Why does it feel like we're at a point where every social media + other digital media are making shitty decisions and falling apart?
Why does it feel like we're at a point where every social media + other digital media are making shitty decisions and falling apart?
I mean there's Reddit ofc, as well as Twitter in its entirety, Discord is implementing some dumb updates, there are issues with Tumblr as well as everything to do with Meta, and I'm sure there are plenty more (and I haven't even touched other digital media, for example the Sims). Why is it all happening in the span of about a couple months?
Lets take the example of Reddit. Reddit could have kept its costs to the minimum and could have run the site with the ad revenue that came in. In fact they could have talked transparently about their opex and asked for a simple donation drive every now and then like Wikipedia. If need be, they could have removed silly GIF replies and other stuff and focused on text alone. However this would not let them become the next Facebook. That's what they wanted to be. At some point in their story was a choice to be forums 2.0 or get into a race to become a cash grab. Sadly they went for the latter.
n fact they could have talked transparently about their opex and asked for a simple donation drive every now and then like Wikipedia.
Let's remember this about Kbin and the Fediverse.
I would donate to help counterbalance the wave of migration that brought me here.
There's a buymeacoffe.com/kbin donation page, where you can donate. I think Ernest should set up a patreon. I'd totes set up a monthly donation
In fact they could have talked transparently about their opex and asked for a simple donation drive every now and then like Wikipedia.
This reminds me of when Reddit used to show their monthly server costs and ask that people get gold to help offset it.
It's the money.
US Fed has raised interest rates, destroying money for the first time in decades in an effort to stop our inflation problem
The knock on effects is that banks literally have less money to lend to companies. Some companies are affected more than others by this environment. Tech was hit hard, extremely hard.
With hundreds of thousands of layoffs, tech industry is contracting. Silicon Valley bank literally evaporated in the span of 3 days. Twitter was losing money and had to sell out. StackOverflow is losing money and is currently selling out.
In this environment, Reddit is about to launch it's long awaited IPO, the time when the public is allowed to directly buy Reddit stock and invest into the company. That's what Initial Public Offering means. If Reddit does well, Reddit will pull in lots of money this year through this IPO.
The CEO of Reddit needs to prove Reddit is profitable, or if not profitable... Will eventually be profitable. Stockholders don't care about Reddit drama for the most part, but most are smart enough to read financial sheets. Reddit needs to show growing revenue, growing profits and cutting costs to attract money.
As such, all of what Reddit's CEO has done makes sense in the context of the IPO. He is betting that shareholders won't notice the drop of high quality content creators from Reddit, since that's not a financial number that's reported. He can IPO, raising millions, maybe even billions for himself. The golden parachute outta here when everything gets screwed up in a year or two and collapses.
I think today's investors are smarter though, and the bearish economy and high interest rates means more investors will pay attention to underlying issues.
Generally the drama isn't a big deal. But in a specific case the only value of the site is in the community moderation and the depth of data on the site.
He needs investors to buy in but he also needs advertisers to buy in. Advertisers do not love paying for negative drama.
I don't think that Reddit can compete against Youtube, Facebook, or TikTok with regards to ads.
They can make some money, yes. But Reddit will never have high-end ad revenue, not with its current model (or any changes they're making).
U just enlightened me sir. Thank you.
I disagree in it really making sense (at least long term, but I recognize this is also "normal" for these corporate types) - it destroys long term viability for short term goals.
Happens all over the corporate world. They are encouraged to operate this way usually the guy there when the actions were taken getz out well before those long term consequences arrive. Hopefully Steve does bear the consequences himself, he dezerves it for being a horrible person in general.
Yeah, investors are going to be even more inclined to identify exactly why the platform might be successful in the future. They’re not going to blindly throw money at new IPOs (as much) because debt isn’t free anymore.
The VC money is drying up and they're demanding a return on investment as the world's economy struggles on at the moment.
Indeed. VC is going into "AI" instead so now services have to be financially sustainable. And that is not really the problem, it's when companies intentionally do it in a way that fuck the user.
Pretty good answer tbh
Late stage capitalism You make a business and it goes well, you make some money everyone is happy.
But with time your profits will plateau or even decline. It's natural, but businesses don't understand that it is insane to expect a company to always turn crazy profits when the product does not evolve.
Companies like apple and Microsoft don't worry as much because they are constantly evolving with new product.
Companies like Twitter, Facebook, reddit, Netflix have hit a wall where there really isn't anywhere else to go so they start making shareholder centered decisions made by people who aren't even in touch with the user base of their product.
Reddit, Twatter etc never made any money
Twitter made 44 billion dollars. Pretty sure it didn't cost that much to run. Ergo Twitter made money.
That's the big hurdle. That's the big catch. Social media companies are contingent on speculation to drive profits. Facebook isn't worth what it is without speculative buying in the markets. Twitter, same story. That's where reddit is at, they want a payday and to move on. The funny thing is this same reasoning exposes just how awful a businessman Elon Musk is. Twitter is going to literally drive him from the top ten richest in the world list all on its own. Give it time.
The funnier thing is Steve Huffman is such a loser he is looking up to Elon in this past week. The guy wants so desperately to be able to buy popularity like Elon did.
Absolutely, this explanation is on point. A case can be made about the economy of profit or burst, vulture capitalism and all that sbut that's not the point here. There's simply only so much room to grow and social media are a fickle thing by it's very nature.
Economy is going bad, interest rate are up, and all Silicon Valley's company are built upon VC loans and expansion goals. Scale economy is bound to fail, and it's happening now.
This is the answer. There was a lot of free money and now there isn't. Companies gotta cough up profits or go bust.
There is the “enshittification theory” — https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Article specifically mentions TikTok but is relevant for Reddit.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
this. oh god this sums it up so well. any platform that features a “feed” and the company offer to “personalise” it for you - that’s where enshittification will occur.
Capitalism slowly shits up everything. Even the things it helps create.
I mean this in the most general way possible. Not just platforms. Even if reddit was profitable it would still continue. It's just part of the cycle of seeking not just profits but ever rising profits.
It's just more obvious lately on digital platforms because it has been kind of compressed into smaller amounts of time.
That which is free must find a way to cost.
That that makes money must find a way to make more.
And slowly but surely its takes on a fine shine. A glean seen from a distance. But when you get close you realize. "oh, its fucking shit all over it."
I swear every problem in the modern world is like two degrees separated from capitalism.
Hard for it to be otherwise, considering it affects almost everything.
I'd rather focus on publicly traded companies as the main root of evil before dealing with capitalism itself. Private companies tend to not be so destructive - many are fine staying where they are, instead of growing infinitely like cancer, eating everything around them.
Silicon Valley Bank collapsing is putting pressure on tech companies to actually turn a profit, so they're turning to slimy tactics just to survive IPO
I don't think it's from a specific bank, but it is probably related. From being inside the tech world, the general sense is that the "macroeconomic environment" is different, because of the interest rates, so companies are getting pressure from all of their investors and banks to behave differently. At a lot of places, this has led to layoffs, trying to reduce costs, etc. It also manifests as trying to squeeze out more profit at all costs.
I like the "enshitification" term for the actual process that Reddit and others are going through.
