Oops this was super unclear, sorry—the thing that ties together all of these crappy websites isn’t money issues, just that they’re the winner in a network-effect-based business, thus have no plausible competitors and no incentive to become more useful / less crappy.
While Wikipedia didn’t have an existential threat from a competitor, they did have the existential threat of the editor retention crisis as gwern describes.
Why do you think such a threat provides no incentive to become less crappy but an external competitior would?
Oops this was super unclear, sorry—the thing that ties together all of these crappy websites isn’t money issues, just that they’re the winner in a network-effect-based business, thus have no plausible competitors and no incentive to become more useful / less crappy.
While Wikipedia didn’t have an existential threat from a competitor, they did have the existential threat of the editor retention crisis as gwern describes.
Why do you think such a threat provides no incentive to become less crappy but an external competitior would?