Seriously, what's up with big sites literally dying as we speak?
Seriously, what's up with big sites literally dying as we speak?
First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?
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!
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:
- The platform is good for its users.
- The platform abuses the users, to be good for its business customers.
- The platform abuses the business customers, to claw back all value for itself.
- The platform dies.
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.
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:
- You make the service that attracts new users by providing what they want. Often you do that at a loss, because your goal is to gain a big enough userbase for steps 2 and 3.
- Once there's enough users, you shift to attracting commercial interests instead -- vendors if you're running a store, advertisers or celebrities or other "big clients" if you're a social network, etc.
- Once both users and commercial interests are hooked, you can start tightening all the rules and switching completely to profiting yourself and your shareholders.
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.
The line has to go up.
The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don't demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don't sell and bail.
Now, with Twitter there's a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn't the place for it.
Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it's money.
Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it's Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they're making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.
Facebook: I don't even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it's just ads.
Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn't feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they're a bad thing, just using an example)
Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.
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?
Their death is waaaay overdue. We literally jumped one cycle because the 2008 financial crisis and 0% interest rate.
Now there is no free money, and they need to extract value to seem a good investment, so they canibalize themselves and turn into shit.
Most of Elon stuff is doomed once reality catches on. Same with Uber. Same with streaming platforms. Same with Meta.
Also there is a new/old boy in the bubble and burst town, Microsoft and their AI push. It’s going to destroy them pushing them into overspending to keep up.
Everybody just wants money now. Some of that is reasonable, these companies tend to work if not with a loss, then with quite unpredictable margins.
Now that tech investors have found a new bubble - AI - they are no longer willing to sponsor old-fashion internet stuff and wait if it ever turns a profit.
Especially since many got used to becoming all that richer during the pandemic, and are looking to keep those numbers rising.
But there's also some sudden hatred of porn, and I don't know where that is coming from. Tumblr, Imgur have limited it completely, OF wanted to, Reddit probably will, coedcherry shut down. The owner of coedcherry said it was really a sudden 180° turn of the banks to no longer wanting to do anything with porn, and nobody knows why.
It's especially bizzare considering how these platforms keep assuring us that we'll still be able to post and see blown off heads and all kinds of other nasty stuff, it's just the titties that are being banned! Eh?
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.
Facebook dies due to privacy concerns and misinformation. Twitter under threat because Elon. Imgur just deleted their NSFW content. Reddit with its API pricing. Twitch executives also getting greedy. Youtube has been going down for years.
It feels like we're seeing the natural life-cycle of social media companies in real time.
The twitter/elon thing is hilarious. I honestly do think he accidentally got himself into quite the pickle and now his pride is keeping him there. As for reddit and twitch, I don't assume these are the surface-level-dumb moves that we think they are. My guess is that this is a calculated means of rolling out the changes they actually want by:
- overshooting
- letting everyone get mad
- backing off to their actual changes (or something close)
- letting everyone think they've won
- and finally push forward a bit more once everyone is preoccupied with the next thing
Internet users love to cancel shit, but at the same time, are always looking for the next thing to cancel. So as much as people hate twitter or facebook or tiktok or youtube or windows or nintendo or chick-fil-a or whatever, they're all just looking for an excuse to forget all about it, and continue using their product as quickly as possible. And corporations know that, so they've worked "giving them that excuse" into their plans.
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.
Course-correcting, maybe? Web 2.0 really overstayed its welcome with Facebook/Twitter/Reddit being such dominant websites over the past 15+ years. Various reasons of greed, narcissism, and other factors finally popped the bubble.
I'm really enjoying the Feder-verse or whatever we're calling it since decentralization can prevent a lot of this nonsense from ever occuring. It feels like a new approach to the late 90's era of message boards and such.
The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company.
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
On one hand, I can name sites that, in 2023, either screwed over their user base, or just went under.
- Teknik (obscure file host/git repo host)
- Enjin (forum host for clans/everyone and their dogs' minecraft servers, rebranded to peddle NFTs)
- Imgur (currently scrubbing their servers of anonymous uploads/nsfw content)
- Discord (changing their username system to a bad one)
- Reddit (charging exorbitant prices for their api; $20m per year for Apollo's developer)
I have been considering a domain name to access hypothetical home servers as of late, just so I don't have to worry about shit like this.
COVID.
COVID changed everything. In an attempt to recover quickly, companies ramped up their abuses to new levels. While billionaires defending them all had their masks removed as the world collectively realized that it's impossible to make a billion without exploring others.
Toss in back to the office mandates and rising costs while those same companies post record profits...all while the population is Uber sensitive to that kind of thing, and we're in the middle of a not so quiet proletariat revolution.