I learned a lot from reading that article; thanks a lot! It's something I had an intuitive sense about, but the cynical moves these platforms have been making are much less mysterious now
That's an interesting thought, seems potentially plausible. Is this something you're spitballing yourself, or is this an idea that's been flying around?
I work in tech startups and it's well known that equity is much harder to come by and comes with much more strings since the SVB collapse. The VCs are hurting and SVB was a wakeup call for them to be more active about getting value from their ventures.
was SVB a big investor in these companies or is there some other reason it's collapse is having an effect?
I read that SVB was often the only bank that would do business with tech companies and their execs because of their weird balance sheets
I think also we've become so dependent that they can just do whatever the fuck they want.
I've lived in a bunch of countries and FB messenger is the only way for me to keep in touch. FB can do whatever they want to me because I'm never going to persuade a bunch of people to all move to signal or something.
Reddit has communities that simply don't exist on any other platform.
They have the critical mass.
It's basically the lifecycle of any big corporation.
When the industry is new and there's tons of new users to reach, everyone tries to be the most friendly corporation to build a name for themselves. Positive press and the halo effect helps bring in more people.
Once an industry matures and growth slows, the focus shifts to nickle-and-diming customers to squeeze more profit out of them.
Doesn't matter to me - most subreddits on reddit are not relevant to me.. a time suck and waster mostly. The most interesting subreddits and users I like to follow have all pretty much left for kbin and lemmy instances, and mastodon as well. Thank god Tech people tend to be ahead on the curves instead of flailing around behind them.
Public companies are legally required to always do their best to grow year over year. Eventually these companies get so large they can't realistically get more market share so they have to figure out how to make more money from their users. This leads to them squeezing users for cash in the hunt for short term gains because they've already realistically capped out on how much money they can make per year. It's a dumb system that can't work in the long term.
A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.
This was pulled from Case law on the fiduciary duty of directors to maximize the wealth of corporate shareholders with a few more cases sometimes in favor of the business and others in favor of the shareholder. If anyone else wants to read some more on this. Reading some more based on what searches I find it seems like in reality it complicated. But I'm just a individual contributor all of this is above my knowledge grade.
I do agree though that this model is not realistic long term. Eventually you need to jump into other markets to continue your growth or just squeeze your user base / customers dry.
Just search Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, the case that enshrined this doctrine...
I know the system prevents it but they should just be happy with making a steady amount of income each year
Private companies absolutely can, what sucks is alot of owners are looking for a public exit so they can make a ton of money and step away from the company. Valve is a great example of a private company happy to sit back and rake in cash. They have no plans to go public and can continue slowly improving their product because of it.
Fiduciary responsibility of the company to their shareholders.
Because of capitalism, no seriously these decisions are based on money and growth. But both of these things are relatively finite. You can't keep have exponential growth year after year. Eventually you will plateau but there isnt a mechanism in capitalism to accept that. So companies start forcing monetary gain.
This is the root of it. Reddit is not profitable (like twitter) and between my experience of Reddit over the years and stuff spez said in recent interviews, and the whole blackout situation recently, it's obvious that profit is the main driver for the business. It's funny referring to Reddit as a business, but that is now its primary purpose and descriptor.
I imagine the past few years have had a knock-on effect on social media businesses including Reddit, just as it has for the energy, food etc industries. What are the margins per user for ads served? It's got to be razor thin these days especially when Reddit employs thousands of people doing who knows what. I know they had to hold off their IPO due to the market and recently laid off some staff, they are clearly in bad shape as a business.
Interest rates went up and investors aren’t able to get cheap money. So investment is drying up. A few banks collapsed. Tech companies are trying to make a profitable business. Instead of a zombie company
This is it in a nutshell, without any "late stage capitalism" nonsense.
Reddit, like Twitter and other prominent tech companies, was supported largely by outside investment. The company didn't make a profit, but investors continued to put money into it in hopes that it would eventually net them a return. Low interest rates make investment capital easy to come by and relatively low risk, but higher borrowing rates have dried up a lot of that funding. This forces the company to find other ways of sustaining itself.
I think the free money train in leaving the station and everyone is scrambling to be profitable. But that's just an assumption based on twitch and Reddit right now.
So I guess you're saying this is Powell's fault, huh. 🤔
What did twitch do now?
All these companies have done about as much growing as they can. I remember listening to the radio on my drive to work a year or two ago, and they were talking about how Facebook had done internal research and concluded that they had captured something like 95% of the possible user demographics, meaning that they were unlikely to be able to reach new customers because either you have Facebook and you use it, or you've already heard of it and you don't want it/don't use it anymore.
It was interesting, because Facebook/Meta, like Twitter, Reddit, Discord and Tumblr are all for-profit companies that exist to make money, and yet, the expectation of infinite growth from the market never ceases. There will never be a time when the company has grown "enough". Enter the short-term smash-and-grab strategies. The idea is that they know that their business model has peaked in terms of growth and profit and they now need to extract value from the company before the market catches up to that fact. Social media is inherently unprofitable. Nobody wants to actually pay for it, and they do not produce a product, so eventually once the ad revenue has reached critical mass, the users become the product and are essentially ransomed off. Reddit just tried to pass the buck onto the 3rd party app developers rather than the users, but since the API restrictions affects regular users as much as it does developers, it had the same effect.
Suffice to say, unless you are a member of a social media platform that is a non profit, this is going to keep happening. Even if you land on a site that prides themselves on being excellent stewards of their company and never prioritize profits and growth over stability and customer satisfaction, eventually they will be forced to make a decision - lose a lot of money or lose some customers. The answer, sadly, is all too obvious to them by now.
Do anyone knows how lemmy survive? Are we a product?
Good news.
Computers are much cheaper and text is very low bandwidth. A $100/month server will be able to host a large chunk of us, and donations will likely be able to cover these meager costs.
Without a need to grow exponentially, we can mostly sit happy on single physical server and $100/month (or so) independent instances.
No need to build $million+ data centers like the big boys. We can take advantage of our small size instead.
Lemmys developers mostly fund themselves by a grant of the Dutch NLNet Foundation, they have talked about it in the past.
Yep. Once capitalism completes the growth phase of the latest boom-bust cycle, companies start focusing on increasing revenue. Turns out when the economy starts declining people aren’t willing to spend money on random shit. People didn’t want to spend money on it during the boom, they’re even less likely to do so as their expenses go up and wages stay stagnate. A truly idiotic economic system.
Social media is inherently unprofitable. Nobody wants to actually pay for it, and they do not produce a product
i miss when people were just excited to be able to chat with others online
Oh, I agree. Sometimes I yearn for the halcyon days of "Web 1.0", before the corporations muscled their way in and took what regular people built from the ground up and perverted it into a mechanism of capitalism and corporate greed. It was like the wild west and every session was an adventure.
Maybe I just have rose tinted glasses on, but it seemed to me like the internet was a more pleasant place when things were more decentralized.
It's Enshitification https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification
Enshittification is the answer. I mean, everything costs $, but my opinion? That's worthless!
I think it’s the fallout of allowing private companies to monetize the internet. Way back in the early days of the internet, it was a pretty de-centralized experience. Then we started centralizing things, companies realized there was revenue to be made, and those companies (because they were corporations) valued the money over the people. Capitalism, basically. Only way to fight this is to take the internet back to what it was in about 2006.
If people don’t use Reddit or Twitter or Facebook, those companies have very little value. The value in any social media is generated by the people who use those things. If there’s no people, there’s no value.
