.