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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is where my mind goes. Kinda convenient that Twitter and Reddit, both likely particularly dangerous to those seeking power happen to be destroyed seemingly intentionally in the same year ahead of a sure to be insane U.S. election season.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Hmm, kinda interesting. A lot of Trump shit was spread on Reddit during the 2016 election, makes sense they would try to get rid of anyone who would oppose that content

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Not money per se, but the oil of the 21st century: data.

I guarantee it's primarily about improving their ability to harvest and sell user data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Exactly. The native apps can gather so much more info than a website and they have to kill third party apps to force people to use the official client.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The timeline split after harambe. This is known

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder what our alternate timeline selves are doing. Good for them, right?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In Timeline-α the Visitors didn't turn away in disgust and Contact was approved. The Uplift process is well underway, environmental conditions have been stabilized and restoration is progressing well. Space travel is still restricted to the Solar System but Humanity is on track to full Membership. Ambassador Harambe has resumed his duties on the Council.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Also what hasn't been touched on very much in this thread is the increase in interest rates from the Federal Reserve. The money hose has shut off and expansionary business policy won't work for the foreseeable future even disregarding a recession. All these internet companies have developed and grown in an essentially 0% interest rate environment that rewarded growth beyond all else. With rates increasing, investment in risky companies that may or may not grow is becoming a less attractive option when you can just buy a 5% bond and so I bet a lot of these non-profitable, growth-focused web companies are seeing liquidity dry up and are having to reach profitability to avoid bankruptcy since servicing new debt in this current interest environment is basically impossible without solid cashflow and a clear corporate vision.

This is leading to all these companies suddenly raising prices, cutting staff, choking competition, and cheaping out to try and break even instead of grow. It's a paradigm shift.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Crazy to hear people talking about this stuff out in the wild. Feels like I'm on superstonk, only place I tend to hear anyone connecting these dots.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Speaking of superstonk, is there a good superstonk or wsb personalfinance lemmy community? I am subbed to the beehaw finance community, but it's really not a tube yet and seems to be a bit more economics leaning than pure personal finance or investing.

The subs I spend a lot of time on were FIRE, financialindependence, wsb, and personal finance and I miss them lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The Canadian GameStop folks have a community on lemmy.ca, but we are still very few.

I would like to join a federated wsb community too, if there's anyone with any integrity willing to run it impartially. Anyone running such a place has a conflict of interest imo, the tendency is moral hazard. At least with single stock communities you know their motive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

So why do layoffs at all if they don’t actually work? “People do all kinds of stupid things all the time,” Pfeffer says. “I don’t know why you’d expect managers to be any different.” https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/26/23571659/tech-layoffs-facebook-google-amazon

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's Bob Ross reruns on twitch?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

https://www.twitch.tv/bobross ;)

great to watch & fall asleep to

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think the "the internet is dying" perspectives are all incredibly overblown. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon. I remember all of the "Facebook is dead, I don't know anyone using Facebook!" posts, but I suspect many here are invested in some index fund that is being pulled upwards by Meta.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's not the services that are dying, but the internet as we used to know.

Change is natural, but the services are all changing in a way not beneficial forthe users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

These companies have proven time and time again that a quick moneygrab will win over retaining the people who make the site work. capitalism 101 baby.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

big money ruins everything

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

money ruins everything

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Ayyy that's capitalism, baby!!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The reddit exodus is comparatively very small. Tens of thousands of users, many of which will not stick around. Reddit has millions of users (hundreds of millions?). They barely notice.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There is a crisis of democracy in contemporary societies, every time that you invoke the direct power of the people, the status quo conservationists ban your participation and exclude you of most of the expression spaces.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The issue with replacement for YouTube is that it needs to be both sustainable AND pay the professional content creator. This is not an easy task and the main reason why alternatives are usually running behind a subscription service.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

what happened with twitch?

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