Reddit, Twitter, etc, have been running at a loss for ages, burning through vulture capitalist money to build up a solid userbase. Now they need to start turning a reliable profit, which means enshittification of the user experience to make more money per user.
And the worst bit it even happens to non free platforms.
Like Spotify pushing a TikTok style interface, and ramming my home screen full of things I don't care about. Like, you've known me for a decade you should know I'm not into drake and podcasts by conservative men.
I don't understand why Reddit doesn't just buy up one of the 3rd-party apps that have the tech that people say is so badly needed. If the 3rd party apps actually make money then just buy one of them and make money with it.
Sounds like you're trying to blackmail spez there.
Capitalism, babyyyyy!!!
It was capitalism all along...
These companies are overvalued. Currently we're operating in supply side economics where the wealthy have all the money and companies do everything they can to attract those big investment dollars.
But the truth is social media companies (despite being household names) don't really make the revenue that warrants their high valuation by investors. Investors are starting to figure this out, and now they're desperately throwing shit at the wall to try to keep from losing those big supply side dollars.
Social media companies can break even and employ a lot of people while doing so. They could have a good user experience, and it would be all fine. But they wouldn't have sky rocketing share prices doing that. The leadership wouldn't get fat bonuses. So they implement all these crazy schemes so they can make projections about future revenue.
It doesn't matter if these schemes actually will make money or not. They just need to show X number of users multiplied by Y additional revenue per user and that's enough to attract investment. And it doesn't matter if it destroys the company either, the people at the top will get their bonuses.
Plus there is way too much capital in search of investments. Perhaps taxing the owners of this capital and using it for the public good would help.
Related question: why does it feel like hollywood is intent on completely destroying all of our beloved franchises? It's not like the place isn't overflowing with incredibly talented artists, writers, actors, producers, etc. I just don't understand why it's so hard for them to make something that isn't garbage.
This video explains it well: Basically, its greed and the fact that franchises are safer bets. And of course many people still watch them. https://youtu.be/p4GERuvdhYI
Personally I feel like the Mario movie was one of the best movies like that to come out. Sure it's nothing too amazing, but for a video game adaptation it's definitely up there. It does seem like everything has to be remade to be almost deliberately awful though.
Spiderverse is goated and is very different from MCU.
I mean they're not... There's been some amazing films recently.
Not what, destroying our beloved franchises? You're telling me star wars, star trek, and lord of the rings are in a good place right now? The ghostbusters remake, the insultingly bad fourth matrix movie, that attempt to revive the X files a few years back, the list goes on.
I'm not saying NOTHING good is coming out at all, but I AM saying just about everything coming out "related to franchises you used to love" is total crap with rare exception.
It really is that simple
Greed. It's all driven by greed. It's not just social media companies either. My best guess to why it's happening now.. The boomers are aging out and want to take every last bit they can squeeze out before they retire/die.
It's not the boomers, it's the shareholders that would like to see a return on their VC investment, because interest rates are up and they are getting impatient. Reddit never had a sustainable model to begin with, and now it's all coming down. It's not the old people.
I wish it was just the boomers. We have a whole new generation of greedy corporate bootlicks on their way up.
A lot of them go into business with venture capital, a great idea with future potential, but no idea how to monetize any of it.
Eventually the capital is starting to dry up and the owners will want return on their investments - so the company is forced to start turning profit. Enshittification of service at all costs follows. And then perhaps public IPO and the founders cashing out and buying yachts.That's the lifecycle of a tech-startup
The other element to this is the lack of competition. Since companies funded this way don’t need to turn a profit for a long time, they can very easily kill their competitors who do need to be profitable to survive.
So when the time comes for the company to turn a profit, there are few if any competitors left to put pressure on them, giving them the power to do what they want, and leaving consumers with no other options.
And now the interest rates are up and money tight. All non-profitable companies suddenly need profits. Boom.
Our startup making business services and actually selling them... Getting any funding now is such a grind.
I really think VC is to blame for a lot of it. Although not in Twitter's case... And I assume meta is backed by a VC (although they might be).
In the end it comes down to these investors wanting a return on their investment and those in charge of the VC usually go one of two route:
- inject ads in as many places as possible
- track as much of the users data and sell it
It's odd that all of this is happening at once, but if I had to bet on a cause it is complacency.
The internet used to be fast in trading the hands of "power". Social medias/major forums would fall just as quickly as they rose. This began to change in 2008-2010 when we sort of developed the Status Quo of websites we see nowadays.
I think these corporations forgot that social medias are not indefinite, and assumed that they could safely get away with much more now than they actually can.
Glad to see new platforms such as Lemmy rising to the task. Change the status quo.
Because you are the product, not the client. You are only catered to enough so that you may be coralled. You are basically cattle to these corporations.
As for why this is happening now:
- The economy is in a downswing right now so we are going to see cost cutting and belt tightening.
- Entrenched proprietary social media platforms are basically monopolies. You cannot choose to use an alternative because these are walled gardens and leaving means losing your ability to communicate with large groups of people. The larger and more entrenched these big firms get, coupled with lack of regulation means they can do whatever the fuck they want. You have no power and no choice (except for the Fediverse, a one-time pain to migrate to).
They wish it's this easy to keep people. If businesses knew how to monopolize the market forever, they wouldn't have been so desperate to set up these walls.
I dropped cable for Netflix years ago with a shrug, and as Netflix and all the streaming services are turning into cable I dropped them too and will wait for the next thing. If talking to some large group of faceless masses becomes annoying and spam filled, I'll keep my resources for other things I can turn my attention to.
It's weird to me to see these artificial structures treated as though they're some real solid thing with no alternatives. That's literally these companies' PR to make us believe it
Actually I once applied for a job at Reddit, there were like 5 or 6 interviews spread over 2 days basically. And almost everyone I talked to did something related to Ads. (The position I was considered for would have been about some service to deal with problematic posts, hate etc.) So it's just a huge ad machine.
This reminds me also about this Facebook documentary from 2 years ago, how ML algorithms implicitly shape how we interact. Maybe such efforts were better put into good moderation (oof), and a well-working UI...
That said, I wouldn't mind paying a little and already even did so to give awards and also for an App. (Can't be that much they earn with ads anyway?) I hope Lemmy is there to stay though, I'd be happy to donate/contribute every once in a while.
Everything in the Fediverse is self-hosted on somebody's dime, if not yours, with the cool part being that you can host yourself and at least have some control for your money and hassle.
Fediverse users seem to tend toward the over-40 set, with lots of people who can eat a $25 monthly hosting fee for their own instance if it matters to them. I think we're reaching the point as an internet community where a lot more people are saying fine, I'll pay for the social media thing if I have to, goddamn, fuckit can't take it with you. All we have to show for "free" social media is communities that turn sour again and again, and a sort of perpetual fleeing of the storm from one site to the next.
Lemmy is very lightweight and you can run it on $5/mo or even free tier VPS if you're the only user for the instance. I myself run my lemmy instance on a low power pc in my closet and route the traffics via a $3 vps (essentially rented for its static ip address).
This is the consequence of the fed raising interest rates and companies finding it much harder to find money to pay salaries and operating costs. So companies have to actually seek profit or go bust and CEOs and board of directors are getting desperate and showing how little they understand what makes their products great.
What you really mean is that this is the consequences of the Fed's pulling back on the corporate welfare program of qualitative easing.
We've been printing free money for the wealth holding class since they fucked up our economy gambling on poor people not being able to afford housing.
They got used to the welfare and instead of getting their houses in order, they started gambling with our future tax dollars like they were guaranteed forever. That's why Trump was such a bitch about politicizing the fed and blaming interest rates. He, and everyone else, knew our economy was getting artificially propped up and wanted to kick the can down the road four more years.
Now the wealth class is going to take out all their angst out at the American people to see if they can cause the government to flinch first.
The real problem is that the wealth class doesn't give a shit if they're making money of Americans or not. They'd happily follow the economies around the world. The government doesn't have that option.
Everyday Americans, and to a lesser extent, the world, suffer while Mommy government tries to get corporate daddy's wild free money addiction under control.
Dad is going to either go for a pack of smokes and some milk in China, or maybe Russia a few years ago, or beat the kids until mommy lets him drink again.
Blaming interest rates plays a lot better than telling the kids that daddy doesn't have a job and needs to go to rehab because he doesn't know how to make money and just gets it from Mom and the kids college fund/next months rent.
The tech bubble is over (kinda, they're trying to spin it back up with AI) and so is the free money party. Rates are rising, and investors aren't content to throw money at companies that still don't know how they're going to make any money. To make money, they've got to squeeze it out of somebody: either users or advertisers.
In Twitter's case, they squeezed it out of a vain billionaire who they convinced to buy the company. The shareholders got their money, and now making a profit is somebody else's problem. Reddit could've similarly tried to court a buyer, but there's no guarantee they would have found one (maybe Meta?). Instead they're trying to a gin up some revenue either out of third party apps or by pushing third party app users onto the main app so they can advertise to them. I haven't been following Discord and Meta's stuff, but the reasoning is probably similar.
The behavior of corporates and - especially - VC-backed ones was always out there (the dot-com bubble of 2000 was in a context of relatively high interest rate), but Ben Bernanke dumped gasoline on it through quantitative easing, as you rightly pointed out. By trying to save banks and a sluggish economy, the Fed enabled every growing distortions in corporate behavior since 2008. No wonder the 99% are pissed off. These attempts to "save the economy" resulted in ever-increasing exploitation of workers. I still think that it would have been better for the Fed to let a wave of bank bankruptcies sweep the US so that investors and management would be kept on their toes against bad corporate behavior.
I literally just came across an article that talks about why and how it happens https://open.substack.com/pub/catvalente/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
That was a great read. Thanks for posting something that isn't the same Doctorow article I've seen a hundred times. I love that description of the purpose of conservatism:
To clone their particular set of neuroses and fears and revulsions and nostalgias and convictions and traumas so that they never have to experience anything but themselves, copied and pasted unto the end of time.
I highly recommend everyone read this article. It summed up the way I think we all feel very eloquently. Thank you for linking it
Absolutely beautiful writing in that post. As someone who’s been on forums since the mid-90s it hit home pretty hard.
Thank you sharing. It was a rally nice read.
Very nice read. Thanks for the recommendation.
Best thing I've read in awhile, thanks for sharing that with us.
Incredible article. Thank you for sharing!
Happy to see that one getting traffic here, she's great. And infuriating.
Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.
Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.
Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop talking to each other and start hurting each other.
Holy shit, that article was profound. Thank you for sharing.
a lot of people have already basically made this point, but ad revenue isn't really good enough to make massive massive tech platforms profitable, and there's only so much VC money they can all burn. we saw the first stage a few months ago when basically every major tech company had massive layoffs, now all these companies are trying to become profitable all at once
Because capitalism, that's why.
This is the correct answer. Even the most hardcore capitalists have to realize that endless year-over-year growth is impossible. The invisible hand will eventually correct the market -- we may be seeing the start of that now, and it's going to affect the biggest first.
Even the most hardcore capitalists have to realize that endless year-over-year growth is impossible.
The fact that they continue this cycle of "extract every last drop of money and then move on to the next big thing" shows they really don't. They're more than happy to wreck everything as long as they have enough cocaine to hold them over.
I don't think there was ever any illusion that reddit or Twitter were operating as charitable organizations, or even as non-profits.
Sure, and nobody would blame them if they simply tried to create a sustainable business with positive cashflow. The type of capitalism that is referenced here is the one where you squeeze every last penny out of the platform and would even sell your users trust, which your long term profit relies upon, if it means higher numbers in your quarterly report.
Because nobody can make a platform and just leave it alone, it always has to grow and make profit. All of the apps we use to communicate should be a public service but that's totally utopic.
Capital only looks out for itself. Online communities are a product to be exploited in the eyes of investors. The purse strings are getting tighter with rising interest rates, and investments that relied on potential are suddenly less exciting when the price to service goes up. Profit is king at the end of the day. It sucks, but that's capitalism.
But the good news is, tech is a highly disruptable industry. Barrier to entry is accessible for regular people.
And that's why we're here.
Reddit doesn't die because we left. They die in a few years when the Fediverse just works better than Reddit. And we fund that.
Speaking of, how do I kick in a few bucks to help out various Lemmy servers? Anyone know?
Yep. The rising interest rates is an enormous part of it, and it's not really getting discussed that much. Basically, the 2010s were a period of historically extreme low interest rates. When you can borrow for cheap as you could during the 2010s, you could easily fund growth via borrowed capital. Money was flowing everywhere. Tech companies in particular could get funding from places like Silicon Valley Bank, so profitability was a secondary concern, with growth as the primary concern. No need to be profitable if you can fund your day-to-day operations with cheaply borrowed money.
In the current environment, things are very different. Cost of capital is much higher now, so borrowing to fund the day-to-day isn't as feasible anymore. Those rising interest rates ultimately led to Silicon Valley Bank's collapse in March: They held a lot of long term US Treasuries on their balance sheet, so they were forced to show huge unrealized losses with rising interest rates because of mark-to-market accounting. That collapse cut off a huge source of funding for Reddit and other tech companies.
The result is predictable: Reddit needs to turn to profitability, and they have to do it fast. It absolutely sucks for long time users, but they no longer have access to the same funding source that kept the place afloat in the 2010s.
Reddit isn't unique in this. Other tech companies show a similar pivot to profitability after funding growth with cheap money in the low interest rate environment of the 2010s. Uber is a good example: Borrow money for cheap to fund operations at a loss for a few years, and all of a sudden, you've gained huge market share because you've undercut the cost that taxis charge. After that money dries up though, you have to raise costs to pivot to profitability. Today, Ubers are often more expensive than the Yellow Cab you may hail from the street, but people are so used to using Uber that they don't compare prices anymore.
I agree. I think interest rates are driving more of this than people realize. The Fed is still planning two more rate hikes before the end of the year to try and get inflation under control.
Silicon Valley Bank was also a victim of a changing environment. Runs on a bank used to be something that could take days. Now they can happen in hours with panic spreading via social media and withdrawals happening from an app. It didn't help that they were a niche bank serving a niche customer base.
Higher interest rates, less vc money, have to actually start being profitable
VC money drying up means enshittification machine slamming the gas
No doubt. Instead of slowly making it shittier bit by bit so that we didn't noticed, they had to go mask off an remind us that we are the product.
