The Great Internet Recession™ has begun
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Forreal, what's going on? Why does it seem like so many separate sites are suddenly so much worse/going downhill quickly?
Apparently they have been living on life-support.
I can't claim to fully understand how it worked, but apparently as long as sites could show user growth they could attract investments, but with inflation causing interest rates to go up (and other economy hocus pocus) , that money is quickly drying up.
I don't know if the investors believed that if the user base could grow large enough, someone would buy the companies, or they suddenly could come up with some fantastic monetization of said user-base.
Now as companies are listed on the stock exchange, and facing the falling investor interest, they are expected to react (aggressively) to secure future revenue.
Adding to what you said about interest rates: We're at the end of a long period of cheap borrowing (very low interest rates) during which overvalued assets were used as collateral to secure loans for investments. These propped-up assets are beginning to drop to their true (intrinsic) values. In other words, speculation and irresponsible practices were propping up a house of cards that's starting to collapse, and now investors are scrambling to cash in or cut losses wherever they can. So they're deciding that time has run out for online platforms that promised to grow but still haven't hit their numbers/monetization goals.
tl;dr: Infinite money glitch got patched (because it was wreaking all sorts of financial havoc) and now investors need to end life-support for risky/unprofitable investments.
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Billionaires bought the internet and now they're realizing that it isn't profitable.
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Our entire Internet enjoyment has been heavily subsidized by venture capital for the last 30 years which hoped to monetize us more than they have been able (believe it or not).
Now they are calling in their bets...
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So, twitter, Reddit, Imgur, and now Gfycat are all killing itself
Has the internet bubble finally popped?
The privately-owned for-profit Internet is starting to pop. User-driven FOSS will reign supreme.
Just like the good old times of internet. When every kid had a hobby and installed a forum software into a shared hosting to spend time with others. "If you build it, he/they will come."
The only thing that sucked about having my own PHPBB forum was the lack of actual users to communicate with.
But it looked and did everything just the way I wanted, so that was nice. 🥹
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it really does feel like a return to the older decentralized web
I expect adblockers will find a way around that. If nothing else, AdNauseam should work, as it tells the site that you clicked all of the ads it's blocking (making it much harder for them to build a profile on you).
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Been wondering how they detect how many videos you've watched without being logged in.
Cookies can be cleared, IPs can be changed, and if we all use something like the Mullvad Browser fingerprinting will be far more difficult.
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You mean popped again? It has already popped back in 2002 with the dot-com bubble bursting. Seems investors never learn.
Tumblr was just ahead of its time
Wait what's happening with imgur?
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Oh sweet, it's dot.com 2.0. Grab your popcorn, it's time for the internet to implode... again! Never ever underestimate shareholders' willingness to self-destruct a product for short-term profit.
It's called fiduciary duty and it's why every mega company sucks.
Cut costs by replacing cashiers with self checkout? Write a fat check to the shareholders! Then, shoplifting is becoming an even bigger issue from the self checkout... Cut costs again by preventing shoplifting by having people man the self checkout! Write another fat check to the shareholders!
Nevermind that it would have been easier and cheaper to just keep the system we had. Looking at you, Target.
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Wow, the 'enshittification' of the internet is really taking off now. Sites are either already dodgy, or well on their way there!
I know this has been a bit of a slow burn for a while now, but it really feels like it's all coming to a head suddenly.
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The times, they are a changin'...
I've watched the internet evolve since I first logged on to CompuServe in 1990. I don't think I have seen such a dramatic and fast change since the beginning of the WWW over crap like CompuServ.
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What the hell is going on?
Everything is falling down:
- Google is dropping Reddit and Twitter from their searches.
- Twitter is throttling Tweets and you have to signin to view anything. Which would be crazy antivaxxer radicals, so not missing anything. No more free API use.
- YouTube is blocking you after 3 videos if you use an adblocker.
- Reddit has killed all 3rd party apps among API changes
- Now Gfycat is going, man that's like most of the sites I used since a kid. Imgur seems to be around still at least.
And imgur banned porn and removed all posts not linked to a user account!
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- Imgur banned and purged NSFW images
Damn. Imgur was so awesome when it first came around. I remember the creator doing an AMA when he made it. It mainly served as a image hosting site, just for Reddit... Then it gradually went to shit
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After 2008, interest rates were set to zero and basically stayed there for the next 15 years. What that meant was that investing your money in literally anything was better than putting it in a savings account or loaning it to the government (bonds). What thatmeant is that any company with a dream and a product found themselves swimming in piles and piles of venture capital fund funds. And all that money meant that customers were getting a lot of stuff at or below cost from companies that had lots of cash to spend, and no real concern about making it back. Now the free ride is over and everyone is trying to cash in, only to find that’s not as easy as they made it sound to their investors.
Enshittification is a sexy concept and I understand why everyone has glommed on to it. Unfortunately, the interest rate explanation is the much more complete and correct one.
Gfycat was the only good gif hoster. The rest, tenor, giphy, etc, are all corporate buzzfeed slop, that were primarily used by dimwits to decorate their shitty blog posts with (remember the various reddit admin feature announcements that had like 300 stupid gifs in them?)
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It’s like the enshitification cycle somehow synced! https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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That's crazy. Things are moving fast these days. It seems every private company owning a big website is trying to squeeze money out of user or closing.
It's almost as if tech companies were entirely propped up by venture capital firms and didn't have to be profitable or sustainable and focused entirely on growth and now that interest rates have gone up and VC funding has shrunk, a lot of them actually have to cut costs and justify themselves in order to get funding.
It's kind of nice to see, to be honest and I hope it continues. I'm kind of sick of these companies and these tech bro dipshits unleashing their untested products on society willy nilly.
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Had no idea this was even at risk of shutting down...
so do we also know why they're shutting down?
Money. Always.
Gfycat had the excellent business model of hosting a load of high bandwidth content and not making any money from anyone
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Was there an agreement somewhere that I don’t know about to kill off half of the internet in July?
This is insane. I wonder what other relatively large internet service will go down.
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