It’s honestly really sad what’s been happening recently. Reddit with the API pricing on 3rd party apps, Discord with the new username change, Twitter with the rate limits, and Twitch with their new advertising rules (although that has been reverted because of backlash). Why does it seem like every company is collectively on a common mission of destroying themselves in the past few months?
I know the common answer is something around the lines of “because companies only care about making money”, but I still don’t get why it seems like all these social media companies have suddenly agreed to screw themselves during pretty much the period of March-June. One that sticks out to me especially is Reddit CEO, Huffman’s comment (u/spez), “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive”. Like reading this literally pisses me off on so many levels. I wouldn’t even have to understand the context behind his comment to say, “I am DONE with you, and I am leaving your site”.
Why is it like this? Does everyone feel the same way? I’m not sure if it’s just me but everything seems to be going downhill these days. I really do hope there is a solution out of this mess.
Twitter's rate limiting has been reported as perhaps being a failure to pay bills or otherwise properly manage their servers, and not some specific policy change. So that particular example might not be what you were focusing on or what you meant to focus on. Obviously Twitter made many other decisions, and the recent big one is cutting off access to tweets for people who are not logged in.
As for Reddit, the price of the API is not the point. Rather, the price is so high that nobody's going to use the API, and that's the point. But they want to pretend that it's still possible to be used. And we know this is true because if the API really has such high value, then presumably some of the popular clients out there would have been worth it for Reddit to purchase, and the purchase price would presumably have some correlation to API usage.
On a more general level, though, I think what you're talking about is the process known as "enshittification". It's possible for social media companies to avoid this end result, but it requires great care especially in the early stages.
Yea ik that I just didn't wanna make my post too long haha.
Spot on.