Everyone’s a genius in a bull market with a near zero interest rate.
Honestly I think it’s this. All these tech companies finally being pressed to show ROI now that the risk-free rate of return is much higher.
As a phenomenon you'll see a lot of people call it "enshittification." The term seems to originate with Cory Doctorow who writes, "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."
The whole article on his blog is worth a read here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys. His Mastodon handle is @pluralistic if you'd like to follow his work there (woohoo federation!).
woohoo federation!
bro wtf we are actually living in the future, i just followed the equivalent of someone's twitter from the equivalent of my reddit account
Funny how this concept scares some people. It's pretty neat.
Good article too. I've just used enshittification to describe an HP printer.
im still getting used to this but i can both have twitter AND reddit?? amazing
The main sticking point is profitability. Not many platforms have managed to create a business model that's sustainably profitable. Reddit certainly hasn't. Now they're basically looking for a way to cash out so they're prioritising short term profitability over everything.
Honestly if reddit had come, cap in hand, and says "Hey what can we do to be awesome so you'll buy premium"
And then listened to our advice? I'd have bought premium to help em out.
Instead, they are acting genuinely insane. Like back when my brother was on cocaine and Adderall and would try to hit me up for money.
Reddit can die.
The issue is the mindset of profitability.
For a platform like reddit, the mindset for sustainability must be based on efficiency and utility, not profitability.
These platforms are called platforms rather than websites or simply "companies" for a reason. They act like a public utility rather than a for profit service of convenience. Public utilities also suck ass when operated as for profit businesses.
They're just trying to survive until they IPO. Then they can cash out and who gives a fuck about reddit after that.
@Xeelee @pluralistic @VoidCrow @wrath-sedan They all have business models that are sustainable. They might not all have models that promise and deliver growth every year from now until the heat death of the universe, but those are choices they made. Craigslist has been sustainable for over 25 years now and could stay sustainable forever. But it might not grow to billions of dollars in revenue because of decisions that @craignewmark made.
As an ex-admin of a Facebook anime shitposting page, I firsthand experienced it many times. The rules changed constantly, the reach died suddenly, and we were supposed to pay for ads.
This was all on top of struggle with economic and family issues, differences with the other admins, and seeing my community more and more embracing the far-right, the very thing that destroyed both my country and my dreams.
Maybe they weren't far-right and really just not as far left as you. More context on this is needed because it's become a real problem of people labeling everyone that criticizes progressive thinking or policy as "far-right" these days. It's why I can't stand Reddit anymore. Site does not encourage diversity of opinion and debate.
Reductivist, boring, and accurate. I’m impressed
I think the concept of a trust thermocline is important here: https://freethepeople.org/the-trust-thermocline-twitter-and-the-feds/
Was coming here to post same quote
Yes! Follow Cory Doctorow, he explains all of this so well.
I reckon there are two factors at work here, the profit imperative and enshitification. The profit imperative relates to how corporations have to make exponential profits every single year (and as we all should know you can't have exponential growth in a finite system.)
And enshitification is a result of the profit imperative, with all the corporations trying vainly to keep the profits rolling in they have to cut quality, be it through replacing ingrediants with inferior ones or pumping in the sugar so it's harder to taste the wood chips, killing third party alternatives for viewing your site to keep all the ad revenue to yourself, putting out unfinished products and charging top dollar while treating your users as unpaid testers.
Or any other of the million shitty practices corporations can think up to keep the economic perpetual motion going, it's all going the same way in the end though because you can't get blood from a stone and as a great man once said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
Nobody said that companies have to make exponential profits, that's why non social media companies are doing ok.
The reason social media companies are failing is because investors are tired of throwing cash away and need them to turn a profit
It's a general trend of vulture capitalism, or more accurately locust capitalism, over the last several years.
Investors want extreme ROI(Return on Investement, aka their money back and some extra), so they'll cut every single corner and monetize everything, and even run companies into the ground to make it happen faster. And then just move on to another company and to the same thing, with absolutely zero interest in long term income, customer retention, etc.
Because easy money from a decade of low interest rates is disappearing.
This. The VC money started to dry up / investors are demanding returns, not just growth.
Because most services we are using aren't sustainable. They all bleed money.
That's by design, isn't it? Dominate the market while operating at a loss then monetize once you have attained monopoly. Like Uber's strategy. This is an awful way of conducting a business IMHO, it falsifies the economy. I honestly believe they should put severe regulations on this.
Ish.
It is a strategy that works when interest rates are 0%, and the 2008 recession was so bad that the IS Fed kept interest rates low until 2021.
Redo the math at 5% interest rates today and 13 years of $1 Billion investment needs to make $1.8 billion just to break even. Money losing strategies are nerfed in this new meta.
its silicon valley baby ! you haven't needed a profitable, sustainable model for decades. you need a big mouth, a slide deck and the phone numbers of a few suckers with lots of money.
That's kind of core to most business models though, even the ones we usually respect. Take video game consoles; a lot of the hardware is sold at a bit of a loss, especially considering the R&D going into them over a long period of time. Then, they make that money back via third party game sales when their playerbase is eventually high.
Operating for extended periods at a loss is no longer really an option though. Zero interest rates made it not a big deal to be unprofitable. Companies could afford to operate in the red by taking on debt. Now that taking on debt means large interest payments, having a down quarter or year could be a death spiral of ever increasing interest payments that make it harder and harder to become profitable.
Basically, the business models that work with zero interest rates do not work when interest rates are constantly rising.
Over-centralisation.
This kind of slow degredation of services is quite normal, however, this time around the wider use of these degrading platforms is hitting harder. Even 5 years ago, most communities had an IRC rather than a discord, and most ran a forum, or a community forum, with other info being on a wiki.
These days a lot of content that used to sit on a forum now sits on twitter, or on reddit. Discord is the new IRC, and so on. These separate services were a lot less convenient, but more resilient.
Odds are, we might see similar smaller communities pop up again as things get worse in the larger ones. Folks are pinched for cash at the moment, and so free services like neocities might see a boom as fandoms abandon larger sites (again).
Many tech companies were overvalued for a long time. Everyone was happy to invest and pump money into those companies because "those platforms are going to be the future and I want to be part of it when they are starting to make a ton of money". It didn't matter that many of those companies were not profitable because they always promised to make up for that in the future.
This classic idea is starting to break down a bit. Many Tech companies have become profitable in the meantime, but many of them also have various troubles like moderation.
So why are so many media companies making "shitty decisions"? Well, because from a business perspective, they aren't necessarily "shitty decisions", they are kinda smart decisions. Reddit makes money by gathering data and by showing ads. They cannot show ads on apps they don't control. So they have to handle a lot of traffic for which they get nothing back. That's why they are trying to push as many people to use their app as possible. They know that the hardcore oldschool community won't like that, but they are probably pretty sure that enough will switch to the app to make it worthwhile for them.
Meta is fighting to stay relevant as well. Facebook was the foundation of social media for a long time, but in the digital space, this can change very quickly, so they constantly have to try new things.
And if we look at games like the Sims, the game who really escalated the whole DLC thing, it's a similar story. From a consumer perspective, what they are doing is bad. From a business perspective, it's smart. And that's what it ultimately comes down to.
