The original use is specifically a service platform that’s made worse by the owners to get more money after first being good to everyone to collect a large user base, then by squeezing the general end users, then by squeezing the business customers to collect value for themselves.

It sounds like a really specific definition, but you’d be surprised by how often it applies. He originally thought of it to apply to Tik Tok after noticing it following a similar pattern as Facebook, Amazon, and I think Google. Then the internet realized it could keep applying his term to so many more companies, like Spotify, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Reddit, Microsoft, Apple, all streaming companies, and even physical product companies like car companies or John Deere, etc and it’s shot up in popularity and use since then.

Not sure of the general use case you describe, but the person who invented the term in that article I linked sounds like he doesn’t mind if it’s used in a more general case for things getting worse from greed, so feel free to go ahead and keep using it I guess lol. Although maybe we should come up with a different, more general term for that if there isn’t already one? I’ve got nothing, but if anyone has suggestions lol.

Do you have any source for that? I would be curious to see.

I think, they are only paid indirectly in that the money are spent on propaganda to make them act like this

Deal with them just like regular trolls. You shouldn’t be like the Muskrat cultists who think content moderation is useless and thus should be given up on. I understand, I suffered from activism burnout on the regular (one was right in the middle of an election campaign), but one should not give up easily.