Are lots of websites really going downhill and/or closing or does it just seem like it to me?

Im glad decentralized social media is picking up steam. No more of these major communication platform rug poolings for everyone. Now at worst individual instances can implode and everyone just has to move to a different instance or self-host, and still access communities on every other instance.

So first thing, Twitter is different than the rest. Elmo purchased it and he is doing some things to it that looks crazy.
Reddit CEO admitted that his API changes are inspired by Elmo's Twitter changes, he likely wouldn't double down if that didn't happen to Twitter as well.
Anyway, to show inflation the government increased interest rates. Which made investors thinking, "why should I put my money in this risky business that doesn't even generate money, when I could purchase government bonds and add long as government doesn't default I will get 5%?
This actually put pressure on trash startups that don't generate profits.
Ironically it is more like how much interest have been historically. It's just that after we had recession it was lowered to not turn it into depression. Then it was kept at nearly 0% until now.
Side note: if your bank still offers still nearly 0% interest rate in your savings account, they are making killing on your money and they are counting you won't notice, because people got used to those low interest rates.
- re: your side note, if I had any money in my bank account I'd be furious!
- So making services worse actually makes them less trash because profits? They werent trash startups, they were made into trash corporations.
For sure... Non-decentralized social media has value created by the immense number of connections and content created.
It also has the risk of abusing those connections and making the network less valuable by a centralized decision to clog it with paid content... Which alienates users and makes the experience less efficient.
Facebook did it, reddit is doing it, Twitter is trying to do it. The move is almost inevitable.
Decentralize it and it takes almost all potential greed out of the equation so the network stays most valuable to users.
- This makes me wonder whether decentralized social media is actually immune to enshittification, or will it just take a different form we can't even imagine at this moment in time.
I think it's orchestrated. I think it's intentional. I think the internet is under attack in the capacity that we know it as. I know it makes me sound conspiratorial but ever since Musk overtook Twitter every big social CEO has praised is approach. Musk fucked the internet up as we know it and Rupert Murdock showed media moguls that they can push trash and make heaps of money. There's no incentive to run quality content online and Musk started the downturn of that realization. I think we're in for some troubling times.
- Hanlon's Razor, bro.

This is the enshittification of the Internet. Cory Doctorow wrote about it here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys and it explains why this was always going to happen.

Interesting read.
The likes of Spez were just not that intelligent enough to figure out how to make Reddit pay before the VCs called in the investments. Not that it's an easy problem to solve, but if you're going to take on money like Reddit did you sure as hell needed a better plan then leaving it up to later to figure out. Amazon had a plan clearly, Reddit did not.
Also, what Reddit is now doing mimics a little of what Facebook did too, the enshitification of your feeds (just look at the app). They're just hoping Reddit is as addictive as Facebook is and you'll stick around regardless. I wonder if they recent;y hired some new advisers that told them to make these recent changes too?
- Here's the play, charge a reasonable amount for API calls and people will either pay with money or with data, some will even do both.
  Instead you and I are having this conversation on kbin.
  After the way shithead acted and talked, well I waste less time on the internet, and yeah, it's a little harder to find results on google, but that is just making me realize how much I relied on Reddit.
  I need to find another search engine too, I rely too much on too few providers.
  They got us one convenience at a time.
- If it weren’t for MLM Huns and boomer memes of ice cold takes from 2013, Facebook would be long gone too.
  Even just taking the huns out probably would have killed it 3 years ago.
I dunno. If the general trend is to move toward the fediverse then things might actually get better.
- Meta has already expressed interest in the fediverse. It's going to be up to everyone who likes it to defederate from every corporate instance.
  There are no good corporate actors
- I hope that will be the trend, but I think the VC funding cycle will continue
Can we think of a better word than this enshitthing?
- Mistifying / Mistification works if you like Anglo-German puns. Emmerdification for an Anglo-French equivalent.
  If you're against anything to do with faeces at all, I'm not sure there's as short and easy a neologism that as fully captures the meaning and, importantly, disdain without being a mouthful.
  You need an en- of some sort because it's clear that something is changing and then the action is the attempt to squeeze as much profit out of an enterprise with the expectation that nothing much will, er, change. This inevitably ruins or destroys the nature of the enterprise from the users' point of view.
  Then the CEO immediately has cognitive dissonance between their own ego and self-belief of infallibility versus the fact the enterprise isn't working or has changed far more than their expectations. Their ego, and desire for profit, inevitably wins.
  Much like badly managed corporate take-overs, all the smart people leave as soon as they can assuming they haven't already been fired and replaced by an inferior of some sort.
  Thus, the whole thing turns to... well. Is there a better word?
- I've seen rentrophy thrown around, the decline in service as rent increases.
Thanks for sharing this. I learned a lot.
I've been saying this will happen for years and people just dismissed it, I'm feeling quite vindicated now

It's not just you, see this thread:

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/126183/What-s-with-social-media-companies-trying-to-destroy-themselves-recently

That thread has some very interesting insight. Thanks for posting!

