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ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

Not really “all of a sudden”, this has been a long process. The often repeated enshittification thing is fully valid. The short version is:

  • start out
  • grow and expand as much as possible
  • bring in advertisers
  • make everyone depend on your service
  • abuse your powers, since everyone “needs” your service

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter are the more obvious culprits, but every big tech company does something similar, one way or another, even hardware companies like Intel or Nvidia

toughpat ,

Great article thanks for the link.

Shadywack ,
@Shadywack@lemmy.world avatar

nVidia was very popular as the scrappy upstart during the Riva128 and TNT/TNT2 Ultra days. Their popularity with users was very high at the time. Enshittification really got started with them during the early Geforce days and just spiraled around Geforce 3. When they got their asses spanked by ATI with the R300 series they had to de-shittify for a brief time.

sproketboy ,

ESG

Yoz ,

Whats ESG?

Lack0fCommunication ,

It’s like an abusive relationship, they know they can do things against their customers but most will come back willing to pay to make it work. This trend will not stop until enough people leave.

super_user_do ,
@super_user_do@feddit.it avatar

They’ve reached such an economic power that now they just want to be as profitable as possible, crushing any kind of competition of popular pro-user participation while profiting over our data and content

WE, the users, made them able to do so, giving them economic and sometime even geopolitical power. But WE still determine whether they can exist or not man, we still have the power to bring them down. It’s time to take back what’s ours!

SeaOtter ,

Cheap/free money has dried up.

WiseThat ,

That and market share. Between 2007 and now, a website could reliably grow as new people got connected to the internet and as internet usage naturally grew. Up till recently, a large proportion of people either didn’t use the internet at all, or had the internet, but didn’t use much. Prior to 2020 I knew lots of friends and family who simply did not own a home computer or maybe had like one laptop for the whole family (and a bunch of phones).

During that era, the attention was all on getting new users in the door. Make a good, cheap/free product, and people will come.

But NOW, most people already are using the internet like 14+ hours a day and have become full netizens. If companies want to keep growing, they can’t rely on new blood, they need to pivot to harvesting more from the people they already have.

kazumakiryu ,

Quite simple. Greed got to their heads and people became tired of dealing with their bullshit.

AlbyEvent ,

The biggest problem is that average people are used to the tech big companies provide, and lazy so that they won’t move to overall better alternatives. This means the companies don’t care about consequences of their actions, because there is NONE. Looking at it from the company’s perspective, why not make more money from people that won’t leave the site anyways?

notabird ,

Which is bad for society, but necessarily bad from a community stand point. Reddit has only gotten worse the more popular it had gotten. Starting over again in the next platform, maybe it could be better (without the monetization aspect). But someone has to cough up the dough for the servers. Non profit funding is happening; we’ll have to wait and see if that is enough.

bcron ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    CodeInvasion ,

    This is the only response required. I’m quickly becoming exhausted of reading everyone’s epiphany on “enshittification” as if it’s some natural eventuality. Yes the money must eventually come, but not always at the expense of platform quality. If anything the results we see from “enshittification” are due to the fact that most businesses fail eventually due to poor leadership.

    Just to echo what you have already said, money today is simply more expensive than it used to be. We even see the impacts of macro monetary decisions on households.

    Buying a house or a car on loan is far more expensive than it would have been a year and half ago. A $500,000 house in 2021 would cost $2,000 a month at 2.75% interest and 20% down. Today same that payment is $2,800 or 40% more expensive at 7.75% interest.

    Modern companies live on revolving debt, so if their suddenly gets 40% more expensive and that same amount of money is also less valuable at the same time (inflation), then they need to make up the difference somehow.

    Corporations are trying to find the balance between squeezing more revenue to pay their ever increasing debt bills while also not destroying the environment that attracted the users (their products) in the first place. Twitter and Reddit are just going about it horrifically because of poor business leadership and decision making. Netflix’s approach appears to be sustainable, and there is no doubt that YouTube will be fine in the long run.

    This is not meant to be apologetic to the decisions made by Twitter and Reddit. They’ve made their bed through their own horrible decisions, and now they’ve got to sleep in it.

    dragontamer ,

    Buying a house or a car on loan is far more expensive than it would have been a year and half ago. A $500,000 house in 2021 would cost $2,000 a month at 2.75% interest and 20% down. Today same that payment is $2,800 or 40% more expensive at 7.75% interest.

    Note that mortgages are not what companies pay for loans.

    fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLH0A3HYCEY

    CCC bonds yield is the “low-quality” bond market, and is closer to what you might expect a no-profit internet company to be borrowing money at. 2021 was 6%ish interest rates, but today is ~12%+.

    But 2016 was ~18%+ rates, its much more volatile than the mortgage market.

    CodeInvasion ,

    You are absolutely correct! I just couldn’t think of a way to further dive into that nuance, but I also wanted the example to be relatable and tangible. Thank you!

    ICastFist ,
    @ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

    I remember a video, I think from ColdFusion, explaining how the economy has been working on debt on top of debt since the 2008 crisis. The whole idea of “grow first, profit never later” is only possible thanks to endlessly rolling debts. A bubble begging to burst

    And the irony is that the same motherfuckers responsible for that problem will be responsible for this next one AND they’ll still stay rich, while we slave away having to deal with “economists” complaining that we want to own houses.

