Technology

Doctorow's Enshittification describes it pretty much dead-on. It's basically the cancerous form of late-stage capitalism that we're living under now.

The timeline split after harambe. This is known

We've reached the end of the VC-funded golden age where they are all now demanding a return on their investment, hence why the screws are now all getting tightened.

I have a sinking feeling that these moves are not about money, but more about power and manipulation. If you squeeze these user bases such that the savviest users are forced out, those more likely to ask "Why?" about damn near anything, you will own access to a group of people that can be influenced to think/do/buy whatever the top management and/or majority shareholders want. If you lose a few million users, what does it matter if they were dissidents to your goals?

The twitter thing is sad, but honestly not a huge deal. I rarely used it anyhow.

The reddit thing is depressing, since I've been a huge supporter and user of Apollo for many years. It feels like getting stepped on and I feel for the developer Christian Selig who devoted so much time and energy to the app.

I hope nothing happens to Twitch in the way that Twitter and Reddit have though, the small time streamers I follow and support won't survive a thing like that.

The twitter/elon thing is hilarious. I honestly do think he accidentally got himself into quite the pickle and now his pride is keeping him there. As for reddit and twitch, I don't assume these are the surface-level-dumb moves that we think they are. My guess is that this is a calculated means of rolling out the changes they actually want by:

1. overshooting
2. letting everyone get mad
3. backing off to their actual changes (or something close)
4. letting everyone think they've won
5. and finally push forward a bit more once everyone is preoccupied with the next thing

Internet users love to cancel shit, but at the same time, are always looking for the next thing to cancel. So as much as people hate twitter or facebook or tiktok or youtube or windows or nintendo or chick-fil-a or whatever, they're all just looking for an excuse to forget all about it, and continue using their product as quickly as possible. And corporations know that, so they've worked "giving them that excuse" into their plans.

From everything I have observed, businesses are hunkering down for a recession in the next fiscal year. It explains the lay offs, the penny pinching, and puzzling decisions that look like business suicide.

For services that are free for users, advertising revenue and investment fund raisers are the only thing keeping them afloat. With banks like SVB getting seized by the FDIC, it's starting to scare investors. Advertisers are seeing the writing on the wall that people will stop spending as much as they used to. We are also probably seeing jacked up pricing across the board because businesses are taking what they can before it's gone.

So what's left? Squeeze users for money. Additionally, shed users that actually cost them money and these tend to be power users. The question, which everyone seems to be assuming is a foregone conclusion, is if this shedding strategy will end up killing the service. In reality, we don't know but the idealists would sure feel good if someone else ate their market share.

I'm just glad that federation is picking up steam in the social media space.

Big sites have made surfing the web so boring. I will end up spending the day on 2-3 sites. All this shake up will hopefully force me to look at more websites again.

Hah! Are we so inured to the death march towards dystopia that it is surreal when something good happens? All of these large social media sites are privacy hating monopolies that actively disrespect their members and misuse their information.

They should die. Let them. We should celebrate!

The reality is that nothing is really dying and nothing is really changing. Twitter is still fully operational and other than a small hit nothing happened. Twitch already did a step back. For Reddit we'll see but only a really small percentage of reddit is using third party apps.

COVID.

COVID changed everything. In an attempt to recover quickly, companies ramped up their abuses to new levels. While billionaires defending them all had their masks removed as the world collectively realized that it's impossible to make a billion without exploring others.

Toss in back to the office mandates and rising costs while those same companies post record profits...all while the population is Uber sensitive to that kind of thing, and we're in the middle of a not so quiet proletariat revolution.

Thanks to COVID a lot of people realized that despite the elites best efforts, the enemy isn't left or right, it's us versus the super rich. And it's having a trickle down effect.

I suspect that we're at end-stage capitalism, essentially every company feels they should be constantly making record profits and they think of predicted profits as granted, when they didn't reach predicted profits it was seen as losing money which in the CEO's eyes meant they needed to increase their income to make up for losses and the only way for companies that rely on user generated content for revenue was increased advertising which is the route youtube is currently going for the rest they had no way they could see to increase their income till elon decided to crash twitter with introducing the payed blue checkmark. What we saw when elon did that was a failing company but what twitch and reddit saw was an opportunity to not be blamed for following musks example, funnily enough though they fucked up on the attempt and everyone saw them as money grabbing

I think this is "normal" and the previous status was a glitch due to the low interest rates. Investors threw money at tech companies and didn't care whether they made any money. Not any more. It's now "make money or go bust". I am not sayiny these new trends will make them money, but IMHO it's what's driving them

Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter seemed more like an extremely elaborate shitpost that went horribly wrong. It's like Musk never intended to buy them in the first place but was legally forced to do so (he tried to back out of the deal beforehand.)

As for Reddit, that place has been going down the shitter since around 2016. Power users have ruined that site, especially the handful of moderators that control hundreds of subreddits between themselves. Spez is a blithering idiot who has done more to censor and subvert the site than Ellen Pao ever did (ironically, everyone accepted it and didn't revolt against him because he wasn't a woman.)

That being said, I really hope Steve Huffman doubles down on the API changes and kills Reddit as a platform. Nothing would make me happier.

