There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

designated_fridge ,

You are used to a time where money was essentially free for companies. Whenever they needed money, they could loan money almost for free.

As interest rates are up, that’s no longer the case and priorities have changed from growth to plugging holes.

betterdeadthanreddit ,

We’re not people to them, just part of a product. Why do anything more than absolutely necessary to keep the money flowing in? Save a fraction of a penny on bandwidth, earn another fraction by selling more complete data and ad views. Multiply that by the number of users and if enough will tolerate it, somebody at the top can buy a shiny new yacht.

Stinkywinks ,

Like the downfall of everything in our society, greed.

RemembertheApollo ,

The BS idea of infinite growth that our financial system revolves around. The stock market and investments all demand endless growth, and that pressure on company quarterly reports drives everything from unbundling, to suppressing wages and benefits, to squeezing users for more money in any way possible- and for us that’s ad revenue to be extracted from our browsers and apps.

Briguy24 ,

$.

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.

peter ,
@peter@feddit.uk avatar

All VC backed tech companies have been operating on the assumption that they can focus on growth and then make a profit later. That hasn’t happened for most of these companies and VCs are starting to demand returns. It was always going to happen, I’m surprised it took this long.

Overzeetop ,
@Overzeetop@kbin.social avatar

More importantly, the IPO market collapsed a couple of years ago. That is the VC's payday. Now that we're not in an IPO buying frenzy, investors are wanting to see positive cashflow before they buy.

zedtronic ,

Rates needed to rise before it was going to come to pass.

RatzChatsubo ,

Chatgpt is using up all their resources and inflating viewership by logging into these sites millions of times. And ad companies are mad that they can’t catch eyeballs anymore so they are pressuring social media giants to search for alternative income

Just my headcannon

bioemerl ,

I doubt it. There's no way one company is inflating the views of a website by a million times. And the users are not going around browsing the internet with Chat GPT in mass. Web scraping is definitely an excuse for them to make these moves, not a reason

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.

Thioether ,

Combination of VC money drying up and fear of LLM sucking up their future revenue streams. I think the former is the the logical driver and the latter is the secret fear.

DuskLoaf ,
@DuskLoaf@lemmy.world avatar

Everyone wants a piece of the AI pie

Shialac ,

Yeah, very likely. Platforms/Investors see a way to make money besides the usual Ad- and Subscription-Based monetization models

redballooon ,
  1. Grow a platform
  2. AI appears on the stage
  3. ???
  4. Profit
FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Maybe Spez and Elon can use AI to write all the posts on their platforms to keep the advertisers interested.

Sabata11792 ,
@Sabata11792@kbin.social avatar

So, no changes?

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.

s4if ,
@s4if@lemmy.my.id avatar

They need money for their greedy venture capitalists.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •