Mildly Infuriating

The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they've only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

Now though, that's no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn't been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.

Not to mention it lined up perfectly with the start of the new fiscal year on July 1st. Hard to believe that is just a coincidence.

every interaction that additional user makes with tweets viewed by those 100k existing users requires 100k updates pushed to those 100k users’ pages. Every like sends an update of +1 like on the tweet to every one of the 100k users. It becomes significantly more expensive per user engagement.

This is not how a reasonable API works and is probably not how Twitter "pages" work. A "+1" just changes a number in a database from, say, 629644 to 629645. The latter is no more expensive to send over the wire to a client when it requests data.

They were previously publicly traded were they not? How do you figure that backend funding worked if it wasn't shown on the balance sheet?