Twitch and YouTube literally think they're too big to fall and work actively to fuck over the content creator, when decent competitors like Rumble and Kick are coming along. Mixer could have been decent but Microsoft's strategy was literally to offer two streamers nine-figure contracts and somehow think this would drive people to their Twitch-clone. At least Rumble and Kick are competently run.

twitter was overvalued. reddit has made a lot of questionable business decisions over the last decade or so but their recent API change will be their death knell. it feel like a cash grab. I personally only use Twitch to watch Bob Ross reruns :P

People aren't reacting to this sudden interference with content aggregation with as much outrage and fear as they should.

The thing that Twitter, reddit, and so many other sites that have recently been bought up and swallowed, do so well is aggregate information for us. It provides us a pool of information, with which we as a collective society can sift through and analyze together through the lens of our experience, our professionalism, and our intelligence.

Before these types of sites, we were segregated and isolated. As much as I miss forums, for the most part they became bubbles that hyperfocused on singular categories. This kept us in our place. This kept us from venturing out and sampling things that were different and other. When sites like Fark took off, we suddenly had insight into things we may never have had interest in or knowledge of before.

Corporations and governments are trying to dismantle aggregation because it keeps us informed and it keeps us involved. It informs us of the other, and allows us to co-mingle in an environment where we might be exposed to new ideas and new ways of doing things that were otherwise not available.

We shouldn't just be lamenting the downfall of reddit due to our lack of entertainment. We should be very, very afraid of the day when the only way you can find 'other' information is by using very specific search terms.

People in power have been working very hard for a very long time to take us back to a time before the Internet, and a time before aggregation. What I sincerely hope comes out of this is the realization that we are all stronger together with our complex variety of ideas and perspectives, and our ability to question things and provide information to each other.

In case anyone has forgotten, Twitter is a lifeline to many corners of the world most of us will never touch and have no way of accessing otherwise. Twitter was the tool for dozens of uprisings and protests around the world. Twitter was the catalyst for so many young people to connect and realize that the situation they were in could be changed. And that's been taken away. It's been made a joke, and people are leaving in droves. People whose experience and support could help the next protest. That's exactly what they want.

But what do I know, I'm just a rando on the internet, who may be able to tell you the answer to your very niche question, who may say just the right thing when you're needing support, or who may pass on your story to someone else who knows a journalist, which may lead to your voice or your injustice being heard.

They're trying to isolate you. Don't let them.

This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.

I've always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn't invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I'm probably on here too much though!

Well, while it is surprising it's all happening within a year or so, it's not unexpected at all.

They're ultimately for-profit companies. They have openly demonstrated the obvious truth that when push comes to shove, users don't matter to them, at least not as much as money. Our attention was the product.

The big sites got big by being there when a previous big site died. But nothing lasts forever, and eventually a social site becomes desperately uncool because there are people old enough to have grandkids on it. And they totter on, like a zombie, until they fuck out badly, and most people leave. But not everyone, I still get linked to blog entries on Livejournal now and then, sometimes I even end up on Blogger when I’m following a trail and people are still updating some of those.

Higher interest rates means less investment, resulting in these companies racing to make a profit. The reality is that Reddit is bleeding money and has been for years, and Twitter is barely profitable.

Their death is waaaay overdue. We literally jumped one cycle because the 2008 financial crisis and 0% interest rate.

Now there is no free money, and they need to extract value to seem a good investment, so they canibalize themselves and turn into shit.

Most of Elon stuff is doomed once reality catches on. Same with Uber. Same with streaming platforms. Same with Meta.

Also there is a new/old boy in the bubble and burst town, Microsoft and their AI push. It’s going to destroy them pushing them into overspending to keep up.

Companies trying to squeeze every penny out of their employees and customers leads to catastrophic damage that is very visible, then everyone has to suffer, except the execs with their big fat bonuses.

Course-correcting, maybe? Web 2.0 really overstayed its welcome with Facebook/Twitter/Reddit being such dominant websites over the past 15+ years. Various reasons of greed, narcissism, and other factors finally popped the bubble.

I'm really enjoying the Feder-verse or whatever we're calling it since decentralization can prevent a lot of this nonsense from ever occuring. It feels like a new approach to the late 90's era of message boards and such.

It's not just tech companies like Reddit and Twitter, it seems like it's most companies. Ever since the COVID lockdowns prices have been going through the roof, you get less for what you pay for, they're laying off workers, and all while raking in record profits while also crying about how no one wants to work and how they can't afford anything because of the economy. I've never been more cynical about companies than I have been the last year.

From Cory Doctorow:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Some of it is because we had a decade of cheap borrowing which has come to an end and many of these platforms were never profitable.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for them to die and for federated or privacy-conscious alternatives to take their place. But I don't think they're all dying that much.

While it is true that more people complain and leave for alternatives than before, long term it doesn't seem like the masses are really switching yet. I feel like people are becoming more aware of privacy, market-monopoly, and other related issues, but at the same time don't want to hand in convinience, pay money to stop it, nor move somewhere when the rest isn't there yet. We see a spike on alternative SNS like Lemmy and Mastodon around the time news regarding some drama with big SNS releases, but we also see many users leave the alternatives after a time and that they never left the first platform that had drama to start with. They're just used both to eventually return. It's generally only a specific crowd that really leaves for good to go elsewhere, but not the masses.

As for the many lay-offs lately. Don't forget that during COVID the sky was the limit for tech. They all predicted that after the time being locked in our houses doing everything remotely, we'd keep doing that, and they invested accourdingly. However, as the world opened up more that predictioned turned out wrong, causing them to have over-invested and needing to make budget cuts to fix their mistake.

please can youtube be next?

I really want to stop using my google account and that's the only thing keeping me from moving away from it.