No Stupid Questions

A lot of these companies have never been profitable and have been running on VC money on speculation alone until they reach critical mass and can turn on the monetization streams.

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.

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.

We see that Twitter was been purposely twisted to be a comfortable space for neo-Nazis. We know spez's politics. It doesn't take much of a leap to conclude that he's killing off the moderator class to make Reddit more friendly for the neo-Nazis. Most likely though that's just a convenient side-effect of unbridled greed, though.

What were the bad decisions discord is making? Im out of the loop

Low effort guess, VC's cashing out before society collapses.

just seeing what all the fuss is about over here. I don’t know what I’m even doing.

A lot to do with product quality in general. Overtime they look at ways to cut costs and maximise profits.

It always reminds me of the Aero Mint chocolate, going from something very tasty to greasy and definitely not as good as it used to be. A lot of products have gone that way. They have attempted many times to change the recipe of coke with some success here and there. In a way to bring the cost of manufacturing down. I don't see social media as something any different.

Twitter has lost a majority of its work force for good and bad reasons. As well as lost a lot of features that cost them money to make it profitable.

I really do see it happening post 2008 recession in a lot of countries. Companies in general are also getting more involved in digital media the kind of people who don't care about that medium. They just want to make money. Before that point not many people knew much about it they just saw that shareholders loved tech firms after the boom.

As a phenomenon you'll see a lot of people call it "enshittification." The term seems to originate with Cory Doctorow who writes, "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."

The whole article on his blog is worth a read here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys. His Mastodon handle is @pluralistic if you'd like to follow his work there (woohoo federation!).

Start making alternatives, open source alternatives.

Honestly? I don't care. I don't use corporate "social" media and I'm very happy with the Fediverse. If you do something for profit, profit will always come first. Even before I became a Fedizen, I knew public discourse cannot reliably be provided by greedy corporations. I'm just surprised it didn't happen earlier and that the people are surprised about what's happening now.

Capital only looks out for itself. Online communities are a product to be exploited in the eyes of investors. The purse strings are getting tighter with rising interest rates, and investments that relied on potential are suddenly less exciting when the price to service goes up. Profit is king at the end of the day. It sucks, but that's capitalism.

What are the dumb updates discord is doing? I haven't noticed anything different, except for the username change that doesn't have a gamertag anymore.

Turns out infinite growth without covering your costs doesn't work out

@VoidCrow https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification