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sknob ,

Short answer : Enshittification.

Long and brilliant explanation here : www.wired.com/…/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

NewEnglandRedshirt ,
@NewEnglandRedshirt@lemmy.world avatar

Jesus. It’s articles like this that make me both be thankful for Doctorow and his ability to put tech shit in terms is non-techies can understand.

at_an_angle ,

I find it fitting that an article on enshitification is so hard to read because of enshitification on the site.

hitmyspot ,

Seeing boing boing articles in my Twitter feed was one of the reasons I started using it years ago. When junk started filtering in, that’s when I stopped using it. When musk started messing with politics and using Twitter to push his views, that’s when I nuked it.

ThatsDrSpaceJunk2U ,
@ThatsDrSpaceJunk2U@lemmy.world avatar

That was an excellent article. Thanks for sharing!

ccunix ,

Original on Cory Doctorow’s own site here

slipperydippery ,

Thanks dirty looking the original article, that was a great read!

theragu40 ,

That is one of the best summaries of the Internet I’ve ever read. Maybe the best. That is quite the article, thanks for sharing.

TheGreenGhost ,

This concept is also why I’m so hopeful for federated software. The federated model means that there’s no single instance that holds all the power. Many of these instances are run by admins of their own kindness and initiative. And at worst, if any instance were to start being “enshittified,” people could easily move to another instance and continue participating in the greater network.

Between all of what we’ve seen unfold in the last few months, and even weeks, on Twitter and Reddit, it’s safe to say that “enshittification” could be reaching critical mass. That’s why I came here, after all, and I’m looking forward to seeing this community simply persist here on the web.

bionicjoey , (edited )

My fear is that even if you’re correct, as the internet monoliths that have been built on the past decade fall to federated software, we will lose forever an immeasurable amount of arts and culture that has been stockpiled in these corporate spaces. Think of all the great educational YouTubers whose videos won’t be able to be passed on to whatever the next thing is if YouTube collapses.

YourHuckleberry ,

Those folks will re-upload old content onto the new platforms.

nuachtan ,

Patreon?

Dr_Cog ,
@Dr_Cog@mander.xyz avatar

Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to happen. Video files are huge (tens or hundreds of gigabytes) and many creators delete old videos once they are uploaded to Youtube so that they don’t run out of space or keep having to buy more and more drive space. Even tech YouTubers like MKBHD pull clips from their old videos directly off YouTube because they no longer have the originals (he did a podcast talking about this)

C_M ,

That is stupid. I get that smaller creators it maybe lesss feasible to backup. Because they don’t make enough money. But a video file, certainly if you put same compression as yt, isn’t that big. Say one gb per vid, that is 30 gb a month (say times 3 for redundency) you have less than 1tb a month, of lees than 60 bucks of storage drives a month. Small price pay for someone that has a million dollar studio to not be trusting on yt for your videos. But thay also disn’t talk about the risk of putting your 2fa in the cloud, so i am not that surprised

can ,

Many do not have million dollar studios though.

C_M ,

I get that. Thats why i included that it is a bit different for smaller creators. So yes, we cant assume there are a lot of backups for if youtube decide to go more evil. But I think of you make your money with youtube, you should invest in storing your own backups. If only for if your channel get hacked and they delete al your videos and youtube cant/wont help to restore them. And that is why i get a bit sad if a big channel says something like this, because in my eyes its very bad practice to relay on yt for your backups. ( Assuming they dont do a seperate backup amd only just rip from yt because of ease of access).

bionicjoey ,

Not all of them. What about the ones who are no longer active on the platform? The ones people forgot about? The ones who have died? You think there will be 100% coverage? In the case of YouTube, many channel operators don’t actually keep a local copy of all their videos, since the files would be too big. So the only copy is the one on YouTube.

Spzi ,

What about the ones who are no longer active on the platform? The ones people forgot about? The ones who have died? You think there will be 100% coverage?

Maybe that’s not that much of a bad thing. The day had the same length before YouTube was a thing, and people spent 100% of their time. Differently. Some things might have been pushed out of sight by YouTube, and a dying giant can create room for new things to grow.

bionicjoey ,

The Library of Alexandria burning down wasn’t a good thing. Any time human knowledge that has been collected gets scattered it’s bad

Spzi ,

I get your point, but the comparison barely holds. The Library of Alexandria had many unique works of cultural and scientific importance. YouTube is full of mundane content, mostly entertainment. Especially the scientific parts are merely re-tellings of other works which do not live on the same platform. Nobody stores their scientific findings on YouTube alone. Many creators do not upload to YouTube alone.

The more people value a specific video, the higher the chance it got copied elsewhere. So for the important parts, we probably have decent coverage.

WhiteTiger ,
@WhiteTiger@lemmy.world avatar

undefined> The Library of Alexandria had many unique works of cultural and scientific importance. YouTube is full of mundane content, mostly entertainment.

Are you serious? The vast majority of culturally significant artifacts were, at the time of their creation, mundane and/or entertainment.

DickPuncher ,

What about all the old art and other stuff that hasn’t been kept around? They probably weren’t worth preserving through the ages, if it’s good enough we’ll see it again

YourHuckleberry ,

Those folks will re-upload old content onto the new platforms. I know people don’t like to talk about money, especially in relation to the fediverse, but it’s important. If you want someone to dedicate a large portion of their energy into making high-quality content, it’s not unreasonable for them to want to make money doing it. How can we get money into the hands of content creators without allowing centralized control of the content?

nuachtan ,

I think I can understand your point. Large ‘“media” companies will horde the content and refuse to let it see the light of day because they believe they own it. I don’t think that’s how it would go down. Anything I’ve ever produced to be put on the web still exists somewhere on a hard drive that I control. I doubt the big name educational YouTubers are deleting the source material as soon as it goes up to YouTube.

