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Shartacus ,

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

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

TheGrover ,

It’s called Enshittifiction

en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification

raunz ,
@raunz@mander.xyz avatar

This

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.

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?

    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.

    kazumakiryu ,

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

    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.

    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!

    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.

    sproketboy ,

    ESG

    Yoz ,

    Whats ESG?

    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.

    danboy4 ,

    Because investors are tired of the model where they dump a shit load of cash into something that has no good path for monetization. So they’re forcing them all to make money which hurts users.

    cavveman ,

    This worked when there was basically no interest on money that was lent from banks. But now when the interest is on the uprise. Well, naturally investors and banks pull the plug.

    To be fair. I’m quite surprised that the plug wasn’t pulled several years ago. Twitter has almost never being in the black, always in the red. Reddit has never publicly showed it’s numbers, not yet. But would not surprise me if it was red numbers every year.

    NutWrench ,
    @NutWrench@lemmy.world avatar

    Yup. You can’t monetize something whose value is determined by the whims of the people who use it. There are a million websites streaming porn that do a better job of monetizing content than YouTube.

    How did the “investors” think this business model was going to work, again? “Let’s get millions of people to donate their time and content . . . pay them pennies in return, monetize all their content for ourselves and here’s the good part . expect them to PAY for the privilege of accessing it?”

    KluEvo ,

    You forgot discord and the username changes, which happened a few weeks ago

    rookie ,
    @rookie@lemmy.world avatar

    and now they’re advertising stuff like subscription tiers and server shops, which makes me feel like they’re using a completely different service than I am

    ShittyKopper ,

    So when are we readying the Matrix homeservers?

    …and getting Element to care about chat UX rather than throwing Matrix at any other problem they can think of (no we do not need a vr metaverse but FOSS)

    snek ,
    @snek@lemmy.world avatar

    Could it have something to do with inflation?

    dragontamer ,

    The opposite. Inflation makes debt cheaper. If you borrow at 10%, and inflation is 10%, its like you borrowed money for free.

    The issue is that central banks increased interest rates significantly. If you need to borrow more money, its at 14%, 16%, or higher now.

    turt1e , (edited )

    I was having trouble wrapping my head around this at first but if the example below is correct I think I get it now.

    Suppose you borrow $10,000 from a lender at an interest rate of 5% per year, and you have to repay the loan in one year. Now, let’s assume that there is an inflation rate of 3% during that year.

    Without inflation:

    Loan amount: $10,000
    Annual interest rate: 5%.
    Interest payment: $10,000 * 5% = $500.
    Total repayment: $10,000 (loan amount) + $500. (interest payment) = $10,500.

    With inflation:

    Loan amount: $10,000
    Annual interest rate: 5%.
    Inflation rate: 3%.
    Interest payment: $10,000 * 5% = $500.
    Total repayment adjusted for inflation: $10,000 (loan amount) + $500 (interest payment) = $10,500.
    Inflation-adjusted value of repayment: $10,500 / (1 + 3%) = $10,145.63.

    In this example, the inflation rate of 3% effectively reduced the real value of the debt repayment to $10,145.63, making it cheaper in real terms. This is because the value of money decreased due to inflation, allowing you to repay the debt with dollars that have a lower purchasing power.`

    dragontamer ,

    $ is ambiguous. You need to say 2023$ vs 2022$. Once you have year-$ in front, everything becomes super-obvious.

    Loan amount: 2022-$10,000

    Total repayment: 2023-$10,500

    Except April2023$ is 4.9% less value than April2022$: bls.gov/…/consumer-prices-up-4-9-percent-from-apr…

    So April2023-$10,500 is equivalent to April2022-$9985.50, inflation-adjusted.

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