No Vaseline Chronicles

Named after Ice Cube’s 1991 masterpiece — the diss track about a manager who stole money from the artists who made him rich. Same energy. Different spreadsheet.

No Vaseline is the collection for platforms that changed the rules after you built your house on their land. The companies that invited you in, let you build an audience, create content, generate data — and then quietly moved the fence, raised the rent, or sold your furniture to a competitor while you were at work.

Google paid Reddit $60 million a year for access to your posts — the ones you wrote for free, on your lunch break, about your plumbing problem — then blocked every other search engine from indexing them and IPO’d 27 days later at $6.4 billion. Then Google itself started scraping every website on Earth, answering the question above the link, and keeping the visitor. The source got a footnote. The source’s traffic got a funeral.

In Sonny’s experience, the people who build the platform never stay to clean it up. That’s what users are for. Users and subpoenas.