I'm really surprised this story wasn't a bigger discussion item. This seems like an interesting story for our times (in the tech world). Dribble wanted to be paid for arranging those contacts, but they were really just an entrenched middlemen. I don't see them as having any real creation of value other than a tax on hiring people in that area. A new company with better rules for designers and probably much lower fees could well attract enough designers and buyers of their service to easily supplant them - or at least take a good amount of business.

Plus the actions of dribble looked very kludgey, poor PR and not much customer appreciation. It looks to me like they were trying to very publicly punish Kuznetsov so other people would tow the line. There's another thing, it would have been trivially easy for someone well known like Kuznetsov to connect to possible customers through linked in, once the initial contact was made on Dribble. The moat of Dribble looks like it's going to be filling up with sand.

This just feels like obvious overreach by dribble. But they are doubling down on their side. I look forward to seeing how this ends up.

If you are a middleman who is living off money from connecting people, you better provide a real service, and not just be an entrenched but useless gatekeeper.

I believe permission-less alternatives over the Nostr protocol with Bitcoin/Lightning payments will fix the issue.