    Ramaniscence ,

    Couple this with the idea that Elon is proving you can do something drastically unpopular to increase profit, and most users still won’t abandon the platform. Tech companies, traditionally, move quickly off of FOMO to make a profit. Elon has brazenly validated many choices that other companies have generally considered risky up until his point.

    I would expect this to get even worse now that spez has doubled down. Many people talk about how Elon and spez are ruining their platforms, but at least for now, they have seemingly gotten away with it. Some users have migrated to other platforms, but many have stuck around.

    ChiefestOfCalamities ,

    Hit the nail on the head. Elon and spez don’t need to keep anywhere close to all their users for this to be a success. From a business perspective, they could lose a quarter of their users and still come out stronger if it means they’ve monetized the rest. Then add in the additional bonus of getting rid of all your ideological, principled troublemakers, leaving you with a platform full of high quality, addicted users that are easy to take advantage of. I don’t like it, but it really is a sensible strategy from a monetization perspective.

    wolfpack86 ,

    This is as accurate of a take as you can get. I did a scroll of reddit yesterday. It ain’t dead.

    cosmosaucer ,

    Very interesting, thanks!

    Any chance you know of any papers, ideally academic, that go into this, for further reading?

    joel_feila ,
    @joel_feila@lemmy.world avatar

    www.wired.com/…/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

    Enshitifacation. Twitter onlyy turned a profit once, YouTube is about 20% of global bandwidth and has turned a profit. companies don’t just want money they want the amount of money to always increase. So they turn to ever more exploitation to try to get it.

    davidalso ,

    Thanks for the link. That was a really good read. Even better on Doctorow’s own site, I think, because of all the extra links he provides.

    TheGrover ,

    It’s called Enshittifiction

    en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification

    raunz ,
    @raunz@mander.xyz avatar

    This

    Compu ,
    @Compu@lemmy.world avatar

    the problem is businesses r built on the concept of infinite growth, profit isn’t the thing that determines success, it’s the constant increase in profit, now things r quickly hitting the limit and they’re desperate to find any way to keep the number going up

    Shartacus ,

    Yep and we have a right to not use their shit services and start a new one while the investors get pissed

    TwoFace211 ,

    When did YouTube disable adblockers? In the last 24 hours?

    ArcBlades ,

    Well, its not exactly YouTube trying to block adblocker, rather Google in trying to disable the use of adblockers on chromium based browsers, with the reason being YouTube revenue from ads.

    However, they announced this in late 2022 and I am not sure weather or not it actually was implemented (Firefox user).

    Here is a link to a news article I found talking about this.

    Ruben ,

    This is not what this is about, YouTube will be implementing a three-strikes policy if you are using ad blockers: theverge.com/…/youtube-videos-disabling-ad-blocke…

    AlbyEvent ,

    The biggest problem is that average people are used to the tech big companies provide, and lazy so that they won’t move to overall better alternatives. This means the companies don’t care about consequences of their actions, because there is NONE. Looking at it from the company’s perspective, why not make more money from people that won’t leave the site anyways?

    ArcBlades ,

    Well would you look at that. I was not aware of this, thanks for letting me know!

    meldroc ,

    Ok, ad blockers may have to move to downloading and bit-bucketing ads to make it appear to Youtube’s servers that we have watched them. Worst case we may have to live with 30s pauses in videos.

    zloubida ,
    @zloubida@lemmy.world avatar

    They were testing things in the last few days.

    WolfhoundRO ,

    They were like this before also, but you’re right: now they’re much more overt and like they’re pushed or hurried by something… And that something is the prospect of recession. They’re not publicly announcing it, but their liquid assets are running low and they hit the ceiling for growth. YouTube is trying to maximize their exposure and revenue for ads by cracking down on adblockers; Twitter and Musk doing the dumbest decision just for money, the last one for the rate limitation being connected with not paying the bills to Google Cloud; Reddit introducing 3rd party API usage fees for, maybe, the same reason… They ran out of “smart” and covert solutions to milk their product, partners and clients of money and they would rather go down in greed. And they won’t even be directly responsible due to those golden parachutes

    PizzasDontWearCapes , (edited )

    In fact almost all companies start off willing to accept low profit margins, or even losses when they get started

    They are building a client base that will allow them to reach economies of scale or the ability to raise their prices based on reputation

    Social media companies are a special case because they use the general public to provide a large part of their product (content, and access to a marketable audience)

    None of these platforms can exist at break-even or better without charging users or leveraging users to charge advertisers

    As for the fediverse, I’m grateful that app devs and instance hosters are doing what they do for free, but wouldn’t begrudge them one bit if they charged me or served up ads to pay for their expenses and time. Anyone that demands this must remain cost and ad free better be building their own app and hosting their own instance

    cley_faye ,

    It’s more like you now notice this because it have visible effects, but it’s been going on for years. Restricting content, abusive rules and stupid changes have been the norm, all toward a centrally controlled experience geared toward generating internal profits on the back of users and content creators.

    It’s also why some prominent content creator started their own platforms, too.

    It’s just that now it reaches “intolerable” level for most end-users.

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