I think the free money train in leaving the station and everyone is scrambling to be profitable. But that's just an assumption based on twitch and Reddit right now.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Cory Doctorow has some very interesting blogposts on the topic. He call it enshittification. It's more or less the business model of plattform Capitalism.
Start making alternatives, open source alternatives.
Economy is going bad, interest rate are up, and all Silicon Valley's company are built upon VC loans and expansion goals. Scale economy is bound to fail, and it's happening now.
This is the answer. There was a lot of free money and now there isn't. Companies gotta cough up profits or go bust.
@VoidCrow Everywhere you look you see overpaid executives and CEO’s who think they are actually brilliant enough to deserve their astronomical wages/compensation, and thus think they can do no wrong. Their ideas are always brilliant, and when the shit hits the fan, they blame their staff for a bad implementation and fire them first.
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 wish it was just the boomers. We have a whole new generation of greedy corporate bootlicks on their way up.
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.
But the good news is, tech is a highly disruptable industry. Barrier to entry is accessible for regular people.
And that's why we're here.
Reddit doesn't die because we left. They die in a few years when the Fediverse just works better than Reddit. And we fund that.
Speaking of, how do I kick in a few bucks to help out various Lemmy servers? Anyone know?
I was able to donate to Ernest who runs kbin. I can't find the link at the moment but it is floating around here somewhere.
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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!).
Reductivist, boring, and accurate. I’m impressed
The main sticking point is profitability. Not many platforms have managed to create a business model that's sustainably profitable. Reddit certainly hasn't. Now they're basically looking for a way to cash out so they're prioritising short term profitability over everything.
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Because most services we are using aren't sustainable. They all bleed money.
That's by design, isn't it? Dominate the market while operating at a loss then monetize once you have attained monopoly. Like Uber's strategy. This is an awful way of conducting a business IMHO, it falsifies the economy. I honestly believe they should put severe regulations on this.
ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are the reasons. I’m starting to see commercials that are using highest tier video tech. Just keep pushing.
That’s one community that’s worth supporting.
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These companies are overvalued. Currently we're operating in supply side economics where the wealthy have all the money and companies do everything they can to attract those big investment dollars.
But the truth is social media companies (despite being household names) don't really make the revenue that warrants their high valuation by investors. Investors are starting to figure this out, and now they're desperately throwing shit at the wall to try to keep from losing those big supply side dollars.
Social media companies can break even and employ a lot of people while doing so. They could have a good user experience, and it would be all fine. But they wouldn't have sky rocketing share prices doing that. The leadership wouldn't get fat bonuses. So they implement all these crazy schemes so they can make projections about future revenue.
It doesn't matter if these schemes actually will make money or not. They just need to show X number of users multiplied by Y additional revenue per user and that's enough to attract investment. And it doesn't matter if it destroys the company either, the people at the top will get their bonuses.
I wish we could just have oppressive Pharoahs because they cared a lot about sustainability.