Besides, a lot of the good ones have already moved to Nebula as well. If thought like educational YouTube you should check it out.

bionicjoey ,

Educational YouTube was just an example. But there is a real danger of culturally important media being lost. See cases like the Operation Soda Steal video

nuachtan ,

Thanks for the link. That was an entertaining watch! Still, the narrator states that he is sure the original exists on a hard drive somewhere. He also gives a solution towards the end of the video. If you really like something download it.

SgtSilverLining ,
@SgtSilverLining@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Absolutely. I was a big part of the non professional music production side of YouTube a decade ago. Imagine getting 100+ new songs every week, from talented artists putting everything they had into their work. It was incredible! This year I got into data hoarding and looked into downloading my old favorite songs… Turns out most of them deleted their old work from YouTube when they went pro or simply closed out their channel for personal reasons. Not even the compilation channels were still around. Hundreds of thousands of songs are just gone, along with the records of that community’s culture.

Ggtfmhy ,

Not an amateur producer at all, but a few years ago I was listening to a lot of YouTube mixes while working. Lofi stuff might be cookie cutter elevator music to you, but I loved some mixes over others. I got attached to some of them, and discovered a ton of artists that way. These were single, long videos with many tracks each.

My heart sank when I started finding some of them turn into broken links. I figured out YouTube-DL and got to archiving. I found some reuploads of playlists I liked such as the wonderful Morning Coffee by the amazing SoulSearchAndDestroy (the lead song, damn fine coffee by mtbrd, is one of my favorite lofi tracks ever). Other playlists have been lost to time.

Sometimes I skim through my archived playlists to find a song I can remember in my head, and sometimes I don’t find the song, and it’s possible that I will never find it again. Again, silly for this to happen with lofi of all things (one of the most dispassionate and almost disposable genres of music).

I still think YouTube is unmatched for music discovery. Yes, you’re clicking on songs for “bad” reasons such as the thumbnail or recognizing the curator’s channel, but it worked pretty damn well for me.

SolarNialamide ,

7 years ago I got introduced to this really small local artist by a friend who had just a handful of songs on his YouTube channel, but they were all incredible. I could listen to music while I worked but it wasn’t super practical to have my phone out for it, so I always converted songs from YouTube to mp3 and downloaded them to put on my mp3-player. I did that with this artists songs as well. A few years later, I wanted to show another friend this music, and the whole channel was deleted. Sometimes I wonder if I and the artist itself are the only people who have a recording of his songs in the world.

mysoulishome ,
@mysoulishome@lemmy.world avatar

Love this take

1st ,

That was fantastic- sums up the stages pretty well

Tigbitties ,
@Tigbitties@kbin.social avatar

Good read. Thanks.

Rinox ,

I think it’s a consequence of higher interest rates drying up VC money, meaning that tech companies now have to actually be profitable, rather than just grow.

If the plan was grow now, profit later, then later has come

InverseParallax ,

Nailed it, investors are demanding profit increases, it’s not just interest rates (though they’re the main reason) but also the corporate tax cuts in 2018 basically dumped a ton of profit onto corporations because they repatriated all their offshore cash they’d been hoarding.

That bump lasted 2 years, but the expectation of higher revenue is still there, it doesn’t matter if you got lucky at slots last month, if you make your normal salary this month investors will be absolutely pissed.

insomniac ,
@insomniac@sh.itjust.works avatar

This sounds too stupid to be real but I was working for one of the largest corporations in the world during this period and we were congratulated on 20% growth even though we did nothing. Of course we didn’t get an extra bonus or anything but they acted like we had an incredible year when we really just had an average year with a massive tax cut.

Then the next year, our goal was to grow at 20% again and when we missed it by 17%, no one got a bonus or raise.

This timeline is the stupid one.

EddieTee77 ,

This is what irritates me. You still made money just not as much as you wanted or hoped so your company punishes you. You can’t have infinite growth

thanks_shakey_snake ,

You can’t have infinite growth

Every publicly-traded company: “Hold my beer”

Bautznersenf ,

Most companies really are that retarded because everyone wants to look good and take credit for every great thing happening. People like that should not be in charge of anything.

orphiebaby ,
@orphiebaby@lemmy.world avatar

Capitalism: “Numbers go brrrrr”

AgentOrange ,

This is also a great example of why higher interest rates aren’t automatically a terrible thing. In general, it’s probably a good sign for the economy that companies are expected to be profitable. Means resources are being used well. The limitless VC money kinda meant any dumb idea regardless of merit got funding.

BullsOnParade ,
@BullsOnParade@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah this is critical. These promises for money later mean that all sorts of stupid ideas were being funded, and therefore people hired, etc, but now that’s coming to a close. Companies and investors will be more likely to scrutinize spending (as they should) and see how to rightsize with reality and line of sight to profit. For significantly more complex reasons, it’s similar to an individual borrowing themselves into crazy debt, and banks eventually determining that they need more than credit/promises to keep seeding you cash.

Time to pay back some promises.

AlmightySnoo ,
@AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world avatar

any dumb idea regardless of merit got funding

That’s still the case and high interest rates haven’t really fixed that because they are still not high enough. Just look at how any company mentioning “AI” in their earnings call gets extra billions in market cap overnight without having a real product yet.

MsPenguinette ,

I wish we lived in a society where not everything needed to be profitable. People deserve treats and sucks to have things that made our lives better go awake because shareholders demand money

AlmightySnoo ,
@AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world avatar

Whether we like the ongoing enshittification of Reddit or not, I think it’s fair that shareholders expect a return on their investment and they have the right to pressure spez to seek aggressive monetization of the platform.

