I just read this article and what Meta is doing then triggered all the alarm bells!
This tactic even has a Wikipedia page: Embrace, extend, and extinguish
From the Wiki (quite enlightening):
The strategy’s three phases are:
- Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
- Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
- Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
Related question: is “Hot” super buggy? I am on 0.18.0, but I still often see really really really old posts (1 year old, 2 years old) sprinkled in with new stuff, and I often see clusters of 5-10 posts of a single community grouped together.
I have to pay extra attention to the post age because of this.