Unchecked corporate greed and no regards for users or communities that were built on these platforms. Hopefully the centralized ones will die from too many ads and user abandonment and the decentralized ones will rise and thrive.

Exactly this. The money tap has dried up post pandemic and they are seeking new revenue streams while also slashing costs. The hunger for perpetual growth to sate the investor class and their matyroshka nesting yachts is driving these decisions.
- .
- Yeah, someone else said that the other day on another discussion - we're seeing the bubble bursting for social media. The VC money is drying up, so these websites with massive bloat and overhead suddenly need to come up with new ways to generate cash. So they turn to what they "think" works - charge the visitors for the privilege to use their website without ever considering that maybe people will simply migrate and go elsewhere, as they always have.
  Just like when most people left Myspace, then left digg, then left twitter, and left facebook, and left reddit. There's always stragglers that will keep the sites afloat. But they are a shell of the sites they once were.
  Look at Facebook - back in 2005 it was an amazing site where all your friends were socially active and engaged. Now it's a ghost town - out of hundreds of friends and family, I only see a few posts from friends/family and a ton of ads and posts from groups I follow.

Not just you. I don't know if anyone's made it official yet, but I call what's currently happening the "social media collapse." Corporations have been sinking their teeth into popular social networks, only to realize that they've never been profitable and that the people who use them don't want to live with advertising or restrictions. The annoying paradox of social networks is that by the time they're popular enough to be worth using, they're already too popular, and are doomed by the whims of a meddling executive.

Exactly, the venture capital is finally drying up and the services can't figure out how to sell anything to enough people to recoup their investments. Why reddit has to pull out third party apps and shove ads and reddit gold down our throat, why Elon has to shill Twitter blue and cap our view counts. Facebook and Google services exist because their business model is selling ads foundationally and not selling services. It doesn't matter that their socials are losing money because it's always been a branch of their advertising business and not the other way around.

There are larger macroeconomic issues at play here which are a big contributor to it. High inflation and an uncertain US economic situation has caused tech companies (as well as others) to lay off people and is making it harder for startups and smaller companies to raise capital to keep the lights on. So yes, there is something bigger going on that is indirectly causing all of this.

Yeah. It's like it's 2000 in the Bay Area all over again.

The tech bubble is starting to show signs of bursting. SVB alongside other large investent firms going down has shown companies that just being on the internet is not a sign of making money. Essentially the internet bubble is popping...again, as interest rates skyrocket and realized gains become smaller, internet-based companies seem to be scrambling to outpace the likes of Machine Learning and the new technological curve coming. Reddit going IPO, the Twitter shenanigans, etc.... Essentially they've all realized that their sites and business models are being made obsolete by the "new wave" of businesses/startups relying on newer technologies and novel revenue models.

Tldr; this is the cycle, new tech comes out, old tech dies. It happens all the time, just that this time it's not happening in our physical world but rather the virtual.

With interest rates going up it's costing more and more to have borrowed money sitting in the likes of Reddit hoping for a nice payday one day.
- This is really the biggest part. There isn't room for the future right now, gains need to be realized to pay other investments and if not portfolios leaned out.
- Sounds like a promising venture for wallstreetbets people
I think another major factor is that this is really the first time since 2008 that companies have had to deal with interest rates on their loans.
For 15 years, corporate money was functionally free from the government banks. It allowed a lot of things to happen that could not have otherwise happened.
Now that its not free anymore, the bar of profitability is suddenly a lot higher than it was last fall.
Yeah, except machine learning is also another bubble which I expect is going to burst pretty soon, so who knows where things will end up after that.

I personally can't wait to see it all burn. This last year especially has shown me how many people are just getting fucking sick and tired of centralized, corporate bullshit, even if they aren't consciously aware of why (things like issues listing items on Marketplace due to false auto-removals, no way to contact a human being for help with a business issue, spam, bots, unintentional bans/excessive moderation, etc.) At the end of the day, when the average person starts to complain about shitty UI and too many ads, you know a platform has peaked - and it's happening everywhere. Social media has had its time in the sun. I want it to fucking crumble now.

