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.
It seems like the proximate trigger for many of these decisions has been the rise of ChatGPT at the end of last year. Before this, they saw the best way to monetise their platforms as being about encouraging new content to create new clicks for advertising revenue. Since ChatGPT, they realised they're all sitting on goldmines of old content that could be used to train their own AI models - so suddenly they're prepared to take a range of seemingly-mad actions that will harm the quality and quantity of new content being created, because they think they've got enough revenue-generating potential from the existing content.
Of course the problem here is that a) they're killing the golden goose - monetising the back book while degrading the new content means they can only do this once, so they better hope it works and makes them a shit load of money, whilst b) although there's loads of potential in AI, we're yet to see someone actually make money through it and it has the potential to be a huge bubble where the hype eventually dissipates and the market collapses upon itself, with only a handful of players making it through unscathed to become the big success story.
All of these social media companies are betting the future of their platforms on them being the one that makes it through the AI bubble. Most of them will fail.
Another potential problem with trying to monetize off the back of AI is that AI is such a rapidly developing technology that there's no guarantee that their stashes of data will actually be all that vital. There's been a tendency lately toward training AI with a smaller but more highly refined and curated data set rather than just shoveling vast quantities of text at them, for example.