An ambitious post with a sweeping conclusion. However, I have some concerns about the details being presented to support that conclusion. I can't comment on much of what she says, but I do know quite a bit about Tumblr and Reddit. So when she says:
> Tumblr is being reorganized and censored to make room for ads, including deleting accounts without any warning
That seems a bit odd. So let's look at the links she provides: The first is to a story that notes that Tumblr has had ads for years, and speculates, with no real basis, that perhaps someday Yahoo might want to censor Tumblr, even though they've previously promised not to and are showing no signs of planning to start. And the second link about an account being deleted is no better; it's also from 2 years ago, and basically boils down to "one Tumblr user had their account deleted"; long-time Tumblr users will be well aware that this has been Tumblr's first (and usually only) solution to everything since day one.
A better summary of her links would be "Tumblr is the same as it always was".
And her discussion of Reddit is little better; spinning an employment dispute about which very little is known into, again, some sign of major change. But I've been hanging around Reddit long enough to remember when people were fretting about Yishan Wong ruining the site. Then about Ellen Pao. Now we're back to people worrying about Ohanian ruining the site, and now Yishan and "Chairman Pao", as her critics loved to call her, have morphed from evil oppressors of free speech to now vanquished defenders of the founder's original vision, which will now be lost as the founder's return to restore their original vision. Or something, her metaphor[1] seemed more like an excuse to link paintings to me.
Either way, a dispute over the direction of the site's AMA section, which seems to have led to an employee leaving, is pretty weak evidence of some massive sea change in the internet. Especially when you realize that most of what drove the protests was frustration among the moderators about poor moderation tools and poor support from administrators, which has been a source of contention for years. The core problem was a lack of change, if anything.
Plus, the actual main complaint seems to be that a service she loves is trying to find a way to make money. So when she's frantically finding a way to get a copy of the songs she loves while compensating the artists:
> I clicked on one song that I loved. It took me to Amazon, but the song wasn't available on MP3, only on Audio CD or Vinyl. I immediately clicked away. I would gladly buy it on MP3 for 99 cents. But not wait for 2 days for a CD to ship. I guess I'll listen on YouTube for now, an experience also now completely ruined by ads.
So she's afraid that the song may, someday, get removed from Soundcloud, so she wants a copy of her own and to give the artist money, but she won't wait 2 days for the CD?
> Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song, even a song you love
Right. She'll gladly pay 99 cents, but she won't pay $1.50. Nor wait for a CD to ship. It must be instant and under a dollar.
> After these two songs, I gave up. I'll just risk being on SoundCloud until the other songs get taken away, I guess.
Well, if the first two songs out of the "over 100" songs you have saved, and love so much you panic at the thought of not being able to listen again cost more than $1 or take more than 2 days to acquire...
...then sure, might as well give up and keep listening to anti-smoking ads.
[1]: http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2015/06/reddit-was-amazing/
Edit: Author has clarified that it was less the $1.50 cost of the second song, and more the fact that she didn't recognize the payment processor and was afraid of fraud. Not quite as odd as it seemed, although I don't think it changes my point.