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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Sustainable as interpreted by a non-techie bean counter looking at maximising next quarter’s profits and ignoring everything past that.
They’re doing an IPO so yes, that is what sustainable means nowadays, as shitty as it is.
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.
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.
Because easy money from a decade of low interest rates is disappearing.
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.
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.
Start making alternatives, open source alternatives.
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.
This is just what living in late stage capitalism looks like.
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.
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…
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
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.
I mean they’re not… There’s been some amazing films recently.
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).
deleted by creator
Oh no…
