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 and Reddit both want to get profitable fast - which doesn’t work, as both companies have never been profitable and don’t have any experience with actually making money.
The reasons behind this are different (Elon just wants to make some money after he bought Twitter, Reddit wants to be somewhat presentable for an IPO), but the effects are similar and make me question if we’re at the end of the "free corporate social media" era of the internet.
Discord has two possible reasons for that specific change. For one it wants to get more mainstream and therefore loses parts of what made it special as a social network (e.g. the special username system).
I also think Discord (over-)reacts to its spam/scam problem here and tries to make usernames more distinctive.