No Stupid Questions

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.

Capitalism slowly shits up everything. Even the things it helps create.

I mean this in the most general way possible. Not just platforms. Even if reddit was profitable it would still continue. It's just part of the cycle of seeking not just profits but ever rising profits.

It's just more obvious lately on digital platforms because it has been kind of compressed into smaller amounts of time.

That which is free must find a way to cost.

That that makes money must find a way to make more.

And slowly but surely its takes on a fine shine. A glean seen from a distance. But when you get close you realize. "oh, its fucking shit all over it."

Over-centralisation.

This kind of slow degredation of services is quite normal, however, this time around the wider use of these degrading platforms is hitting harder. Even 5 years ago, most communities had an IRC rather than a discord, and most ran a forum, or a community forum, with other info being on a wiki.

These days a lot of content that used to sit on a forum now sits on twitter, or on reddit. Discord is the new IRC, and so on. These separate services were a lot less convenient, but more resilient.

Odds are, we might see similar smaller communities pop up again as things get worse in the larger ones. Folks are pinched for cash at the moment, and so free services like neocities might see a boom as fandoms abandon larger sites (again).

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.

Because a user base has yet to demonstrate that there will be significant consequences for such actions. Maybe there will be, but they will be less-tangible long-term consequences that can’t easily be attributed to these actions.

I reckon there are two factors at work here, the profit imperative and enshitification. The profit imperative relates to how corporations have to make exponential profits every single year (and as we all should know you can't have exponential growth in a finite system.)

And enshitification is a result of the profit imperative, with all the corporations trying vainly to keep the profits rolling in they have to cut quality, be it through replacing ingrediants with inferior ones or pumping in the sugar so it's harder to taste the wood chips, killing third party alternatives for viewing your site to keep all the ad revenue to yourself, putting out unfinished products and charging top dollar while treating your users as unpaid testers.

Or any other of the million shitty practices corporations can think up to keep the economic perpetual motion going, it's all going the same way in the end though because you can't get blood from a stone and as a great man once said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

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).

Reddit, Twitter, etc, have been running at a loss for ages, burning through vulture capitalist money to build up a solid userbase. Now they need to start turning a reliable profit, which means enshittification of the user experience to make more money per user.

I feel as though the user base is a large part of the problem. I might be wrong but the accessibility of social media that have apps is a lot easier for the younger population who these days are flooding social media. I don't think a lot of people use forums or currently Testflight apps such as Memmy (for Lemmy). The iPhone is the phone for influencers and if Lemmy officially releases an iPhone app the same problems may happen.

Higher interest rates, less vc money, have to actually start being profitable

A lot of them go into business with venture capital, a great idea with future potential, but no idea how to monetize any of it.
Eventually the capital is starting to dry up and the owners will want return on their investments - so the company is forced to start turning profit. Enshittification of service at all costs follows. And then perhaps public IPO and the founders cashing out and buying yachts.

That's the lifecycle of a tech-startup