Higher interest rates means they have more pressure to start being profitable is my guess.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Greed.
a lot of people have already basically made this point, but ad revenue isn't really good enough to make massive massive tech platforms profitable, and there's only so much VC money they can all burn. we saw the first stage a few months ago when basically every major tech company had massive layoffs, now all these companies are trying to become profitable all at once
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.
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.
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
Companies in general are just designed to make more profit, that‘s it. All their decisions make sense from a business perspective, they are just shitty for us from a human perspective. This is why we need decentralised platforms which aren‘t inherently profit seeking.
Funny also how every time someone criticises capitalism someone shows up attributing all technological advances to capitalism. No. It‘s the people, under any economic system there will be inventions, it is small minded to think people only innovate or work out of greed, if that were so the entire open source just wouldn‘t exist and volunteering wouldn‘t exist.
Because they are all beholden to shareholders, not users (or prepping for IPO)
only now? to me most social media platforms were shitty to begin with, or had become shitty long before.
I feel this is a matter of perspective. The average Joe whose concept of "social media" is Facebook probably has never noticed anything getting any worse. The mainstream users who just want to see funny pics and couldn't care less about 3rd party clients might actually be quicker to side with Reddit than with the protesters.
Twitter has never been attractive to me. Even back when its API was public (ancient history). Not only is their feed noisy and of poor quality, constantly swayed by "trending" stuff I don't care about, it also has always had you depend on a privative and closed source walled guarden. Things were much more open before twitter, when people used blogs to post their stuff instead.
Reddit might have been a bit more open once.. but it stopped being so long ago, this is not a change in behavior. Maybe this is an unpopular thing to say, but I'm actually glad this is happening. I think the API fiasco might be an overall good thing if it helps people get away from Reddit, and if so I hope Reddit does not backtrack.
A lot of them go into business with venture capital, a great idea with future potential, but no idea how to monetize any of it.
Eventually the capital is starting to dry up and the owners will want return on their investments - so the company is forced to start turning profit. Enshittification of service at all costs follows. And then perhaps public IPO and the founders cashing out and buying yachts.
That's the lifecycle of a tech-startup
The other element to this is the lack of competition. Since companies funded this way don’t need to turn a profit for a long time, they can very easily kill their competitors who do need to be profitable to survive.
So when the time comes for the company to turn a profit, there are few if any competitors left to put pressure on them, giving them the power to do what they want, and leaving consumers with no other options.
And now the interest rates are up and money tight. All non-profitable companies suddenly need profits. Boom.
Our startup making business services and actually selling them... Getting any funding now is such a grind.
I honestly feel like - and this is just my thought, no data to back it up - all the major companies or sites felt like they were the only ones around, there was nothing to replace them, so they could make whatever decisions they wanted to make.
Like when we all left Digg for Reddit - Reddit was already a thing so it was a relatively "painless" switch. With this one it's like... Musk took over twitter and I sort of heard about the fediverse but I'm personally waiting for Hive to get a desktop - but once Reddit started doing it's thing it was like "yeah I really need to move now" and kbin had a much better landing page than any of the other fediverse things I'd stumbled upon which really helped with the onboarding... And it's been nice watching it grow.
But yeah previous to this it was like...there was nothing else available so why did they have to care about what they did if we were "stuck" there with the decisions they were making anyway.
lol...and yet here I am on kbin so - yeah looks like that plan (assuming it's at all correct) didn't pan out entirely like they were hoping.
Careful with Hive. It is perfectly positioned to suffer the exact same fate as Twitter if it is allowed to grow. Then we have learned nothing and it all just repeats. Never mind that the app is absolutely atrocious both from a data security standpoint and an accessibility standpoint.
Because a user base has yet to demonstrate that there will be significant consequences for such actions. Maybe there will be, but they will be less-tangible long-term consequences that can’t easily be attributed to these actions.
Greed. It's all driven by greed. It's not just social media companies either. My best guess to why it's happening now.. The boomers are aging out and want to take every last bit they can squeeze out before they retire/die.
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