That problem wouldn’t have existed if Reddit was a non-profit though, like the Wikimedia Foundation.

hellequin67 ,

expect a return on their investment and they have the right to pressure spez to seek aggressive monetization of the platform.

Whilst I agree that investors have everybright to expect a return on investment I think this could have been resolved and a number of ways which didn’t include alienating a large proportion of the user base.

AlmightySnoo ,
@AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t think investors are the ones who told spez how to run things. They likely simply pressured him to make changes as quick as possible to make Reddit profitable. Investors don’t usually specify how to generate that profit though, otherwise they’d run their own companies.

darthsid ,

Exactly I’m tired of all these capitalism apologists. The aim is to innovate, there must be a more decent way to monetise or profit. If pursuing such hardline tactics means profitable at the expense of your customers and enshitification of your platform, I’d urge you to reconsider your business setup.

bodmcjones ,

I think in part there’s an essential misunderstanding of current events at the core of Reddit’s behaviour (not yours, I mean - spez/investors/etc).

Historically the rule was supposed to be ‘if it’s free, you’re the product’, which is to say that our attention (and profiles and demographics) were on sale to advertisers. The big recent development is someone figuring out, or thinking they’ve figured out, how to monetise us a different way - specifically, by using the things we create as training data for AI. A sensible organisation would continue to balance these two possible cash flows and, since both really require user retention to remain profitable in the long run, seek a middle ground. But the perception is that there’s more money in the training data than there is in the user attention, so they focus on maximising that and spit on the users. The obvious consequence is that they lose users and their source of training data dries up.

AlmightySnoo ,
@AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world avatar

You’re conflating investors, who lent Reddit the money and want a return on it, and spez, who actually runs the business and made those bad decisions. The investors weren’t the ones who told spez how to create the return on investment, they merely pressured him to find a way to do so. Do you think Warren Buffett tells Apple how to run things? I’d be surprised if an old fart like him had any say in how iPhones should be designed or how the Apple Store should operate.

poVoq ,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

The capitalism apologist is going to tell you that this is necessary for innovation as Venture Capital firms fund 100 start-ups of which 99 fail to turn a profit, and thus the 1 that does has to make up for the other 99 by making extreme profits.

But that that is just as flawed logic as thinking that there can be a “decent” capitalism that doesn’t destroy everything in its path in its pursuit of profit. If you are trying to be “decent” you will be out-competed by someone else under the current economic setup.

Steve ,
@Steve@compuverse.uk avatar

The modern Neoliberal capitalist philosophy of shareholders being the only priority, isn’t the only capitalist philosophy.

The Embedded liberalism after the new deal, worked quite well. Since the employees are making the products, and management is making the decisions, while the shareholders don’t directly make anything for the company; People understood that the shareholders were the last priority, in getting profits. It’s why worker wages scaled with productivity until the 80s.

That’s when the Neoliberal capitalist philosophy took hold and gained power. First the Republicans with Regan, then Democrats with Clinton, then the global economy, since so much of it is driven by the US.

SolarNialamide ,

You’re right, to some extent, but you have to ask yourself why neoliberalism took hold and gained power. The problem with social democracy, even though it’s the best version of a shitty economic system, is that it’s still capitalism and at some point greedy assholes are going to want more, and will start influencing politics to get what they want. That’s why neoliberalism became a thing, despite the succes of social democracy/embedded liberalism for the 99%, because there still was a 1% with much more power and influence. Neoliberalism was a planned and calculated attack on social democracy decades in the making by groups like the Mont Pelerin Society and individuals like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Reagan was just a public symptom of this disease under the surface. If you keep capitalism in place in any way, it will always eventually trend towards it’s natural endpoint of 0.01% being obscenely, unfathomably rich and the rest getting fucked over in every possible way.

Bautznersenf ,

"0.01% being obscenely, unfathomably rich and the rest getting fucked over in every possible way."

Sounds more like Soviet Russia and its satellite states.

EdgeOfToday ,

I don’t think the problem is earning a profit, the problem is the need to earn even more profit than last year. Investors aren’t content to buy into a company like Reddit just to let it continue in a steady state. They want to double their money in a few years and then cash out. They don’t care if they destroy a valuable service that many people enjoy.

olibleu ,

Remains to be seen whether alienating a significant portion of you users is bad for the bottom line though. Twitter is still alive…

Bautznersenf ,

Twitter has been around for so long, it takes some time to kill. The latest move to allow access only to verified users together with meta may actually kill it though.

cynar ,

There are a number of ways things can function that way. Unfortunately, they don’t scale well.

This is part of my hope of federalisation, it lets a group of small entities act as a single large entity. It also lets non-profit and profit making work together. The for-profit provide the brute force, the non-profits keep them from going off the rails too far. It might be the workaround we need.

Also, be the change you want. For-profit businesses often win due to the far better returns. More people are willing to pour the effort into a business that could make them rich than a charity that never will.

assassin_aragorn ,

I think we’d see loads of improvements if the philosophy went from “be as profitable as possible” to “just be profitable”. You’re 15% lower than last year, but still profiting? That’s just a smaller bonus for all employees and a smaller dividend for the investors, after putting a healthy amount of it into savings.

There’s no concept of “enough”. That’s the big problem. It goes for both economics and career advancement. There doesn’t always have to be a “higher”. It’s okay to say “it isn’t worth it to go further”.

tool ,
@tool@r.rosettast0ned.com avatar

I don’t think the problem is so much profitability as it is the demand/expectation for endless growth. It becomes a positive feedback loop and is completely unsustainable after a certain point.

