Then take reddit as another example. No other company wanted to give a dev like Aaron Swartz access to the same kind of resources again. Digg died to reddit when it was bigger in the beginning, so if an external carrot and stick was the deciding factor instead of underlying value, Digg would still be the big thing and reddit would be kept down by the big carrot and stick afforded to Digg by constant profit. But that's not how that conflict played out, the side with underlying value won (and it was centralized and unstable and now we must try to send it the way of Digg)