Analysis: For what feels like the thousandth time this year, Twitter went into total meltdown over the weekend.
It was triggered by chief executive Elon Musk announcing that non-paid accounts would have the number of viewable tweets capped at 600, far less than their paid counterparts.
However, it doesn't stop there. Popular forum website Reddit has recently announced it is locking away its free API (help for people who want to code special things into their services). It'll mean that popular third-party apps will disappear from devices unless developers fork out.
YouTube's also letting us know there's no such thing as a free lunch. It's trialling blocking videos if people are using an ad blocker. Want to remove adverts? Pay for a premium plan.
Remember when Netflix first burst onto the scene? You could get nearly every movie under the sun for around 10 bucks? Now we're paying for fifteen different streaming services, all with one TV series we enjoy. Bring back cable TV, it would've been cheaper than this!
To some degree, this always happens with emerging technology. It appears unfiltered and unregulated, before someone clamps down.
Think of cars. When they were first invented, anyone could drive one, but slowly they were brought under strict laws with safety measures imposed.
In a sense the same thing is happening online. Chief executives and developers have clicked that the internet has become just as important as electricity and water, and that we're willing to pay for the privilege of accessing it.
We've all built social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram into our daily lives, and now that we're hooked, there's a real moneymaking opportunity.
I'm not the only one thinking this.
Commentator Paul Spain from Gorilla Technology says it's likely to become standard across many platforms.
"To get the best experience, we probably in the longer term will need to be paid to use social media," he told Breakfast.
The question is whether these companies can incentivise us enough to cough up our cash for an endless supply of memes and cat videos.
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