You know what else is endless growth? Cancer.

pulaskiwasright ,

This seems like a non sequitur: what is good about only profitable ventures getting funding? These unprofitable ventures were creating good jobs and providing enjoyable and sometimes useful products to consumers for low prices. So why is it good that funding is drying up?

damnYouSun ,

That rather assumes that it actually matters that VC money is being wasted.

After all it keeps the money in circulation and keeps people employed. They then get paid and will then buy useful things from companies that do make profit, so in the end it all works out. It’s only bad for the investors, but that’s always been the thing about investment, it’s always been a risk, and it’s never been guaranteed.

Confused_Idol ,

If the goal is simply to keep money circulating and people employed, there are more efficient ways to do that.

Reddit, as a whole only has about 2000 employees.

bionicjoey ,

“only 2000 employees” Reddit should have maybe 200 employees. 2000 is an insane number of people for a single relatively simple piece of software.

can ,

Especially since they have free content moderation. What are all those people even doing? They couldn’t even keep Victoria for AMA’s.

zos_kia ,

No. I don’t mean to be rude but most of that message is wrong.

VC Money is very much not drying up. 2023 has seen record rounds in most markets. What is drying up is “VC Money for early stage startups with no revenue, no traction, and barely a functional idea”, but even that is not new it has been going on since at least 2018. Remember that guy who raised 1.5M$ with an app that just let you say “Yo” to your contacts ? That was 10 years ago. Those times are dead and buried.

Then the link between VC markets health and interest rates is… contentious to say the least. VCs don’t borrow money - they raise funds from family offices and individual investors, every 2 or 3 years. So every change to the financial landscape will have a progressive effect over 3 years, not a brutal one after a few months. Also you have to bear in mind that the people who bankroll VCs are looking for performance of at least 2X over 10 years. Interests would have to go up to 7% to even be in competition with VC investment. Of course there’s a psychological aspect to investment so the effet is not ZERO but it’s not as automatic as saying “interest go up => vc dry up”.

Finally, the companies we are talking about are in vastly different situations and not necessarily looking for VC money. There is no explaining their behaviour with a single cause, what we’re seeing is probably a cluster effect, because executives are like fish they always follow the movement of the other fish in their field.

  • Youtube has been profitable for years and is part of Google which is massively profitable. VC Money has no bearing on their decisions - they are in a quasi-monopoly with no credible competition and want to squeeze their users out of greed
  • Reddit has a long and complicated cap table including some very powerful institutional investors so they are aiming at an IPO rather than more VC money. They’re in a pretty good place actually with 1.5 billion MAU, and in the process of shaking off the 10% of hardcore users who are super hostile to monetization. Their monetization is so low (<2$/month/user, when the competition is 10 to 20 times higher) that they could bear to lose 50% of their userbase and still make bank with the remaining ones. They don’t need VC money right now.
  • Twitter is… uh… well there’s no telling what Elon is up to but he is absolutely not raising any VC money especially after the shit he’s pulled off since the buy-off. I think it’s just a bunch of bad moves because he’s inept at the social media game.
dhork ,

Their monetization is so low (<2$/month/user, when the competition is 10 to 20 times higher) that they could bear to lose 50% of their userbase and still make bank with the remaining ones.

What’s left unsaid here (but I’m sure you realize) is that these same users whose monetization is so low also provide most of the content and moderation on the site. When you spread out the value of that among the (human) userbase, the total value returned to Reddit by each human is higher.

Steve thought he was targeting the AI with this move, but in reality he has been charging his most engaged users. If he’s upset that Apollo has turned a profit, the correct move was to acknowledge that one guy has done a better job than Reddit’s team, not tell all the users that Apollo helped bring to Reddit that they were no longer welcome

zos_kia ,

I think they’re operating under the assumption that there is no shortage of people willing to work for clout on a leading social media. They think the users they lose are replaceable and you know what it’s not an unreasonable expectation. It sucks but that’s just the way it is, there will always be people willing to post memes and delete nazi comments.

Only time will tell, but it’s not uncommon to kick out power users when they get uppity and think they run your platform. Way easier/cheaper to fire unpaid volunteers than tech-bros with Silicon Valley salaries.

suspecm ,
@suspecm@lemmy.world avatar

I’m not so sure about Google nowadays. What started out as an everyday product killing, ended up as the first of many. They killed Stadia from one day to the other, and then started to basically sell and kill everything that is not massively profitable to the point they sold their domain distribution as well to Squarespace. That does not seem like something a massive monopoly with no regards to investor opinion does.

zos_kia ,

Well i don’t know about that. They still generate 15B$ in profit every quarter. Sure they’re losing some growth, but even amid a historic advertising budget bust they are still beating expectations.

When i mentioned their monopolistic position i was talking more specifically about Youtube, but anyway buying and killing off products is standard operating procedure for a company this size on a market this mature. There’s nothing alarming about Google’s health.

BelEnd ,

99% of their profit comes from their search engine ad revenue though. Google has only ever had one truly profitable product and the advent of chatgpt, driven by their only true rival in Microsoft, has them scared shitless. They are way behind in the AI department and it’s the only thing out their that fundamentally threatens Googles goose with the golden eggs: their search engine.

cryball ,

Couldn’t it be argued that it’s a mistake from reddit to think of themselves as being comparable to platforms that make more money per user?

For example reddit and youtube are completely different in terms of the nature of the platform. Could attempting to monetize an average reddit user to the level of those using youtube might be a mistake? Keep in mind that reddit has much lower overhead for keeping the service running.

The mental image I’m going after is a country that exports mainly wheat arguing that its’ exports should be valued the same as a country that produces complex electronics. The products are at a different realm of complexity. Commodities should be valued for what they are and not be confused with higly refined products.

zos_kia , (edited )

Couldn’t it be argued that it’s a mistake from reddit to think of themselves as being comparable to platforms that make more money per user?