Companies' main goal isn't to satisfy their customers, it's making money. If fucking over customers makes them more money, they do it in a heartbeat.
They've also made a lot of shitty decisions. Reddit decided to invest in NFTs when they had cheap money. That's been about as successful as a lead balloon. That also burned a bunch of user good will in the process. Meta went all in on VR and the Metaverse. They've admitted that's been a bust. This seems more like an A and B with A being cheap money evaporating and B being bad decisions.
I'm reluctant to call the latest Reddit thing enshittification, but it really seems like they're between steps 2 and 3.
On a slightly different note, does any think enshittification will be the word of the year?
I certainly think it will be, enshittification has become a problem that's plaguing so many platforms and companies, and more and more people are becoming aware of it.
They’ve also made a lot of shitty decisions.
That's the thing with tech companies. They are fast to rise, but also fast to fall, so they are always on the lookout for the next big thing. Blockchain tech was supposed to be the next big thing. Crypto currency was at the time already kinda the big thing in the tech industry's eyes. And of course when that happens, everyone wants to be early bird for the next big thing and caution is pushed to the side.
VR and AR are the same. It was and still is supposed to be the next big thing. Another one would be language models and "A.I.". But because all those "new things" tend to be massively over hyped by people who often don't really understand it and just have dollar signs in their eyes, they inevitably support the wrong thing every once in a while.
Thats just living in late stage capitalism. Everything you have now will be rented to you by a corporation in a couple of years.
They are doing everything in their power to make this the worst timeline.
it's what happens when you treat people like walking dollar signs.
Yeah I saw recently cars now have subscriptions for certain features.
Even though you brought the car and all the software and hardware is in it. They just turn it off if you don't pay.
SaaS made people realise it was a much better model then simply selling software for a one time fee.
It all happening in a span of months I think is sheer dumb luck from an entertainment point of view, but deep down the cause seems to me to be the expectation of continuous growth of profits on the part of a product free business model.
It's the lifecycle of social media sites. I knew when I left Digg 13 years ago Reddit would inevitably follow the same fate at some point. The problem we have now is that there are no alternatives of similar size nor established communities to replace the sites that are falling apart. Digg and Reddit were equal and provided an instant replacement of similar size for the exodus. Same with MySpace and Facebook. Now, the users of the big sites don't really have that haven to jump to and people don't want to spend the time building a new community. There is no Twitter alternative. Mastodon just doesn't cut it right now and the fact that actual companies use Twitter as an official mode of communication makes it harder to leave. Reddit is the same way. Every controversy draws users to alternatives, but nothing can match it's size.
My local gov. still puts out emergency alerts via Twitter before official emergency alerts are sent out.
Same here. I'm a government worker and I get liberal leave notifications from their Twitter account first.
Cory Doctorow has some very interesting blogposts on the topic. He call it enshittification. It's more or less the business model of plattform Capitalism.
Yes. Doctorow also talked a lot about platform economics in this recent book-tour interview.
The lie that eternal growth is possible has companies making really stupid moves to increase short term gains at the cost of long term stability.
I feel it's like a sellout on stock exchange: once the first company started to heavily monetize, the others felt like they needed to cash out now, before "stock values drop" i.e. the internet users find different models of social media that make the corporation owned ones obsolete. Thank you lemmy! :)
they are choosing money over people because machines can't say no
Are they, though? Twitter is going a really odd way around making money if that's their goal. To me, I see it as a mix of a few things: the post 2016/cambridge analytica wave of moderation and institutionalization of safety & responsibility, stagnation, meta's withdrawal from Facebook as a platform altogether, higher interest rates, and a rising wave of political reaction. Obviously Reddit doesn't necessarily hit on all of those, but it's not unaffected, either.
They are all just cashing out because they thought they are at the point where the communities will literally put up with anything, and not understanding that the community is their most precious resource.
only now? to me most social media platforms were shitty to begin with, or had become shitty long before.
I feel this is a matter of perspective. The average Joe whose concept of "social media" is Facebook probably has never noticed anything getting any worse. The mainstream users who just want to see funny pics and couldn't care less about 3rd party clients might actually be quicker to side with Reddit than with the protesters.
Twitter has never been attractive to me. Even back when its API was public (ancient history). Not only is their feed noisy and of poor quality, constantly swayed by "trending" stuff I don't care about, it also has always had you depend on a privative and closed source walled guarden. Things were much more open before twitter, when people used blogs to post their stuff instead.
Reddit might have been a bit more open once.. but it stopped being so long ago, this is not a change in behavior. Maybe this is an unpopular thing to say, but I'm actually glad this is happening. I think the API fiasco might be an overall good thing if it helps people get away from Reddit, and if so I hope Reddit does not backtrack.
@VoidCrow Everywhere you look you see overpaid executives and CEO’s who think they are actually brilliant enough to deserve their astronomical wages/compensation, and thus think they can do no wrong. Their ideas are always brilliant, and when the shit hits the fan, they blame their staff for a bad implementation and fire them first.
It's because of Cambridge Analytica. They realized they could blast susceptible morons with hyper targeted political content and warp users minds into being foot soldiers for a billionaire class that doesn't give a fuck about them.
I honestly feel like - and this is just my thought, no data to back it up - all the major companies or sites felt like they were the only ones around, there was nothing to replace them, so they could make whatever decisions they wanted to make.
Like when we all left Digg for Reddit - Reddit was already a thing so it was a relatively "painless" switch. With this one it's like... Musk took over twitter and I sort of heard about the fediverse but I'm personally waiting for Hive to get a desktop - but once Reddit started doing it's thing it was like "yeah I really need to move now" and kbin had a much better landing page than any of the other fediverse things I'd stumbled upon which really helped with the onboarding... And it's been nice watching it grow.
But yeah previous to this it was like...there was nothing else available so why did they have to care about what they did if we were "stuck" there with the decisions they were making anyway.
lol...and yet here I am on kbin so - yeah looks like that plan (assuming it's at all correct) didn't pan out entirely like they were hoping.
Careful with Hive. It is perfectly positioned to suffer the exact same fate as Twitter if it is allowed to grow. Then we have learned nothing and it all just repeats. Never mind that the app is absolutely atrocious both from a data security standpoint and an accessibility standpoint.
The VC gravy train is slowing down, so everyone's scrabbling around trying to find profit. Then running into issues because their business is built upon a foundation of unprofitable decisions made to drive quick growth.
VCs plain and simple. The entire system they operate within is almost perfectly at odds with how a traditional ‘real’ business would operate.
The net result is always some kind of cash grab, and whether the business survives is virtually irrelevant.
Private equity & VCs are IMO recklessly short term-ist with the ‘line goes up’ approach, with as ever, users & consumers & staff picking up the tab in one way or another.
My theory? It's Musk.
He's going around saying he only lost bots and scammers, that he's made Twitter profitable, and that advertisers are back and happier than ever
He isn't showing his numbers and there's no way his claims are true, but he's saying what they all want to hear. "Don't worry guys, you can squeeze your users for cash hard as you want, and they might grumble about it but they'll soon come crawling back"
There's also increased pressure to become profitable ASAP, much of it is likely due to the economy, but Musk lying through his teeth is probably getting to the other billionaires. It's worth mentioning, if you're a billionaire the only reason to still care about money is for bragging rights
Companies in general are just designed to make more profit, that‘s it. All their decisions make sense from a business perspective, they are just shitty for us from a human perspective. This is why we need decentralised platforms which aren‘t inherently profit seeking.
