Technology

That's a nice way to think of it, I've felt I must be on the bad alternate timeline for a while now. Maybe this is a healing branch!

They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.

...jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called "Tiktok's enshittification". It's a four-steps process:

1. The platform is good for its users.
2. The platform abuses the users, to be good for its business customers.
3. The platform abuses the business customers, to claw back all value for itself.
4. The platform dies.

In my opinion it's also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.

Great read.

what happened with twitch?

I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES

Hell, any such company is going to pursue infinite growth and always aim to squeeze as much money as possible from it's costumer base in the short term.

My guess is that because there is currently a big possibility of economic turmoil and these companies are appealing to investors, advertisers,etc. and trying to gain as much capital in order to look stable.

Some people have come up with the word "enshittification" to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.

The cycle consists of three parts:

1. You make the service that attracts new users by providing what they want. Often you do that at a loss, because your goal is to gain a big enough userbase for steps 2 and 3.
2. Once there's enough users, you shift to attracting commercial interests instead -- vendors if you're running a store, advertisers or celebrities or other "big clients" if you're a social network, etc.
3. Once both users and commercial interests are hooked, you can start tightening all the rules and switching completely to profiting yourself and your shareholders.