You’re right it could very much be argued. I mean isn’t that the whole underlying question ? I would imagine that anybody who invests in reddit has the assumption that yes, you can monetize comparably to other platforms. Or even cut the pear in half and sit comfortably at 10$/user which would already be a fucking money printer at >400M MAU.

Now whether they are right or wrong in their thesis is anybody’s guess. Even after the recent debacle reddit is still in a very good position, but social media is such a clown world that you can never really tell.

SixTrickyBiscuits ,

Yeah, I was going to say, I think Google is a wee bit beyond VC money with their, you know, 60 billion dollar annual net income lol.

SixTrickyBiscuits ,

Yeah I think with a net income of $60 billion annually Google is a wee bit past needing VC money lol.

zos_kia ,

Google in panic mode cause they don’t know if they’ll be able to close their 10M$ round from local VCs 😱

SixTrickyBiscuits ,

Yeah, Google has a net income of $60 billion. They are way past the VC money stage.

leanleft ,
@leanleft@lemmy.ml avatar

maybe inflation.
just because U don’t see a price tag doesnt mean its not there.
if you cant see the product, then you are the product!
the state of wellbeing had never really been that great to start.

wildekek ,

Venture capital has shifted very quickly from companies HOSTING content to companies SCRAPING content (LLM’s). This means renting compute is now very expensive and moving into the hands of ‘AI’ companies. It’s like trying to fly a plane while monkeys are tearing the wings of.

TrueStoryBob ,

That plus interest rates are going up. For twenty years VC’s has near limitless cheap loans, now they’ve got to be marginally more careful than before and the companies which grew large but only ever broke even (if that) now need to pivot to profitability to justify all the debt they took on. Would not be surprised if Uber and Lyft start really hiking rates soon.

MargotRobbie ,
@MargotRobbie@lemmy.world avatar

I think most taxi companies have adapted, so they are pretty competitive now.

XanXic ,

I’d say because it’s in the air. Obviously companies watch each other. Like the layoffs in January. The initial wave was the companies that needed to do it and had been planning it for awhile. Then when there was blood in the water everyone was doing it because then they aren’t big mean company, they are just another company doing layoffs right now. Lost in the crowd. It’s already come out some companies did it purely because big companies like Twitter and Google did it.

But we are seeing a big increase in anti-consumer moves because there seems to be no backlash. Like there’s the vocal minority, but it seems by and large a huge amount of the customers for these tech companies are unwilling to move away.

Every time Twitter does something some move off Twitter, and they get such growth! But then eventually stuff like Mastadon’s activity has a noticeable decline over time and Twitter carries on. Some people go back, some quit Twitter entirely. But these are fractions of a percentage probably. They still have the biggest celebrities and a crap ton of users.

Netflix just cracked down on password sharing, in a move that people were calling foolish. The outcry was everywhere and anytime Netflix was mentioned was 20 comments saying they cancelled that day. But subscriptions are up, Netflix won.

YouTube has been pushing more and more ads on users, there isn’t as big as a direct backlash. Like there was more outcry on removing the dislike button. Which…no one cares now lol. But YouTube pushing’s more ads, and they don’t seem to be loosing money for it. I’m sure they are trying to find the ‘breaking point’ for customers. But either people really are willing to put up with 2 30second unskippable ads every 5 minutes or premuim subscriptions are skyrocketing as they ruin the free experience.

WB killed a ton of shows outright, basically burned a bunch of media and shuttered a ton of HBO Max’s staff. People upset… Twitter all a buzz. Now it’s back to HBO is the best streaming service (Which it is lol)

Like it just keeps going. I think it’s just a combination of companies making terrible blunders steal the spotlight from each other and society as a whole has a 3 day memory. The Reddit protests are already cold news because Twitter just DDOS’d itself. People who saw all this with Reddit and call it disgusting moves by the company and the unspoken bond is broken, always end their diatribe with something like “Well I’ll just use old.Reddit with an ad blocker” like they are winning when they still provide Reddit with their usage.

People like us who walk away and move to spots like this are the minority of a minority. It’s up in the air how many will stay and how many will slowly forget their outrage at Reddit and go back.

veroxii ,

People! What a bunch of bastards!

depressed_submissive ,
@depressed_submissive@lemmy.fmhy.ml avatar

It’s up in the air how many will stay and how many will slowly forget their outrage at Reddit and go back.

If I wasn’t already that truth would make me depressed.

5redie8 ,

Thanks for putting this into words, so frustrating but true. People just can’t be assed to care if it means a mild inconvenience for themselves.

MisterMoo ,
@MisterMoo@kbin.social avatar

Agreed. These companies learned that internet outrage is generally indicative of nothing actionable.

designated_fridge ,

Most of the aspects have already been covered but I would want to add one:

This was always the plan, it just wasn’t as highly prioritised as growth.

I work as a developer at a big tech company. We (the company) had our roadmap and it was mostly about getting more users. The more users you have the day the economy turns - the better off you are (… If you manage to turn an profit).

So when the economy went to shit and we (and other tech companies) no longer can loan money for free to cover our running expenses - the priorities shift. Working towards attracting more users is only going to increase your costs at the point and you don’t want to run out of money. So all roadmaps changed and cost saving efforts became the highest prio all of the sudden.

ultrahamster64 ,
@ultrahamster64@lemmy.world avatar

This was always the plan, to put a world in your hand…

squaresinger ,

And then squeeeeze it until the last drop of blood dripps out of it.