Automation in the realm of customer service drives so much of the enshitified experiences. If I'm not talking to a robot/chat engine, I'm talking to a human with such overbearing rules/scripts they might as well be a robot. And I know they hate it as much as I do.
The otherside of this, is that when I encounter a kind human who has actually been empowered to solve problems I tend to leave glowing feedback and share the experience.
Office Space got it right 24 years ago. "I'm a goddamn people person." First people they cut, and it just got harder for the customers.
- It's so sad how awful the end user support has gotten. Even when you're paying Big Money to big hardware makers who make you pay for support packages, you're talking to Malaysia or India or a few in South America. Pinching pennies into dust when they're making money hand over fist for the support contracts. When most end user engineers are only opening tickets when it's dire problems due to how awful the experience is.

Well I didn't know about Gfycat shutting down but I do now. :/ Damn, not even it is safe.

I've never been able to read gfycat as anything but "go fuck your cat," so that's a thought I never knew I'd miss.
- uh. i’ve always read it “giffycat” but the other way might be the gold standard.
- Wait, it's not Gyfcat? :O
- It was Snapchat that bought them out. Not any better though.

It's not even social media alone. The magazine National Geographic had the last of its staff fired last month. Now all of their articles are written by freelancers and there's no longer a physical copy being sold.

Wasn't national geographic bought by disney a couple years back?
- Yeah, Disney is trying to make National Geographic more "profitable".
- Actually it went from Fox to Disney. Fox sank the magazine, really... they were still publishing it, but it was an embarrassment, the kind of vapid trifle that you'd find on a supermarket checkout aisle next to People and the National Enquirer. Remember when David Hasselhoff had a drinking problem and his daughter filmed him eating a hamburger off the ground? It was the magazine version of that. The absolute rock bottom for a cherished institution.

VC’s are calling in their debts. We should expect to see more.

Ngl i think we’re finally seeing a lot of the social media bubble burst. Companies which have spent years in the red, now are being asked to make a profit, however they never had to before and never planned for it. If that sounds like they’ve spent the last 15 years thinking about growth over profits, it 100% is. Growth is important but growing a Losing venture is inherently unsustainable. They should’ve planned for this but most CEO’s have no idea how to plan for the future.
Just my 2¢

I think a lot of people have been weary of the current 20 year run of corporate social media, but didn't know where else to go. Now they do.

I wish this was the cause but I think it's more insidious. When cash supply was cheap and people were stuck at home these companies saw explosive growth. Now the market is down and investors smell blood. They want payouts. This is for sure the story with reddit and it's upcoming IPO as well as Musk burning down Twitter trying to make up for the 1.5bn in debt it's accruing.
Facebook/Meta is trying to expand into new markets since their main service hit saturation ages ago and they've cut all they can. That means killing gfycat, making a Twitter clone, etc.

The web sucks honestly. everyone is either buying, selling, or being sold. The foundations of the web, open information sharing and interconnected servers, is collapsing behind paywalls and corporate greed. You can't even have a homepage or hobby site any more as the biggest indexer is drowning in a trash ocean of generated seo-honed content.

There are some beacons of hope to be found still, but mostly I'm disgusted to see how the larger ecosystem has evolved.

As other people have said, we may very well be watching a bubble burst.

Many social media companies rely on VC money to get themselves started, to handle large initial costs, but the problem is many of them (Reddit included) have been suckling on that VC money for too long, and have been too lax on figuring out their monetisation.

The reason that is a problem now is because we're not just feeling the effects of the pandemic monetarily, but there's all sorts of things pulling at the global economy right now including the Ukrainian war...

It's made VC money harder to come by, so these companies are having to figure out their monetisation strategy now or die, hence the sudden death and enshitification of many social media (and related) sites.

Though if anything, it gives us a chance to exist, so that's cool. Only problem is even on a small scale, I can't imagine these Admins have an easy time monetising either, so I suspect this won't last in it's current iteration either.

This is why a self-hosted WordPress blog is a good place to store all tour posts, media, etc. It can't get shut down because you can just move it. And WordPress is a sane company.

However, you really got to work to get traction from a blog post on social media. It can be done but does takes work.

The bigger problem, yeah, is most social media is walled silos and the companies are treating users like the enemy. I was really active in/tax, people thanked me for advice I gave. However, I'm done with Reddit. Let it rot.

I guess we need to create our own communities!

