No Stupid Questions

Because most services we are using aren't sustainable. They all bleed money.

It's a general trend of vulture capitalism, or more accurately locust capitalism, over the last several years.

Investors want extreme ROI(Return on Investement, aka their money back and some extra), so they'll cut every single corner and monetize everything, and even run companies into the ground to make it happen faster. And then just move on to another company and to the same thing, with absolutely zero interest in long term income, customer retention, etc.

Capital only looks out for itself. Online communities are a product to be exploited in the eyes of investors. The purse strings are getting tighter with rising interest rates, and investments that relied on potential are suddenly less exciting when the price to service goes up. Profit is king at the end of the day. It sucks, but that's capitalism.

only now? to me most social media platforms were shitty to begin with, or had become shitty long before.

I feel this is a matter of perspective. The average Joe whose concept of "social media" is Facebook probably has never noticed anything getting any worse. The mainstream users who just want to see funny pics and couldn't care less about 3rd party clients might actually be quicker to side with Reddit than with the protesters.

Twitter has never been attractive to me. Even back when its API was public (ancient history). Not only is their feed noisy and of poor quality, constantly swayed by "trending" stuff I don't care about, it also has always had you depend on a privative and closed source walled guarden. Things were much more open before twitter, when people used blogs to post their stuff instead.

Reddit might have been a bit more open once.. but it stopped being so long ago, this is not a change in behavior. Maybe this is an unpopular thing to say, but I'm actually glad this is happening. I think the API fiasco might be an overall good thing if it helps people get away from Reddit, and if so I hope Reddit does not backtrack.

Thats just living in late stage capitalism. Everything you have now will be rented to you by a corporation in a couple of years.

They are doing everything in their power to make this the worst timeline.

It all happening in a span of months I think is sheer dumb luck from an entertainment point of view, but deep down the cause seems to me to be the expectation of continuous growth of profits on the part of a product free business model.

they are choosing money over people because machines can't say no

It's the lifecycle of social media sites. I knew when I left Digg 13 years ago Reddit would inevitably follow the same fate at some point. The problem we have now is that there are no alternatives of similar size nor established communities to replace the sites that are falling apart. Digg and Reddit were equal and provided an instant replacement of similar size for the exodus. Same with MySpace and Facebook. Now, the users of the big sites don't really have that haven to jump to and people don't want to spend the time building a new community. There is no Twitter alternative. Mastodon just doesn't cut it right now and the fact that actual companies use Twitter as an official mode of communication makes it harder to leave. Reddit is the same way. Every controversy draws users to alternatives, but nothing can match it's size.

Greed. It's all driven by greed. It's not just social media companies either. My best guess to why it's happening now.. The boomers are aging out and want to take every last bit they can squeeze out before they retire/die.

They are all just cashing out because they thought they are at the point where the communities will literally put up with anything, and not understanding that the community is their most precious resource.

I feel it's like a sellout on stock exchange: once the first company started to heavily monetize, the others felt like they needed to cash out now, before "stock values drop" i.e. the internet users find different models of social media that make the corporation owned ones obsolete. Thank you lemmy! :)

The lie that eternal growth is possible has companies making really stupid moves to increase short term gains at the cost of long term stability.

It's because of Cambridge Analytica. They realized they could blast susceptible morons with hyper targeted political content and warp users minds into being foot soldiers for a billionaire class that doesn't give a fuck about them.

As a phenomenon you'll see a lot of people call it "enshittification." The term seems to originate with Cory Doctorow who writes, "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."

The whole article on his blog is worth a read here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys. His Mastodon handle is @pluralistic if you'd like to follow his work there (woohoo federation!).

This is pretty typical for all big companies that take off there is a tipping point when it goes from agile and nimble start up to behemoth company that needs to pay dividends, only they have captured all the market share they can capture and may in fact losing people to other newer services. They're panicking and trying to make things look profitable before it all collapses like Yahoo and they can't sell it. Just my take on it all anyway.

VCs plain and simple. The entire system they operate within is almost perfectly at odds with how a traditional ‘real’ business would operate.

The net result is always some kind of cash grab, and whether the business survives is virtually irrelevant.

Private equity & VCs are IMO recklessly short term-ist with the ‘line goes up’ approach, with as ever, users & consumers & staff picking up the tab in one way or another.

Greed.

The VC gravy train is slowing down, so everyone's scrabbling around trying to find profit. Then running into issues because their business is built upon a foundation of unprofitable decisions made to drive quick growth.

The explanation is fairly straightforward. Interest rates are rising and cash is hard to come by these days. Many of consumer friendly features we have been enjoying have been paid for debt. Now that inflation is high and the fed is force to crank up interest many companies have to become truly profitable and so they start cashing in the user base that they have build over the last decade.

I think the main problem with these companies and the startup/tech bro culture (mostly in the US) is that they are growing for the sake of just growth itself, because they want to get their own. The original idea is to grow as big as they can, IPO, then sell it off. They weren't designing things to be profitable from the start. So eventually they all reach a stage where they are hemorrhaging money too much, and that is where all the enshittification happens (investors come in, they try to make it a real business now, but it wasn't really feasible to be a business to begin with).

Because they are all beholden to shareholders, not users (or prepping for IPO)

Turns out infinite growth without covering your costs doesn't work out

its the eshitification of the internet....it's inevitable