Raildrake ,

Gain a monopoly, get users addicted and reliant, then change the rules of the game and hope they stick with you. It’s happening now because of the economy for sure, but it’s not like it’s surprising.

merc ,

It’s the end of cheap credit.

fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=16J5X

That graph shows the Federal Funds Effective Rate. Until recently, VCs could borrow money while effectively paying zero interest. That meant their investments weren’t under any pressure to become profitable any time soon. Now, borrowing is expensive. VCs don’t want to loan any more money, and want their investments to pay off. Reddit and other pre-IPO companies are scrambling to become profitable.

I assume the big companies like YouTube / Google going against people blocking ads are just taking advantage of the chaos.

As for Twitter: Elon Musk is an idiot.

whoisearth ,

You forgot one thing. Fuck /u/spez

nobody5050 ,

I respect you took the time to link this

zos_kia ,

This meme is repeated everywhere ad nauseam and is blatantly wrong. VCs do not borrow money from the banks. The argument goes the other way around, and implies that the people who bankroll VCs would rather lend their money through banks than invest it - but even that is bullshit, you’d need interest rates in the double digits to even begin to be in competition with your average VC performance.

Also not 100% of VC money is american so Fed rates are not as relevant as you think. Please stop spreading that nonsense.

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

It’s not just american banks that are increasing their rates. We live in a globally connected economy and almost all countries are impacted by the american economy as well as some of the reasons causing inflation in the US (the pandemic and the war). Most countries are affected by the inflation and most countries are combating it by hiking interest rates.

zos_kia ,

Of course everything is connected but it’s not always 1 to 1, nor are the effects always immediate. Some economies absorb different impacts in different ways.

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

The point being made is that it’s more expensive to borrow, do you dispute this?

zos_kia ,

Of course i don’t. I dispute the fact that interest rates are a significant factor in the VC market.

BURN ,

Ads pay basically nothing now and VC funding has dried up. Most of these tech companies operated at a loss and are now being pressured into becoming profitable since investors don’t want to throw money at them anymore.

Data privacy laws have also gotten better, cutting off another revenue stream that was typically used.

Beliriel ,

But when did VC money get flushed in? I doubt that it just somehow stops out of nowhere. I mean all these companies weren’t exactly founded at the same time.

AnObscureTenet ,

During the pandemic VC slowed to a crawl and the stock market went to shit. While the market eventually rebounded VC is doing so MUCH more slowly. VC scum doesn’t care about innovation, it cares about making money. If there’s some level of risk it shrinks like balls in a January pool and it takes forever to coax the little guys out.

SpezCanLigmaBalls ,
@SpezCanLigmaBalls@lemmy.world avatar

Interest rates def have a factor in this also

hydra ,
@hydra@lemmy.world avatar

Tech companies were only favorable to their users during the corporate Web 2.0 genesis when these companies had to lure educated users in with extremely convenient free services, but they always did and continue to do so under terms of service that are intentionally made as hard to read walls of legalese bullshit, so they always click accept and hand them power by moving there.

These companies usually are either publicly traded or aspire to be publicly traded, and are backed by venture capital loaned to them by banks and investors.

Then during the late 2000s and early 2010s these corporations gobbled up web traffic by having all the valuable information and communities behind their walls. This drove their operating costs up a lot but it was no problem, since the zero interest rate policy was in effect so these now-megacorps had basically interest-free loans to get infinite money to finance the platform. However they realized around the mid 2010s that they controlled the vast majority of the web so they realized they could be as greedy as they wanted since no one is going to ever step up to them (YouTube is a shining example of this) and ever since the mid-late 2010s they started nerfing and crippling the user experience in order to please their investors and ad networks. This process was extremely slow initially to minimize the backlash. They applied the boiling frog strategy and it worked.

By the early 2020s this was in full effect: websites do not respect your privacy and try to shove trackers and ads whenever and wherever they legally can, search engines are manipulated to put sponsored and SEO spam links first rather than useful answers, sites are implementing login walls to make sure the valuable content they hold hostage can only be accessed once they have the data of users, discourse is being controlled and micromanaged by corporations with automated censorship, mystery echo chamber algorithms, shadowbans and wordlists, news sites have article limits and paywalls now. It got so bad that it’s already harming society as a whole because it’s causing polarization and these platforms now have enough power to theoretically manipulate elections in some really bad cases.

This is a process known as enshittification: start great then become shit and die. Now that the zero interest rate policy is over, and interest rates started climbing up it means silicon valley free money is over so they can no longer afford to be boiling frogs, they are turning up the heat to 11 and just roasting the frog alive. In other words, the enshittification cycle is becoming exponentially faster and it’s only going to get worse for the corporate web and its users. The only solution is returning to decentralized technologies like Web 1.0 used to be, but it’s extremely hard since free as in you pay with your data services are addictive like crack cocaine.

afraid_of_zombies2 ,

I am starting to miss the echo chamber of YouTube. I am a fairly leftwing atheist in a solid blue state that ranks near last in religious observance. And yet roughly a quarter of the suggested videos/ads I get are for things like Epoch Times, Prager U, HeGetsUs, PJ Media.

Alright so the only way I am clicking on that stuff is by accident. From the advertisement point of view this is worse than selling iceboxes to Inuit, this is like trying to sell ribeye steaks to vegans with no money.

Which makes you wonder what the future holds. Say you are Epoch Times and you find out the YouTube is pushing your product on people who actively don’t want to buy it how much longer are you going to pay Alphabet for a failed advertising campaign?

rob64 ,

It's either that, or these specific groups are opening up their parameters and trying to reach/convert outside their base. Which sounds about right for religious groups.

meldroc , (edited )

There’s also a political agenda at play. The Wall Street madman caste finds left wing popular movements to be obnoxious, as they undermine their business model and cost them money.

Note how Reddit’s admins would turn a blind eye to Nazi subreddits and shit like r/The_Donald for years, until the entire planet screamed at Reddit to exercise some basic asshole control.