Thanks to COVID a lot of people realized that despite the elites best efforts, the enemy isn't left or right, it's us versus the super rich. And it's having a trickle down effect.
I suspect that we're at end-stage capitalism, essentially every company feels they should be constantly making record profits and they think of predicted profits as granted, when they didn't reach predicted profits it was seen as losing money which in the CEO's eyes meant they needed to increase their income to make up for losses and the only way for companies that rely on user generated content for revenue was increased advertising which is the route youtube is currently going for the rest they had no way they could see to increase their income till elon decided to crash twitter with introducing the payed blue checkmark. What we saw when elon did that was a failing company but what twitch and reddit saw was an opportunity to not be blamed for following musks example, funnily enough though they fucked up on the attempt and everyone saw them as money grabbing
Although there's a lot of protesting going on over at Reddit right now, I really don't think it can be compared to twitter. 6 months from now, I doubt things will be all that different at Reddit. A small number of users (relatively speaking when compared to their total number of users) will leave, and that's probably it.
I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES
Hell, any such company is going to pursue infinite growth and always aim to squeeze as much money as possible from it's costumer base in the short term.
My guess is that because there is currently a big possibility of economic turmoil and these companies are appealing to investors, advertisers,etc. and trying to gain as much capital in order to look stable.
Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter seemed more like an extremely elaborate shitpost that went horribly wrong. It's like Musk never intended to buy them in the first place but was legally forced to do so (he tried to back out of the deal beforehand.)
As for Reddit, that place has been going down the shitter since around 2016. Power users have ruined that site, especially the handful of moderators that control hundreds of subreddits between themselves. Spez is a blithering idiot who has done more to censor and subvert the site than Ellen Pao ever did (ironically, everyone accepted it and didn't revolt against him because he wasn't a woman.)
That being said, I really hope Steve Huffman doubles down on the API changes and kills Reddit as a platform. Nothing would make me happier.
Twitch and YouTube literally think they're too big to fall and work actively to fuck over the content creator, when decent competitors like Rumble and Kick are coming along. Mixer could have been decent but Microsoft's strategy was literally to offer two streamers nine-figure contracts and somehow think this would drive people to their Twitch-clone. At least Rumble and Kick are competently run.
Logged into youtube today and discovered that the subscription page is absolutely fucked now. It only shows three thumbnails per row on my 13" laptop screen and they've removed the separation by date, so now it's way harder to tell if any of my subscriptions have uploaded today. Seems like everything is going down the shitter.
With great power comes great irresponsibility
-big corps
People aren't reacting to this sudden interference with content aggregation with as much outrage and fear as they should.
The thing that Twitter, reddit, and so many other sites that have recently been bought up and swallowed, do so well is aggregate information for us. It provides us a pool of information, with which we as a collective society can sift through and analyze together through the lens of our experience, our professionalism, and our intelligence.
Before these types of sites, we were segregated and isolated. As much as I miss forums, for the most part they became bubbles that hyperfocused on singular categories. This kept us in our place. This kept us from venturing out and sampling things that were different and other. When sites like Fark took off, we suddenly had insight into things we may never have had interest in or knowledge of before.
Corporations and governments are trying to dismantle aggregation because it keeps us informed and it keeps us involved. It informs us of the other, and allows us to co-mingle in an environment where we might be exposed to new ideas and new ways of doing things that were otherwise not available.
We shouldn't just be lamenting the downfall of reddit due to our lack of entertainment. We should be very, very afraid of the day when the only way you can find 'other' information is by using very specific search terms.
People in power have been working very hard for a very long time to take us back to a time before the Internet, and a time before aggregation. What I sincerely hope comes out of this is the realization that we are all stronger together with our complex variety of ideas and perspectives, and our ability to question things and provide information to each other.
In case anyone has forgotten, Twitter is a lifeline to many corners of the world most of us will never touch and have no way of accessing otherwise. Twitter was the tool for dozens of uprisings and protests around the world. Twitter was the catalyst for so many young people to connect and realize that the situation they were in could be changed. And that's been taken away. It's been made a joke, and people are leaving in droves. People whose experience and support could help the next protest. That's exactly what they want.
But what do I know, I'm just a rando on the internet, who may be able to tell you the answer to your very niche question, who may say just the right thing when you're needing support, or who may pass on your story to someone else who knows a journalist, which may lead to your voice or your injustice being heard.
They're trying to isolate you. Don't let them.
in this day and age, you have to be really screwing your customers to get any money from investors
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.
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.
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.
The big sites got big by being there when a previous big site died. But nothing lasts forever, and eventually a social site becomes desperately uncool because there are people old enough to have grandkids on it. And they totter on, like a zombie, until they fuck out badly, and most people leave. But not everyone, I still get linked to blog entries on Livejournal now and then, sometimes I even end up on Blogger when I’m following a trail and people are still updating some of those.
