Every time the rules change, how much business is wiped out?
Those who do self-media have been through it, those who do e-commerce have been through it, and those who do local life services have been through it even more: the platform changes its algorithm once, adjusts its rules once, tightens its review once, and the traffic that was decent the day before is gone the next day.
The orders are still there, but the customers are in the platform's hands; the content is still there, but the account is in the platform's hands; the relationships are still there, but the gateway to reach them is in the platform's hands.
What truly makes people panic is not that this traffic is gone, but the realization that—apart from staying on this platform and gambling on next time—you have no other way out.
This is not a problem of any one platform; it is a structure. Everyone who entrusts traffic, customers, and content to a platform is inside this structure. The only difference is which link in the food chain you occupy.
The root cause of being subjected to rent extraction is that there is no “exit” option.
The rent-collection structure is so stable not because the platform is especially bad, but because users and creators have no credible exit option.
You can't take your users with you—users belong to the platform's account system, not to you; you can't take your content with you—content grows inside the platform's database; once your account is banned, the thread between you and your customers is cut.
Growth without an exit option is rented growth. Rented things look like they're yours, but the moment the rules change, they aren't.
Start afresh outside the wall.
If you can't count on the platform to loosen its grip on its own, you have to find a way outside the wall.
Open protocols offer the underlying possibility of "not relying on a single platform for distribution." In decentralized communities under the ActivityPub protocol, servers communicate and cache with one another; AT Protocol lets users' identities and data reside in their own repositories, identified by their own domain names, rather than being locked inside an account on a particular platform.
These are still niche in China, but they prove one thing: being discoverable, migratable, and not dependent on a single entry point is technically feasible; it is not a utopia.
The democratization of computing power is also lowering the threshold. The "computing power bank" and "computing power supermarket" promoted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology allow small and medium-sized enterprises to deposit idle computing power, have it scheduled and billed by card-hours and core-hours, and also subsidize "computing power vouchers." This cannot change the structure in which upstream players take the lion's share, but at least it gives small teams a chance to validate an idea at an affordable cost, rather than being eliminated on the first round of computing power bills.
The significance of these efforts is not in demanding that platforms open up, but in starting a new operation outside the platform walls—or lowering the walls a notch.
What you can truly decide for yourself is which section you stand in.
Technology trends and protocol evolution are not controlled by individuals. But one thing is entirely in your hands—which link of the food chain you stand on.
The criterion is simple: wherever you must rely on traffic from a single platform to survive, you are a tenant; wherever you can build direct relationships, you have bargaining power.
Direct relationships are the only asset that cannot be unilaterally rewritten by platform rules. Email lists, independent websites, your own domain, the brand itself, paid subscriptions, private communities—the core of these is not how advanced the technology is, but that users recognize you, not the platform's recommendation slots. A platform can throttle your content, but it cannot stop someone who already trusts you from opening your email, visiting your domain, or renewing your service.
Hedge with multiple entry points instead of betting your life on a single search box or feed. The practices of overseas indie developers offer a reference: receiving payments directly through channels like Stripe and Paddle, with no platform commission, fees of two to three percent, users paying you directly, and no middlemen anywhere in the chain. This path has a high mortality rate, but it proves something else—outside the rent-collection structure, there exists a business model that directly reaches paying users.
On the content side, changes are also happening. Major tech companies are starting to enter the field and do GEO; AI search is becoming part of users' habits; original, traceable content with clear factual support is increasingly likely to be cited. This trend is not yet stable, but it at least shows one thing: the credibility of content is becoming valuable again. The premise is not to bet your life on the rules of some platform.
Only what can be taken away is truly an asset.
To boil it down, it really comes down to one sentence: when evaluating any opportunity, look at the exit cost first.
It’s not about how much traffic this platform has, but about—whether users can be taken with you, whether content can be migrated, and whether there are other ways to reach them if your account is banned. Growth without an exit option is rented growth.
Conversely, the things that grow slowly but are not constrained by platform permission are what truly belong to you: your own domain, your own official website, a group of people who recognize you rather than a recommendation slot, and a path through which you can directly collect money.
This is the difference between “digital assets” and everything else. Digital assets are not on some platform’s servers; they are in a place you can control, migrate, and keep adding content to.
For a company, the digital assets it should hold onto most tightly are precisely the most basic ones: its own domain, its own website, content it can update at any time, and the direct line between itself and its customers that does not go through an intermediary.
This is also the starting point for our digital platform. We do not advise companies to bet on another new traffic platform; instead, we help them hold tightly onto what is theirs: once the website is built, the domain is yours, the content is yours, and the keys to the backend are in your hands—you can change it whenever you want, and take it with you whenever you want to leave. Platforms will change, algorithms will change, but these things that grow under your name will not be reduced to zero just because someone changes a rule once.
Technology keeps going in circles, but those who ultimately stand firm are all the same kind of people—they do not bet that the platform will always treat them well; they only ensure that the stretch of road they build lets customers walk directly up to them.