But when people started talking about punching Nazis, the banhammer came out immediately. Gotta love Reddit’s totally unbiased policies…

When left wing groups get big enough to get things done, Wall Street pulls strings and then you see bans, shadowbans, biased policies & enforcement against activist groups and marginalized groups (LGBT groups getting NSFW’d out of existence), trolling & astroturfing campaigns, mass propaganda, abuse of user data (Cambridge Analytica), ratting activists out to authoritarian governments, nerfing community moderation and letting Nazis go to town while yawning when users complain, while at the same time, anyone left-wing gets instabanned for jaywalking…

thawed_caveman ,

As discussed here:

Honestly they do it so consistently that i’m starting to wonder if they have a choice.

A common way to do things for tech startups is that they get venture capital funds, use them to run the business at a loss hoping to acquire market dominance, and then use market dominance to turn a profit. I think a lot of tech startups that we know are currently in phase 2, meaning they’ve thrown money out the window for years and are now trying to recoup their investments.

Also, Reddit wants to go public and Twitter already is. This is relevant because investors are animals, all they see is short-term profit, and they use their voting power to make the company behave that way.

There’s a common thread between both my theories: it’s shareholder capitalism. I say this as a lifelong shareholder myself, shareholders ruin everything.

erre ,
@erre@feddit.win avatar

If interest rates are high, I’m sure they’re hard up for capital. The free money they’ve grown to depend on is drying up and they need to make money themselves asap.

dustyData ,

Yup, tech bro culture is wasting someone’s else money to play with computers. No money, no game time for baby. Silicon Valley is in a panic because the infinite spout of money suddenly stopped, and there’s a line of pissed people asking for their money back. They promised the world, now it’s time to deliver and turns out they have nothing of value.

Aceticon ,

I was in the Tech game back in the late 1990s and in the Tech Startup game recently and this time around it’s not techies that are Startup Founders, it’s people from Sales, Marketing and Finance.

The whole “making something cool” ethos of Tech has been replaced by “Find a market niche that you can grow in until you have an exit strategy (IPO or sale to a larger company)” or in other words, make a company that looks like an infinite growth venture and sell it to some suckers for a ton of money.

As it so happens I was in Investment Banking in between those two periods in the Tech industry and immediatelly recognized the same spirit as in Investment Banking when I went into Startups in the late 2010.

At least the previous generation was driven by the “play with computers” drive. This one is all about borderline fraud (often outright fraud - just think Theranos or all the “coin” “tech startups”) in the pursuit of personal upside maximization.

dustyData ,

Tech bro is a derogatory term for a reason. It’s still just a bro. Generally a cis genedered heteronormative affluent white male. With all the worse parts of MBA culture. Certainly they’re sales, marketing and finance types. But they want to be tech adjacent to disrupt the market. They like to portray themselves as techies but are actually about get rich quick schemes. Their one and only interest on NFTs, crypto, AI and all tech in general is how can it enable them to exploit others into making them billionaires.

thawed_caveman ,

I heard the same about the movie industry: it used to be run by movie people, now it’s run by finance people. The greedy producers of old came from the industry and understood the business; today’s greedy producers don’t understand anything about movies, so if you’re pitching them a project, you need to speak their language: here’s a market niche, here’s similar projects that have been profitable, here’s the return on investment we can expect.

I wish i knew how true that is, but it does seem to explain a lot of what we see from Hollywood these days.

Aceticon ,

I was in the Tech game back in the late 1990s and in the Tech Startup game recently and this time around it’s not techies that are Startup Founders, it’s people from Sales, Marketing and Finance.

The whole “making something cool” ethos of Tech has been replaced by “Find a market niche that you can grow in until you have an exit strategy (IPO or sale to a larger company)” or in other words, make a company that looks like an infinite growth venture and sell it to some suckers for a ton of money.

As it so happens I was in Investment Banking in between those two periods in the Tech industry and immediatelly recognized the same spirit as in Investment Banking when I went into Startups in the late 2010.

At least the previous generation was driven by the “play with computers” drive. This one is all about borderline fraud (often outright fraud - just think Theranos or all the “coin” “tech startups”) in the pursuit of personal upside maximization.

andrewrgross ,

What I find interesting is that I’m starting to hear this same story (in different words) from very different sources.

Lefty bloggers are saying, *“The hype economy is over, and vaporware companies used to never delivering are suddenly gasping for air in an economy that requires them to actually provide value.” *And at the same time, mainstream financial podcasts are reporting that “Outlooks for 2023 anticipate a hostile market environment for disruptive innovators as they attempt to leverage their brands to monetize large user bases with low profitability. Meanwhile, the market is being buoyed by legacy firms with reliable cashflow from existing sales and services.”

It shocked me when I noticed how different people are seeing the same thing, and it seems overdue.

plum ,

Great point that shareholders ruin everything. I invest but I’ll avoid certain companies or industries that don’t align with my values, even if those stocks have the most potential profitability. But this seems to be a very uncommon habit in the investing world.

balrog ,

Capitalism.

Capitalism is like cutting off your wings because you believe the reduced weight will make you fly higher.

Smoogs ,

It’s shocking how accurate at how the oblivious and infuriating it is.

RIotingPacifist ,

Part of it is the standard crisis of capitalism, the profit you get from doing the same thing always declines, so over time you have to push up revenue (increasing prices, forcing people to pay, showing more ads, gathering more data, etc) & push down costs (fire engineers, run on less hardware, etc)

Part of it is capitalisms natural tendency to create monopolies, and the lack of competition in a given field causing the company to then lose sight of what it’s good at to compete in a bigger field.

Part is that interest rates mean loans are no longer cheap, so taking on debt to get customer, to at some point down the line make money, is a less viable plan. Twitter is a special case where the bad loans are because that was the original deal not interested rate related, and Musk is trying to pull all of the enshitification levers at the same time.