The internet users are learning about corporate greed and rights!
Rich people like money, and will destroy anything to get it.
I don't think that's true. The web is growing.
However what you might be seeing is a natural progression of a web project. Reality is that not many business projects in IT make it to 10+ years.
What's happening with Twitch? I haven't heard anything.
The post title implies it were prevalent. Which it is not. Three platforms is not a lot overall.
The reasons between Twitter and Reddit are very different.
Twitter was fine. It's on a single Person - Elon Musk - who bought Twitter. All changes after it were through them.
Reddit became a big platform. Now it's run not by a small team but by a big company with management and CEO. Supposedly targeting going public, and probably focusing no longer on usefulness and the service but on profitability and growth. An inherently, broadly, and very different mindset and goals.
Companies trying to squeeze every penny out of their employees and customers leads to catastrophic damage that is very visible, then everyone has to suffer, except the execs with their big fat bonuses.
louis rossman talks about this in two of his recent videos on twitter and reddit. obviously he tackles it using layman's terms, but there's still a lot of valuable insights and it's super palatable.
essentially it boils down to what @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml says here:
"The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company."
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for them to die and for federated or privacy-conscious alternatives to take their place. But I don't think they're all dying that much.
While it is true that more people complain and leave for alternatives than before, long term it doesn't seem like the masses are really switching yet. I feel like people are becoming more aware of privacy, market-monopoly, and other related issues, but at the same time don't want to hand in convinience, pay money to stop it, nor move somewhere when the rest isn't there yet. We see a spike on alternative SNS like Lemmy and Mastodon around the time news regarding some drama with big SNS releases, but we also see many users leave the alternatives after a time and that they never left the first platform that had drama to start with. They're just used both to eventually return. It's generally only a specific crowd that really leaves for good to go elsewhere, but not the masses.
As for the many lay-offs lately. Don't forget that during COVID the sky was the limit for tech. They all predicted that after the time being locked in our houses doing everything remotely, we'd keep doing that, and they invested accourdingly. However, as the world opened up more that predictioned turned out wrong, causing them to have over-invested and needing to make budget cuts to fix their mistake.
Great read.
Let them self destruct.
I'm just glad to have found this place. 😂
That's a nice way to think of it, I've felt I must be on the bad alternate timeline for a while now. Maybe this is a healing branch!
The services are getting worse (more ads, no free API, removing feautures etc.), because of lacking competition they could do it without much consequences. Social media is a natural monopoly, why would anyone want to use a service where no user generated content is? In recent years the services became so bad that many users decided to actually use alternatives instead of sticking with the established platforms. If Lemmy can get a big enough user base it will thrive, otherwise it will be forgotten in a few months.
Social media sites that have been in the red, growing primarily through fostering good will in their customers, are finally trying to turn a profit, and there isn't much available to profit off of without intentionally kneecapping some aspect of your product. Taking stuff away is the fastest way to pissing someone off.
What happened with Twitch? I'm out of the loop there.
People are more concerned about privacy and adblocks are almost ubiquitous to using the internet. The companies need more data to profit than what the users are willing to provide, so they are shutting down or severely limiting API access. These API are also what bots and karma farmers use to create content and engagement on these platforms. But platforms have a hard time separating the two.
Users who are used to using these services for free (in exchange of their data) are now not happy they can't have it their way while they limit the company's means of profit. So they are "threatening" to leave.
Reddit is an echo chamber manipulated by bots and mods are facilitators of karma farmers and PR/marketing agencies. They're protesting in the name of users but really are just afraid of losing that bot generated content/engagement.
Because their business models can never be profitable AND provide the best possible user experience.
The drive to make a profit.
Taking those little projects and extracting every dollar you can until it implodes then you go to the next one.
@notExactlyI20 Also, in the centralized model it only takes a few decisions to tank things. See: Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover and his following decisions and Reddit’s new pricing scheme.
I think it has to do with the Epstein and Maxwell case process. Maxwell had her fingers in many social media websites, especially reddit. I mean for Reddit she was the first user to hit 1m karma, and also one of the first powermods, controlling most of the powerful subreddits. Wouldn't surprise me if all the big rats are jumping ship before shit hits the fan.
Is it because interest rates are higher so investors are hanging onto their money? The money doesn't flow as freely in that direction, but it has to come from somewhere. That means, the "free lunch" users have been having while money was flowing from the investor side has to end, and the tech companies put the squeeze on the users instead to bring in money from that direction.
I don't know if that's it, but maybe?
The MacLeod life-cycle of corporations mirrors late stage capitalism pretty well:
#web3
Twitter gain/lose ratio really in trending up. Honestly next month when content creator start getting paid it will gain even more