@fullfathomfive

It breaks my heart that people keep having to learn this lesson.

I still remember back when Netflix had this glorious user-centric forum and rating section, where regular people gave reviews of stuff, and rated stuff, and you could chat with people about "why did you like X, but thought Y sucked" ... stuff like that. And Netflix had a fantastic recommendation system based on your ratings and reviews that really, successfully suggested stuff you'd never heard of, that you (usually) loved, based on the stuff you'd already watched and rated.

And of course, as their catalog got crappier over time, they had to deep-six all that and start force-feeding people whatever halfway-not-sucky-crap they could ...

And the entire user-contributed forum was deleted, and the rating-and-recommendation system got turned into the crap system they've got now.

Reddit is in the middle of doing this now. Every word you write into any subreddit is going to feed the beast and they will use it to screw you over, one way or another.

And, yeah, pretty much every other for-profit company that pretends to respect and support its user-base will do exactly the same thing, sooner or later, when the need for profits bubbles to the top.