Doesn't need to be WordPress btw. For example, I made my blog using Jekyll with my own theme. Probably way more cheaper as it's only a static site, no need for database, only bunch of markdown files.

It's definitely frustrating. I've been finding myself really missing the internet of the 2000s/2010s, when new and interesting things were popping up and were worth talking about to friends. These days, it just feels like a chore to do anything online, like I'm just ticking off boxes on my to-do list but no longer having fun with the discovery process at all.

Hopefully this shake-up of some of the big tech giants brings some of that back.

Ya also Pinterest has been accidentally banning people I know bc a friend (who I know even irl not just online) got suspended even tho she doesnt post anything and doesnt spam. And I keep getting emails from them about pins I made being taken down then put back up BUT I don't make any pins I only save them and I dont save innapropriate stuff so idk. Ive read this is something a lot of people are dealing with on Pinterest lately too.

It should happened years ago. The fact that "free speech" has been gardened, moderated and owned by companies like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit is mad. Kbin, Lemmy and Mastodon gives individuals the tools needed to retake their power of expression, for good and for bad. Together with Pixelfed and Nextcloud all needs are met - except for server hosting, that is.

Most sites that rely on user generated content are a huge black hole of investor cash (Meta and YouTube are the only ones I can think of that aren't) and have a natural lifespan where increasingly desperate attempts to extract value from it eventually kill the site. It seems like everything is going downhill at once because the web stopped innovating sometime around 2010 and the unprofitable experiments became pillars of the online experience. It's why I'm excited about the fediverse - a return to community-led projects at last.

Most web companies never turned a profit and have business models that wouldn't ever be profitable, endless growth propped up by venture capital was all they strived for. Then hope they get acquired or do an IPO and let somebody else hold the bag - basically a Ponzi scheme. Investors realised this doesn't really work anymore, so the free money ran out. Also, the AI gold rush means VCs have something else to throw their money at.

Things come and go in cycles. There was a time when Fark, Digg, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. were all a big thing and then they slowly went away or declined as something new arose in its place. I think a lot of the more tech-savvy users of Reddit will migrate to various fediverse instances and that you'll see other microblogging platforms arise to fill the void of Twitter, a la Bluesky. You'll still have somewhere to go, it just may not be the place you were used to going to.

I've been on the internet since the mid-80s, so I've pretty much seen it all. The current era has been characterized by widespread corporate takeovers, relegating independent sites to the backwaters of the internet at best. Forums for public comment used to be common, particularly on news sites; now they're mostly gone, relegated to a few massive sites and services which are heavily censored, swarming with bots, and easily controlled.

Free speech was mostly the rule; now it's strictly forbidden, particularly speech against the interests of corporations and the ruling class. Even if you DO find a place online where you can speak against the oligarchy, it's guaranteed that you'll be speaking into a void.

You can have all the free speech you want, as long as no one ever hears you.

The process of enshittification rules the day. Search engines which used to provide useful results now produce nothing but advertising and bot-fodder; on a recent Google search for blog entries about a topic of public interest, I literally got no results other than advertising. Blogs have effectively been eliminated from general public view, unless you go specifically looking for one that you already know about.

Technologically, broadband is the sole province of massive corporations which provide the shittiest service possible at the highest prices. There used to be talk of setting up small internet networks that would be outside the control of corporations and the government (which are now, of course, the same thing); that's utterly forgotten now. Governments all over the world now have kill-switches for the internet that can be used at any time, and that very definitely includes the United States.

There was a time when it was hoped that the internet would finally give power to the people. Instead, it's being used to enslave us even more.

The closest thing I've seen to any sign of hope over the last several decades is the development of the Fediverse.

They just happen to be reaching a breaking point to you, because of how tendencies work, most people reach a breaking point at roughly the same time.

Analogous to this, think of how when you're in a shitty relationship, you don't break up for one red flag or another, eventually you reach a breaking point and decide to not deal with the bs anymore, but when you look back you realize you were in a sea of red flags and should've ended it a long time ago... Either that or you never reach your breaking point and just sink lower and lower and become more miserable. That's about how it goes with most things in the consumer world. It's a good thing that we reach these breaking points, otherwise things never improve.

I think this is the web bubble bursting again. Venture Capitalists have piled money on a bunch of sites and products, we've become used to good free services.

The economy has taken a down turn and there is a increased demand for instant profitability and more and more social media companies realize they have overestimated how many people are willing to become paying customers. So they are forced to cut the product in order to save money instead.

Why is gfycat shutting down?