Funny also how every time someone criticises capitalism someone shows up attributing all technological advances to capitalism. No. It‘s the people, under any economic system there will be inventions, it is small minded to think people only innovate or work out of greed, if that were so the entire open source just wouldn‘t exist and volunteering wouldn‘t exist.
I think it's more the exponential growth factor that tops sustainability. Short term gains over long term stability. Cooking books for Q1 profits by firing staff. It's not inherently capitalism, it's more the current model of profits over everything else. I'm not sure if the genie can be put back into the bottle though so maybe this is just semantics.
This wouldn't happen if companies weren't able to grow so fucking huge. Reddit for a long time didn't have real direct competition, I'm not sure it has even now. Same goes for Amazon vs mom and pop shops, at the end of the day it's at the hands of the consumers if regulators aren't going to regulate.
That current model IS capitalism, the big companies are big precisely because they follow these profit > sustainability tactics, if they didn‘t follow these tactics they would stay small and potentially get gobbled up by the bigger companies. The company I work at is one of the biggest for it’s market worldwide and the tactic is basically buying up the competitors. So it‘s part of their regular business to buy out some cute small family business and enshittify it (ty lemmy for teaching me this word) by integrating it into their "business processes". Which means often layoffs and hiring freezes and as they succinctly put it "making more product with less labor" (also raising prices to get more profit for less product).
I mean, I say all this knowing it‘s as pointless to do as trying to suck up a tornado with a vacuum cleaner, even if I managed to find the right words to convince you and some other readers of what I see here, we‘re still likely to perpetuate the system out of a lack of feasible alternatives until such a point where the planet can‘t bear it anymore.
Sorry, now I went completely off into my usual doom mindset. It‘s all good, maybe you are the correct one and some friendly people will overcome the greed and consolidation processes I see as inherent to the system and save us all by only allowing small companies or something.
The inevitable collapse of a deeply flawed economic system working exactly as intended.
Greed.
Higher interest rates means they have more pressure to start being profitable is my guess.
The explanation is fairly straightforward. Interest rates are rising and cash is hard to come by these days. Many of consumer friendly features we have been enjoying have been paid for debt. Now that inflation is high and the fed is force to crank up interest many companies have to become truly profitable and so they start cashing in the user base that they have build over the last decade.
It's corporate greed. They're just trying to get (more) money out of their users pockets. They're starting not to design their products in a way that the most people use it, but in a way that they get the most money, time and useful, valuable data from their users. That's less people but more profit.
Netflix is showing similar behaviour at the moment.
It' simple: Greed is the reason.
A lot of technological flux going on right now, what with an entire generation partially trained to do WFH and job mobility that brings, the retirement of the tech-phobic boomers, the extremely tight labor market, Russian money going to "more important endevors" (which might also be why bit coin is down), and AI threatening to automate 80% of the workforce. Tech company owners are frightened and making random dumb or scared decisions because of it.
That is the system we live in. Grow or die. I also curse u/spez. But I also think, if I were at his place (build a platform, sold it and now has to run it depending on investors): could I be better? Probably not tbh.
Saying it's just greed is not enough. You just cannot exists in this system without being greedy, you'll decline and fade away (either as a CEO or as a platform).
(If I would want to continue to run the platform, I'd probably just take the money and do something else.)
It's public trading, it's financial slavery, you're forced to grow your profits and cut costs more year after year and that's totally unsustainable in the long run, they should change the parameters used to value companies but that's not going to happen in the world we live in.
I hate what's happening on reddit as much as everyone else but it's very understandable from a business point of view, they're going public later this year, their only purpose right now is to please investors, everything else doesn't matter.
Anyone in spez's shoes would indeed do the same tho most probably in a smarter way (I don't think he's very smart, judging by what he did and said so far).
This is pretty typical for all big companies that take off there is a tipping point when it goes from agile and nimble start up to behemoth company that needs to pay dividends, only they have captured all the market share they can capture and may in fact losing people to other newer services. They're panicking and trying to make things look profitable before it all collapses like Yahoo and they can't sell it. Just my take on it all anyway.
I think the main problem with these companies and the startup/tech bro culture (mostly in the US) is that they are growing for the sake of just growth itself, because they want to get their own. The original idea is to grow as big as they can, IPO, then sell it off. They weren't designing things to be profitable from the start. So eventually they all reach a stage where they are hemorrhaging money too much, and that is where all the enshittification happens (investors come in, they try to make it a real business now, but it wasn't really feasible to be a business to begin with).
Well said. I run a branding and marketing biz and had a customer talking about seeing how they could implement this strategy. I said it nicely, but explained it would ruin everything they’ve worked so hard to build. Go buy some lotto tickets instead and keep your hard work in tact.
I don't know honestly, greed probably. But it's such a shame. It seems like the internet as a whole is heading in a horrible direction, and not enough people care about it for there to be something done about it.
The climate is heading in a horrible direction, and not enough people care. Politics are heading in a horrible direction, and you know what? Not enough people care!
Sorry, the last 4 years has made me very cynical. And I'm in a particularly blue mood today.
dude i feel that. its just lame and hard to grip with
its like i wish almost that i didnt care
But here we are dipping our toes in the fediverse, a bit early for the non tech savvy people but from my point of view we are currently proving that monolithic corps are no longer needed. They are convenient, but not alfa-omega.
Turns out infinite growth without covering your costs doesn't work out
Turns out infinite growth ... doesn't work out
One thing is chain reaction, another is that these media mostly came to existence in the same period of time. So they were aging synchronously.
This was predictable and predicted many times. Just like a building constructed with violations is not going to collapse immediately after it's finished, these things were not going to break (in various ways) immediately after being launched.
They are breaking now. Oopsie.
I hope XMPP makes a triumphant comeback. It's not dead yet.
Because they are all beholden to shareholders, not users (or prepping for IPO)
The venture capitalists that have funded these programs at a loss for years have decided they want to see a return.
Yep. Interest rates are up, the era of cheap money is over, for now at least. Places that were coasting along are suddenly finding themselves in a need to actually make some money.
its the eshitification of the internet....it's inevitable
Honestly? I don't care. I don't use corporate "social" media and I'm very happy with the Fediverse. If you do something for profit, profit will always come first. Even before I became a Fedizen, I knew public discourse cannot reliably be provided by greedy corporations. I'm just surprised it didn't happen earlier and that the people are surprised about what's happening now.
Capitalism. Companies go public (or already were public) and then they can no longer be happy with what they had and need to acheive infinite profit growth. That's partially why companies like Valve, that are still luckily entirely private, can make seemingly consumer-focused decisions and not just chase infinite profits. That's how they've been able to invest so heavily in Linux with such little short term gains. Valve still makes shitty decisions sometimes but it would be 10x worse if they decided to go public.
I hate to break it to you, bud, but Valve is not consumer focused and are definitely focused on maximising profits.
Sure Valve might be more interested on maintaining good relations with customers, but that is just because they want to keep you around so you can make them more money in the long term. Maybe this in itself is worth praising, but at the end of the dat Valve is just another corporation who want your money and I really wouldn't go out of my way to defend or get emotionally attached to them.
