this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?

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[–] empireOfLove@lemmy.one 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.

The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet's history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the "next best thing".

Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It's only just getting started, you watch.

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[–] kratoz29@lemmy.fmhy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

What happened with Twitch? I'm out of the loop there.

[–] jannis@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The services are getting worse (more ads, no free API, removing feautures etc.), because of lacking competition they could do it without much consequences. Social media is a natural monopoly, why would anyone want to use a service where no user generated content is? In recent years the services became so bad that many users decided to actually use alternatives instead of sticking with the established platforms. If Lemmy can get a big enough user base it will thrive, otherwise it will be forgotten in a few months.

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[–] Valliac@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)

The line has to go up.

The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don't demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don't sell and bail.

Now, with Twitter there's a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn't the place for it.

Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it's money.

Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it's Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they're making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.

Facebook: I don't even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it's just ads.

Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn't feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they're a bad thing, just using an example)

Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.

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[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

The MacLeod life-cycle of corporations mirrors late stage capitalism pretty well:

[–] goat@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I think it has to do with the Epstein and Maxwell case process. Maxwell had her fingers in many social media websites, especially reddit. I mean for Reddit she was the first user to hit 1m karma, and also one of the first powermods, controlling most of the powerful subreddits. Wouldn't surprise me if all the big rats are jumping ship before shit hits the fan.

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[–] Cromutorium@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Logged into youtube today and discovered that the subscription page is absolutely fucked now. It only shows three thumbnails per row on my 13" laptop screen and they've removed the separation by date, so now it's way harder to tell if any of my subscriptions have uploaded today. Seems like everything is going down the shitter.

image

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[–] Zagaroth@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What's happening with Twitch?

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[–] Thann@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

in this day and age, you have to be really screwing your customers to get any money from investors

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