When your audience lives on someone else’s platform, your livelihood depends on a moderation system you can’t see and can’t appeal to. Accounts are suspended in error, swept up in mass bans, or deplatformed for reasons that are never explained.

• Wrongful and unexplained account suspensions are common enough that researchers and advocacy groups track them as a systemic problem in automated content moderation. EFF — Content moderation ↗
• Independent measurement of platform takedowns and appeals is collected publicly to document how often moderation decisions are reversed. Lumen Database ↗

You can spend years building an audience and lose access to it overnight.

Followers stopped guaranteeing reach. As feeds turned algorithmic, the share of your own audience you reach for free fell toward zero — and the way back is to pay.

• Facebook Page organic reach has declined steadily for over a decade as the News Feed prioritized an algorithmic mix over chronological posts from accounts you chose to follow. Meta — News Feed / Facebook Feed ↗
• Platforms openly shifted to recommendation-driven feeds (e.g. the “For You” model), surfacing content from accounts you don’t follow over the ones you do. Recommender systems ↗

Reach is rented. The audience you built becomes a toll road.

Ecosystems built on a platform’s API exist at that platform’s pleasure. Pricing or policy can change overnight and take a generation of community tools down with it.

• In 2023, Reddit’s sudden API pricing change forced the shutdown of popular third-party apps and broke many community moderation and accessibility tools. Reddit API controversy (2023) ↗
• Apollo, one of the most-loved third-party Reddit clients, announced it would shut down because the new API costs made it unsustainable. Apollo (app) ↗

Everything built on a platform is built on rented land.

The front door to the web narrowed. Results increasingly favor ads, SEO-optimized content, a handful of large aggregators, and machine-generated answers — while small, expert, independent sites sink.

• Studies of “zero-click” searches find that a large and growing share of Google searches end without a click to any external website. Zero-click searches ↗
• Search-engine optimization incentivizes content built for ranking rather than for readers, crowding out independent pages. Search engine optimization ↗

When the front door only opens onto a few rooms, the rest of the web goes dark.

AI assistants increasingly answer questions directly, summarizing the open web without sending anyone to the pages the answers came from. The people who wrote and hosted that knowledge get no visit, no credit, and less and less reason to keep the lights on.

• AI-generated answer features and overviews are designed to satisfy queries on the results page itself, reducing the need to visit source websites. AI Overviews ↗

The risk is not only that websites disappear. The risk is that people stop visiting websites entirely.

The web forgets. Blogs go dark, tutorials vanish, image hosts shut down, forums are deleted, and links quietly stop resolving — taking years of human knowledge with them.

• A 2024 Pew Research Center study found that a substantial share of webpages that existed only a few years earlier are now inaccessible — “digital decay” affecting government, news, and reference pages alike. Pew Research Center (2024) ↗
• The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine exists precisely because so much of the web would otherwise be unrecoverable. Internet Archive ↗

A broken link is a small erasure. Multiply it by the whole web.

“Buying” digital media increasingly means renting access that can be revoked. Purchases get removed from libraries, games are delisted and rendered unplayable, and shows disappear from the services that sold them.

• In 2024, Ubisoft’s racing game The Crew was delisted and its servers shut down, leaving paying customers unable to play a game they had bought — helping spark the “Stop Killing Games” campaign. The Crew / Stop Killing Games ↗
• Storefronts’ terms generally grant a revocable license, not ownership — purchased films, books, and games can be removed when licensing deals lapse. Digital rights management ↗

A DVD does not revoke itself.