And Valve want to invest in Linux because they are scared that Windows is going to do something to force them out of the PC space. Linux provides a fallback to this. Also, Linux allows them to undercut any potential Windows competition in the handheld gaming space as they can save on a Windows license. Eventually Valve hopes to corner the emerging market here by doing this. Linux support is very much a business and not altruistic move on Valve's behalf.
My point isn't that valve is our friend (they're not), my point is that they're more easily able to make decisions that aren't purely driven by short term gains. Decisions like that are usually better for the consumer. They're still a company and companies exist to make money, but they have a lot more freedom to choose the ways in which they go about that.
The Linux investment, yes was made out of a fear of windows, but is also not something most other companies would be able to do with how long term it is. It's not out of altruism but it's a lot more beneficial for consumers then the short term focused investors that drive most other companies.
We see that Twitter was been purposely twisted to be a comfortable space for neo-Nazis. We know spez's politics. It doesn't take much of a leap to conclude that he's killing off the moderator class to make Reddit more friendly for the neo-Nazis. Most likely though that's just a convenient side-effect of unbridled greed, though.
I mean the guy is literally a millionaire prepper who wants to own slaves in the apocalypse and personally reopened gamergate subs back in the day.
Neo-nazies? What peeps are you following?
$
Twitter is sui generis because they were acquired impulsively by a maniac. But for the others, I think it’s just that interest rates were super low for a long time and now they’ve gone back up to a more historically normal level.
Because a user base has yet to demonstrate that there will be significant consequences for such actions. Maybe there will be, but they will be less-tangible long-term consequences that can’t easily be attributed to these actions.
Over the years there's been a few major sites destroyed by shitty decisions. It's just been awhile since the last mass exodus. Really I think Twitter is well on it's way out but we don't hear about it much because nothing has obviously jumped out as a clear alternative that everyone will be happy to jump to. Reddit is just in the beginning of it's downward spiral and as much as I'm enjoying figuring out this fediverse thing It's not trivial and I'm not your average user so I don't see it exploding overnight.
It's nothing new. It's becoming more spectacular as the people doing it are richer and richer. Geocities sold to Yahoo, who promptly murdered it. LiveJournal sold itself to a Russian banker, which caused most non-Russian users to abandon it. Tom sold MySpace to Rupert Murdoch for like 500 million and bowed out, and MySpace was driven into the ground. The buyers are getting bigger an bigger but the results of trying to squelch users has always been the same - the platform is abandoned.
Running out of VC dollars, now they gotta actually make a profit.
There are lots of reasons. One of them I've seen is that monetizing a thing like a website or online community without bleeding it to death is hard and presents unique challenges. But the CEOs of the world are trying to do it with the same skillset they used to become regular CEOs. It is the issue behind a great deal of problems... our society winnows down business leaders to one type of person for efficiencies sake, but then that type of person is rarely capable of non-exploitative or long term thinking.
Digital Sharecropping:
"What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy."
What were the bad decisions discord is making? Im out of the loop
Username system, locking everything under the sun with Nitro (the most expensive one) and some other crap. Check out NoTextToSpeech on youtube, it's where I get my news about discord.
Username change was a recent update that have upset users.
Low effort guess, VC's cashing out before society collapses.
Centralization, money, power, money, stocks, money. These are just a few reasons. Did I mention money? Oh, and also, money. They're sucking up to investors, and finding ways to get through the up-coming(or on-going) recession without major losses. The only losses are ours.
I think it has something to do with fear of an upcoming recession, platforms need to prove to their shareholders that they can still maintain profitability even in the face of economic downturn. Keep in mind the US hasn't experienced a real recession since the tech boom, which may explain why all this money grubbing is so severe and sudden.
Because user freedom and experience is diametrically opposed to corporate control and ad driven profit seeking.
These companies have continued to function on round after round of VC fundraising, diversifying their corporate holdings to the point that theyre basically wall street funds, and providing little innovation past initial product launch. When the stock market takes a downturn they become insolvent and they have to squeeze profit which means squeezing users. They have no choice, most of these business models weren't viable to begin with.
A lot of these companies have never been profitable and have been running on VC money on speculation alone until they reach critical mass and can turn on the monetization streams.
because investors started wanting them to make money
Because they all saw that Elon repeatedly shat all over Twitter and users praised him for it instead of running away. Now all of them are firing half their staff and putting all pretense of caring overboard.
I feel as though the user base is a large part of the problem. I might be wrong but the accessibility of social media that have apps is a lot easier for the younger population who these days are flooding social media. I don't think a lot of people use forums or currently Testflight apps such as Memmy (for Lemmy). The iPhone is the phone for influencers and if Lemmy officially releases an iPhone app the same problems may happen.
Uh somethings going on with discord? i know it's alls abouts dat ai. but other then that? oh well I did need to update my userhandle the other day. but then it was a while since I logged in.
it was the userhandle thing. they got rid of the numbers from names, now all usernames have to be unique. for people who had 3, 4, and 5 letter usernames, it has become the discord version of highlander, with people harassing, threatening, and bribing other people over usernames they all used to share
What are the dumb updates discord is doing? I haven't noticed anything different, except for the username change that doesn't have a gamertag anymore.
Wouldn't count it as falling apart but they keep trying to push Turbo and their new Super Emojis. I get they're just trying to make money but it's like you can't look at Discord without it being pushed in your face.
There is also that weird hidden alternate layout that is an ungodly eyesore (I think it can be accessed either in the settings or if you double click the sparkle emoji for some reason?) Admittedly I'm not as familiar with Discord's issues, mainly heard others talking about it
New layout? I've seen no hint of that and I use discord all the time
A lot to do with product quality in general. Overtime they look at ways to cut costs and maximise profits.
It always reminds me of the Aero Mint chocolate, going from something very tasty to greasy and definitely not as good as it used to be. A lot of products have gone that way. They have attempted many times to change the recipe of coke with some success here and there. In a way to bring the cost of manufacturing down. I don't see social media as something any different.
Twitter has lost a majority of its work force for good and bad reasons. As well as lost a lot of features that cost them money to make it profitable.
I really do see it happening post 2008 recession in a lot of countries. Companies in general are also getting more involved in digital media the kind of people who don't care about that medium. They just want to make money. Before that point not many people knew much about it they just saw that shareholders loved tech firms after the boom.
Start making alternatives, open source alternatives.
ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are the reasons. I’m starting to see commercials that are using highest tier video tech. Just keep pushing.
That’s one community that’s worth supporting.
How is Stable Diffusion connected to bad/short term orientated social media company policy changes? The ChatGPT connection I understand, even if I don’t think it’s the root cause. (Interest rate increases I think are more fundamental, even if AI is cited by companies as an influence on their choices.)
What? That's an... interesting theory. I've heard a few bad reasons to dislike generative AI, but this is a new one!
Hmmm if I had to put my conspiracy cap on it would have to do with the upcoming election. I haven't tested the waters enough to know how lemmy will react to me.
I will give you my opinion, although many people might not like it. As the new generation starts to fill job roles, they really want to push censorship, because so many young people are offended by literally everything and anything. People that go to college in that field often times sjw‘s and typically when people use a site that didn’t go to college and are a part of just the normal working class they would like to say what they want, which often times offends a sub class of extremely butt hurt individuals so then they ban everyone
