938
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
938 points (97.3% liked)
Technology
60003 readers
2585 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It's part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism's status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we're in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn't be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
Agreed. It's no coincidence that both Twitter and Reddit are shitting the bed at the same time.
Elon is pretty clearly an actual idiot, and has managed to get by thus far by just having a seemingly endless supply of fuck you money, but this is just capitalism doing the Predator bicep meme with foreign oligarchs to consolidate power.
I mean, it sort of is. Unless the fed is involved in this billionaire conspiracy also (which the nature of conspiracy theories will undoubtedly have someone saying of course the fed is in on it with the billionaires).
The simple answer really does make the most sense here. Interest rates are on the rise, and platforms like twitter and reddit have been around for a very long time and none of the venture capital backing them has ever turned a real profit despite the money being pumped into them. Investors will pull out money from the riskiest items first when interest rates rise, and the riskiest items are social media platforms that haven't demonstrated monetization potential even after a decade of use and monolithic control within their spaces. If a link aggregator like Reddit, which is really the only major player in its brand of social media can't turn a profit with basically no competition why would you continue supporting it?
Great point, and I do think you're right because that is the most sensible answer to what the motives behind these recent decisions are. There has been a nonstop flow of cheap debt for years that the fed is just now tightening up on.
But these business decisions also happen to align with the interests of deep pocketed bad actors. The why's of that are conspiracy theories.