This reminds me of Reddit killing off third-party clients and Twitter doing the same.

The decline wasn't immediately obvious at first, but it happened and it capped the growth trajectory of both. Twitter never grew as fast as it did during the third-party client and applications era.

Reddit isn't adding meaningful, human-written content as fast as it was in that era. There's a lot more activity now, but based purely on an eye-count, it's over-run by bots (partly because the best moderation tools are gone!) and the human contributions are declining.

All successful startups begin to drift away from the ground truth of their product. It's a drift away from users. And a drift towards internal politics.

A lot like Rasmussen's drift towards danger, https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-dri...

My theory is that as startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to attract a certain type of person who is more interested in mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up for future corporate rise than building a product.

These people play to the company's internal court and create deeply bitter environments that leads to more mission-driven individuals leaving the company. Eventually leading to the cultivation of institutional arrogance.

Externally, you can watch signs of this process unfolding. Companies start engaging in the startup / corporate equivalent of ignoring gravity. Which they can! For a while.

When you're high, you have a ton of air time. You can't tell / feel the pull of gravity in free-fall. And it takes time, a very long time, but just like there ain't no such thing as free lunch; there ain't no such thing as "too big to care." It's merely, too big to care for now.

The bill always comes due.

> My theory is that as startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to attract a certain type of person who is more interested in mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up for future corporate rise than building a product.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

Reddit is undergoing an even worse tragetory right now:

They're a lot heavier on the censorship and sidewide ban. Subs are being astroturfed as much or worse than usual.

On top of that they're trying to stop anonymous browsing by paywalling on a timer.

It sounds to me like you're describing enshittification. As coined by Cory Doctorow:

> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

(Although I'm not completely sure this maps onto Anthropic, which was never primarily targeting consumers.)