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From Cory Doctorow:
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.
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Some of it is because we had a decade of cheap borrowing which has come to an end and many of these platforms were never profitable.
The timeline split after harambe. This is known
It is known.
I wonder what our alternate timeline selves are doing. Good for them, right?
In Timeline-α the Visitors didn't turn away in disgust and Contact was approved. The Uplift process is well underway, environmental conditions have been stabilized and restoration is progressing well. Space travel is still restricted to the Solar System but Humanity is on track to full Membership. Ambassador Harambe has resumed his duties on the Council.
I have a sinking feeling that these moves are not about money, but more about power and manipulation. If you squeeze these user bases such that the savviest users are forced out, those more likely to ask "Why?" about damn near anything, you will own access to a group of people that can be influenced to think/do/buy whatever the top management and/or majority shareholders want. If you lose a few million users, what does it matter if they were dissidents to your goals?
This is where my mind goes. Kinda convenient that Twitter and Reddit, both likely particularly dangerous to those seeking power happen to be destroyed seemingly intentionally in the same year ahead of a sure to be insane U.S. election season.
Hmm, kinda interesting. A lot of Trump shit was spread on Reddit during the 2016 election, makes sense they would try to get rid of anyone who would oppose that content
Not money per se, but the oil of the 21st century: data.
I guarantee it's primarily about improving their ability to harvest and sell user data.
From everything I have observed, businesses are hunkering down for a recession in the next fiscal year. It explains the lay offs, the penny pinching, and puzzling decisions that look like business suicide.
For services that are free for users, advertising revenue and investment fund raisers are the only thing keeping them afloat. With banks like SVB getting seized by the FDIC, it's starting to scare investors. Advertisers are seeing the writing on the wall that people will stop spending as much as they used to. We are also probably seeing jacked up pricing across the board because businesses are taking what they can before it's gone.
So what's left? Squeeze users for money. Additionally, shed users that actually cost them money and these tend to be power users. The question, which everyone seems to be assuming is a foregone conclusion, is if this shedding strategy will end up killing the service. In reality, we don't know but the idealists would sure feel good if someone else ate their market share.
I'm just glad that federation is picking up steam in the social media space.
Also what hasn't been touched on very much in this thread is the increase in interest rates from the Federal Reserve. The money hose has shut off and expansionary business policy won't work for the foreseeable future even disregarding a recession. All these internet companies have developed and grown in an essentially 0% interest rate environment that rewarded growth beyond all else. With rates increasing, investment in risky companies that may or may not grow is becoming a less attractive option and so I bet a lot of these non-profitable, growth-focused web companies are seeing liquidity dry up and are having to reach profitability to avoid bankruptcy since servicing new debt in this current interest environment is basically impossible without solid cashflow and a clear corporate vision.
This is leading to all these companies suddenly raising prices, cutting staff, choking competition, and cheaping out to try and break even instead of grow. It's a paradigm shift.
Crazy to hear people talking about this stuff out in the wild. Feels like I'm on superstonk, only place I tend to hear anyone connecting these dots.
Speaking of superstonk, is there a good superstonk or wsb personalfinance lemmy community? I am subbed to the beehaw finance community, but it's really not a tube yet and seems to be a bit more economics leaning than pure personal finance or investing.
The subs I spend a lot of time on were FIRE, financialindependence, wsb, and personal finance and I miss them lol.
The Canadian GameStop folks have a community on lemmy.ca, but we are still very few.
I would like to join a federated wsb community too, if there's anyone with any integrity willing to run it impartially. Anyone running such a place has a conflict of interest imo, the tendency is moral hazard. At least with single stock communities you know their motive.