Part is that CEOs generally don’t have a fucking clue about their products or what they are doing (it’s a circuit job about who you know/blow, not what you know), so once one CEO starts firing/enshitifying, the rest just copy them so as to not be left out.

traveler01 ,

I wouldn’t blame them being pure greed on capitalism honestly.

RIotingPacifist ,

It’s not pure greed though, if companies do not push down costs & push up revenues enough, they get replaced by those that do.

It is capitalism doing what it does “best”, here’s a clip from I’m A Virgo that explains it better than me: youtu.be/lpagmvYZKRc?t=84

There are niches where companies can hide out for a while, especially if they provide a service that needs local implementation, but social media isn’t one of those niches, if you get outcompeted, your toast, no matter how big you peak, MySpace, Tumbler, Digg, Slashdot, etc, this is the monopolization effect of markets.

Skooshjones ,
@Skooshjones@vlemmy.net avatar

Capitalism is a system built on greed as a foundation to function. In a capitalist system, you must always continue to grow, expand, engulf, absorb, and acquire. This is why it is such a toxic and destructive system. Capitalism will always incentivize companies to get the most people possible to spend as much as possible on as little as possible, that’s literally the core principle of maximizing profitability.

It’s why enshittification keeps happening, the system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly how it’s supposed to.

jwagner7813 ,

Wouldn’t capitalism be relatively fine without the function of the Stock Exchange? I feel like the stock Exchange is what causes the issue with the need for continual growth. I feel like capitalism without the overarching need to continuously grow due to the demands of the stock exchange system, could work perfectly fine as you wouldn’t need to continuously grow but to maintain a profit and adjust for inflation where needed.

Skooshjones ,
@Skooshjones@vlemmy.net avatar

Capitalism codifies the acquisition and control of capital by an owning class separate from the workers (employees). The owners always want to see their profits grow, because in a system that is zero sum, where competition is glorified as the primary mechanism for fair pricing and business success, if you aren’t growing, then other competitors will eventually extinguish you.

Capitalism mimics evolution in that way, where all organisms compete against each other in a winner-takes-all setting. Talk to any hardcore Capitalist and they will talk about Capitalism being the “natural order”, “human nature” etc. I know, I used to be a hardcore free market capitalist.

A system that places profit and private ownership of capital above all else will always result in the kinds of oppressive systems and company practices we see today.

It’s like how fundamentalist religious institutions are having abuse scandals over and over for literal centuries. They are built in such a way that makes abuse easy to get away with. Even if it starts out perfectly clean, safe, and incorrupt, eventually the very structure of the organization itself will cause abusers to join or allow already abusive people to commit those acts without significant consequences. It is a negative feedback loop that perpetuates itself until it collapses totally or is extinguished by an outside force.

BoastfulDaedra ,

“Enshitify” is my new favorite word, right after “Polymascotfoamalate”.

DashboTreeFrog ,

It’s so common there’s even a term for it now, “enshittification”

To quote the article that describes it:

“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.”

Source: www.wired.com/…/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/The source is about TikTok but the author has gone on to describe how this applies to basically every modern tech company in various interviews.

nobody5050 ,

Cory doctorow is an incredible (journalist?) (blogger?) idk something, his posts are good

DashboTreeFrog ,

I first encountered him through the “This Week In Tech” podcast where he’s a frequent guest. I’m not sure what he is off the top of my head either but he’s brilliant

zos_kia ,

His blog “Boing boing” was a luminary of the early blogosphere when that was a thing people believed would replace traditional media. He was very active with the EFF, copyleft/CC culture, the early maker scene. He was an okay novellist too ! All in all if you grabbed a copy of “Wired” from 2009 there’s a 100% chance his name would be mentioned at least once in it.

Excrubulent ,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Writer is a good catch-all, especially since he’s written some banger novels too. I read Little Brother right on the cusp of becoming an actual leftist and it had a big impact on me.

meldroc ,

Here, now, with the Fediverse, we are going Little Brother on enshittfied social media!

Viva la Révolution !

Fluid ,
@Fluid@aussie.zone avatar

Greedy capitalists believe line must always go up. They will sacrifice every moral principle to their invisible hand god.

JakeHimself ,

What’s their alternative?

Twelve20two ,

Fail and let the internet no longer be for profit.

samus12345 ,
@samus12345@lemmy.world avatar

Be satisfied with just making a profit instead of wanting infinite growth.

Screwthehole ,

Oh my God are you ever speaking my language here.

I dunno, maybe 439 million dollars of revenue reported by reddit in 2021 is, I dunno, lots?

zygo_histo_morpheus ,

If they don’t have a sustainable business model, they don’t have to operate at a loss for years either. Maybe it’s better to let reddit die and transfer to a model that makes more sense. I think that smaller instances with users and moderators voluntarily paying server costs like in the fediverse seems like a much better solution than companies trying to gain a monopolistic position so that they can then ruin their product in order to make money off of it.

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?

    thea ,

    i hope that the internet becomes sort of how it used to be, made by the people for the people and ran by the people instead of made by a few huge corporations that sell our data and constantly try and squeeze profit out of their platforms. i love the sense of community in decentralised social media and there seems to be next to no arguments most places. im really enjoying everything so far after joining

    maajmaaj ,
    @maajmaaj@lemmy.world avatar

    Me too. I feel much calmer scrolling through Lemmy as opposed to Reddit or Twitter. I have way less of an urge to troll over here.

    CantankerousGay ,

    Same. Well I didn’t necessarily troll reddit, but I also had no problem telling bigots where to go or what to suck. Less people to yell at on this platform lol

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