YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
I think it’s a consequence of higher interest rates drying up VC money, meaning that tech companies now have to actually be profitable, rather than just grow.
If the plan was grow now, profit later, then later has come
Nailed it, investors are demanding profit increases, it’s not just interest rates (though they’re the main reason) but also the corporate tax cuts in 2018 basically dumped a ton of profit onto corporations because they repatriated all their offshore cash they’d been hoarding.
That bump lasted 2 years, but the expectation of higher revenue is still there, it doesn’t matter if you got lucky at slots last month, if you make your normal salary this month investors will be absolutely pissed.
This sounds too stupid to be real but I was working for one of the largest corporations in the world during this period and we were congratulated on 20% growth even though we did nothing. Of course we didn’t get an extra bonus or anything but they acted like we had an incredible year when we really just had an average year with a massive tax cut.
Then the next year, our goal was to grow at 20% again and when we missed it by 17%, no one got a bonus or raise.
This timeline is the stupid one.
Capitalism: “Numbers go brrrrr”
This is what irritates me. You still made money just not as much as you wanted or hoped so your company punishes you. You can’t have infinite growth
You can’t have infinite growth
Every publicly-traded company: “Hold my beer”
This is also a great example of why higher interest rates aren’t automatically a terrible thing. In general, it’s probably a good sign for the economy that companies are expected to be profitable. Means resources are being used well. The limitless VC money kinda meant any dumb idea regardless of merit got funding.
I wish we lived in a society where not everything needed to be profitable. People deserve treats and sucks to have things that made our lives better go awake because shareholders demand money
This seems like a non sequitur: what is good about only profitable ventures getting funding? These unprofitable ventures were creating good jobs and providing enjoyable and sometimes useful products to consumers for low prices. So why is it good that funding is drying up?
maybe inflation.
just because U don’t see a price tag doesnt mean its not there.
if you cant see the product, then you are the product!
the state of wellbeing had never really been that great to start.
Venture capital has shifted very quickly from companies HOSTING content to companies SCRAPING content (LLM’s). This means renting compute is now very expensive and moving into the hands of ‘AI’ companies. It’s like trying to fly a plane while monkeys are tearing the wings of.
That plus interest rates are going up. For twenty years VC’s has near limitless cheap loans, now they’ve got to be marginally more careful than before and the companies which grew large but only ever broke even (if that) now need to pivot to profitability to justify all the debt they took on. Would not be surprised if Uber and Lyft start really hiking rates soon.
I think most taxi companies have adapted, so they are pretty competitive now.
It’s because the 2024 election is coming up.
free money has dried up, now they need to monetise your habits.
As discussed here:
Honestly they do it so consistently that i’m starting to wonder if they have a choice.
A common way to do things for tech startups is that they get venture capital funds, use them to run the business at a loss hoping to acquire market dominance, and then use market dominance to turn a profit. I think a lot of tech startups that we know are currently in phase 2, meaning they’ve thrown money out the window for years and are now trying to recoup their investments.
Also, Reddit wants to go public and Twitter already is. This is relevant because investors are animals, all they see is short-term profit, and they use their voting power to make the company behave that way.
There’s a common thread between both my theories: it’s shareholder capitalism. I say this as a lifelong shareholder myself, shareholders ruin everything.
Capitalism.
Capitalism is like cutting off your wings because you believe the reduced weight will make you fly higher.
Others have basically captured it, but my read is a massive change in the overall risk profile held by venture capital firms. The time of reckoning has come, and it’s time for everyone’s (or at least VCs’) favourite three letters: ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).
The last twenty years, we’ve seen this sort of spray-and-pray model, where 99 bad investments could be offset by 1 “unicorn”. The risk appetite seems to have shifted largely because 1.) there’s a higher volume of early stage concepts (so there’s more bad ideas), and 2.) there’s either fewer unicorns, or the unicorns that mature are ultimately less valuable.
Crunchbase put out a good analysis of the current trend of global venture dollar flow:
The Party’s Still Over: The VC Downturn In 6 Charts
You can read news from various outlets - some say it’s a post-pandemic correction. Some say it’s because labour is too expensive. But the bottom line is that VCs aren’t willing to spend money on “users-in-lieu-of-revenue” like they once were, and I honestly don’t blame them. There were a lot of really, egregiously stupid ideas coming out of SV, and their wax wings melted. sad_trombone.mp4
Adam Kotsko summed this entire phenomena up nicely:
No tech burst.
It’s just a cold recession. No one is admitting it, including consumers who keep spending away savings.
But companies are aware of it enough they are tightening purses preparing for harder times ahead.
Of course, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If everyone makes their products worse chasing this quarter’s dollar, and people leave, those companies are going to have a harder time.
Especially as it becomes easier and easier to compete against them at scale.
Just wait until new feature requests and bug reports for something like Lemmy can be handled within moments by AI at dirt cheap pricing.
A very interesting future awaits around the bend.
Because usually the greed, money and power corrupts, no matter how good you are in the beginning.
Part of it is the standard crisis of capitalism, the profit you get from doing the same thing always declines, so over time you have to push up revenue (increasing prices, forcing people to pay, showing more ads, gathering more data, etc) & push down costs (fire engineers, run on less hardware, etc)
Part of it is capitalisms natural tendency to create monopolies, and the lack of competition in a given field causing the company to then lose sight of what it’s good at to compete in a bigger field.
Part is that interest rates mean loans are no longer cheap, so taking on debt to get customer, to at some point down the line make money, is a less viable plan. Twitter is a special case where the bad loans are because that was the original deal not interested rate related, and Musk is trying to pull all of the enshitification levers at the same time.
Part is that CEOs generally don’t have a fucking clue about their products or what they are doing (it’s a circuit job about who you know/blow, not what you know), so once one CEO starts firing/enshitifying, the rest just copy them so as to not be left out.
It’s more like you now notice this because it have visible effects, but it’s been going on for years. Restricting content, abusive rules and stupid changes have been the norm, all toward a centrally controlled experience geared toward generating internal profits on the back of users and content creators.
It’s also why some prominent content creator started their own platforms, too.
It’s just that now it reaches “intolerable” level for most end-users.
It’s called Enshittifiction
This
Because investors are tired of the model where they dump a shit load of cash into something that has no good path for monetization. So they’re forcing them all to make money which hurts users.
This worked when there was basically no interest on money that was lent from banks. But now when the interest is on the uprise. Well, naturally investors and banks pull the plug.
To be fair. I’m quite surprised that the plug wasn’t pulled several years ago. Twitter has almost never being in the black, always in the red. Reddit has never publicly showed it’s numbers, not yet. But would not surprise me if it was red numbers every year.
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I’m not sure YouTube ever wanted you using adblockers.