So why do layoffs at all if they don’t actually work? “People do all kinds of stupid things all the time,” Pfeffer says. “I don’t know why you’d expect managers to be any different.” https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/26/23571659/tech-layoffs-facebook-google-amazon
twitter was overvalued. reddit has made a lot of questionable business decisions over the last decade or so but their recent API change will be their death knell. it feel like a cash grab. I personally only use Twitch to watch Bob Ross reruns :P
The reality is that nothing is really dying and nothing is really changing. Twitter is still fully operational and other than a small hit nothing happened. Twitch already did a step back. For Reddit we'll see but only a really small percentage of reddit is using third party apps.
It's not the services that are dying, but the internet as we used to know.
Change is natural, but the services are all changing in a way not beneficial forthe users.
I think the "the internet is dying" perspectives are all incredibly overblown. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon. I remember all of the "Facebook is dead, I don't know anyone using Facebook!" posts, but I suspect many here are invested in some index fund that is being pulled upwards by Meta.
But how many people are still exchanging facebook contacts? Because I haven't met anyone anymore ...
Good point! I suspect it's a lot more than we think. My parents are definitively still involved in doing this.
But on the other hand, does exchanging contacts mean anything to Facebook anymore? I don't think that's important to their income stream anymore. If the OP meant "these sites are still going strong but aren't what they were when they began", then of course I agree.
This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.
I've always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn't invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I'm probably on here too much though!
We've reached the end of the VC-funded golden age where they are all now demanding a return on their investment, hence why the screws are now all getting tightened.
I’m honestly surprised it even got this far. It was just common sense to me, even a decade ago, that companies that burned through VC cash and tried building up user bases with little regard for actual profitability couldn’t possibly keep it up forever.
What happened with Twitch? I'm out of the loop there.
Doctorow's Enshittification describes it pretty much dead-on. It's basically the cancerous form of late-stage capitalism that we're living under now.
Some people have come up with the word "enshittification" to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.
The cycle consists of three parts:
All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.
The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet's history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the "next best thing".
Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It's only just getting started, you watch.
They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.
...jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called "Tiktok's enshittification". It's a four-steps process:
In my opinion it's also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.
Well, while it is surprising it's all happening within a year or so, it's not unexpected at all.
They're ultimately for-profit companies. They have openly demonstrated the obvious truth that when push comes to shove, users don't matter to them, at least not as much as money. Our attention was the product.
These companies have proven time and time again that a quick moneygrab will win over retaining the people who make the site work. capitalism 101 baby.
Yep, think of the math like this:
1000 users that we can get $1 of profit from totalling $1000 profit
Or 500 users we can get $3 of profit from totalling $1500 profit.
$1500 > $1000 Therefore it's a good decision.
Welcome to the mind of corporate executives
Source: I work with these dumbasses
I think this is "normal" and the previous status was a glitch due to the low interest rates. Investors threw money at tech companies and didn't care whether they made any money. Not any more. It's now "make money or go bust". I am not sayiny these new trends will make them money, but IMHO it's what's driving them
Big sites have made surfing the web so boring. I will end up spending the day on 2-3 sites. All this shake up will hopefully force me to look at more websites again.
Agreed. I really miss stuff like StumbleUpon and Google Reader which were my mainstays before Reddit.
The twitter thing is sad, but honestly not a huge deal. I rarely used it anyhow.
The reddit thing is depressing, since I've been a huge supporter and user of Apollo for many years. It feels like getting stepped on and I feel for the developer Christian Selig who devoted so much time and energy to the app.
I hope nothing happens to Twitch in the way that Twitter and Reddit have though, the small time streamers I follow and support won't survive a thing like that.
I think it's an important lesson in impermanence.
The net will always have good bits and bad bits, but they won't always stay the same.
I hate it when things change, but you're totally right.
It's not just tech companies like Reddit and Twitter, it seems like it's most companies. Ever since the COVID lockdowns prices have been going through the roof, you get less for what you pay for, they're laying off workers, and all while raking in record profits while also crying about how no one wants to work and how they can't afford anything because of the economy. I've never been more cynical about companies than I have been the last year.