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.
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.
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.
U just enlightened me sir. Thank you.
$
Running out of VC dollars, now they gotta actually make a profit.
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.
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.
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.
Higher interest rates, less vc money, have to actually start being profitable
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Because they know it will sell.
They don’t need to make a good Star Wars movie because they don’t need to onboard new fans. They make them only to squeeze out existing fans who will pay regardless of quality.
The new Matrix movie was actually a masterpiece. The Wachowski’s didn’t want to revive the franchise since they considered it complete - but the studio insisted that if they didn’t make it, the studio would get it done itself. So they accepted the offer, and made a movie so bad that it killed any attempts at reviving the franchise for good. The Matrix is now dead, and it will stay that way (hopefully).
I guess Star Wars is too strong to kill even with multiple shit movies.
Besides that, for how long can you squeeze the same universe? I’d rather have something new.
LOTR ROP is pretty good.
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.
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.
Because easy money from a decade of low interest rates is disappearing.
