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.
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.
U just enlightened me sir. Thank you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Higher interest rates, less vc money, have to actually start being profitable
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.
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.
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.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of cancer.
And like cancer, it will eventually kill its host once things are beyond saving.
Because easy money from a decade of low interest rates is disappearing.
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.
$
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.
Start making alternatives, open source alternatives.
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.
Yeah… I mean, we on one hand, we now grow plenty of food to feed almost 8 billion people, cured polio, greatly extended lifespan all over the globe… But on the other hand (waves hand at everything).
Eternal growth on a finite planet ain’t possible, but capitalism demands it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
I was going to say that I wish there was a decentralised way of sending messages… And then I remembered text messaging is a thing.
Incredible how quickly these things become embedded in everyday life
Unfortunately this doesn’t really work with international mates
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.