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?
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.
The timeline split after harambe. This is known
It is known.
I wonder what our alternate timeline selves are doing. Good for them, right?
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.
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.
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 without 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree with most of what you said. I would say classifying SVB as a seizure is probably not accurate. The FDIC only came in when it was clear SVB was going to fold and in fact insured far more than the 250k per account guaranteed. Mainly to try and stem a run on midsize banks because
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Many companies had large holdings, undiversified in these banks
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The banks were borderline negligent with how they handled those deposits, sticking them all in “safe” government bonds that ruins liquidity.
Once the interest rate on the bonds was lower than the base borrowing rate, no one would buy the bonds instead of just buying new bonds with a much higher guaranteed return.
So, given that, I would say the FDIC instead bailed out the banks. Something they would never do for you or I, or even a business with similar valuation as any of the banks customers.
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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
There is a psychology at work in layoffs—ownership forces management to choose to hurt people to give more to ownership. Like paying a blood tribute to the king, but dumber.
I like, and suspect this to be the true reason, the argument that one company sees another doing layoffs so they do layoffs. It’s all just a race to the bottom.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
100% power There’s parallels to the writer strikes Netflix ceo got like 2x the money that all the writers are asking for in bonus so it’s not about money It’s something else
What happened with Twitch? I’m out of the loop there.
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
There’s Bob Ross reruns on twitch?
https://www.twitch.tv/bobross ;)
great to watch & fall asleep to
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.
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.
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.
But how many people are still exchanging facebook contacts? Because I haven’t met anyone anymore …
Good point! I suspect it’s a lot more than we think. My parents are definitively still involved in doing this.
But on the other hand, does exchanging contacts mean anything to Facebook anymore? I don’t think that’s important to their income stream anymore. If the OP meant “these sites are still going strong but aren’t what they were when they began”, then of course I agree.
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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.
I’m honestly surprised it even got this far. It was just common sense to me, even a decade ago, that companies that burned through VC cash and tried building up user bases with little regard for actual profitability couldn’t possibly keep it up forever.
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.
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:
- The platform is good for its users.
- The platform abuses the users, to be good for its business customers.
- The platform abuses the business customers, to claw back all value for itself.
- 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.
This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.
I’ve always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn’t invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I’m probably on here too much though!
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The twitter thing is sad, but honestly not a huge deal. I rarely used it anyhow.
The reddit thing is depressing, since I’ve been a huge supporter and user of Apollo for many years. It feels like getting stepped on and I feel for the developer Christian Selig who devoted so much time and energy to the app.
I hope nothing happens to Twitch in the way that Twitter and Reddit have though, the small time streamers I follow and support won’t survive a thing like that.
I think it’s an important lesson in impermanence.
The net will always have good bits and bad bits, but they won’t always stay the same.
I hate it when things change, but you’re totally right.
Reddit has so many small communities that the people in charge have absolutely no care for. I hope one of these services takes hold as a clear Reddit replacement so that they can be built back up.
I get the impression that owners of large servers aren’t too interested in the growth from Reddit. I think some post even said that using “Reddit refugee” as a reason for application for an account is gonna get you rejected.
Which is fine because you can join another.
Doctorow’s Enshittification describes it pretty much dead-on. It’s basically the cancerous form of late-stage capitalism that we’re living under now.
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.
I have to wonder just how many genuine users reddit actually has based on the amount of account harvesting that utilizes reposting content.
Wait for after 1 Juli if they don’t reverse the decision they made. Right now the mods and users believe they can change this madness, but when the go through with it, many more will leave, especially mods and the og users that contribute most content.
There is no way that the Lemmy network can handle millions of users. The big instances are struggling with tens of thousands. I believe many will leave and reddit will become worse because of it, but it’s not going to die, it’s going to turn into facebook.
It IS Facebook right now, but for zoomers. Nothing but emoji replies, copy-pasting the same tired meme for the millionth time, and so on. The reddit I joined back in 2012 died a long time ago.
I’d argue the 2012 version of reddit was much the same. The narwhal bacons at midnight. First rule of reddit. So many lolcats. I think I was just younger back then, everything was new.
No without mods reddit is basically dead. Thats their own system and fault…
And i think the instances need more capacity to support the traffic, but its not impossible. i also hope that at least some of the people coming here start new instances.
Reddit has slowly replaced mods in large subs with employees. And you vastly overestimate the willingness of the average user to put up with quirks of new platforms like Lemmy.
For Lemmy to support the 430 million monthly active users that reddit has - this is currently, in my opinion, impossible. The largest lemmy server has tens of thousands of users, and is running on the most powerful server that VPS provider OVH offers. The lead developer knows that there are big performance improvements needed in the code and has been working on it for some time, but it will be years before the lemmy network can handle even a few million active users, in my opinion.
They can replace who they want in general, but they never cover the thousands of niche and middle sized subs and thats a money issue, they can’t suddenly materialize thousand employees to moderate some subs. And the medium and small subs actually draw most non bot traffic. Also its estimated that reddit massively inflates user numbers, especially on their “default subs”
Current lemmy supporting hundred millions is absolutely utopian, but its in active development, there would be a way, but i would be very surprised when more than 5% of reddit users would suddenly end up here, lemmy needs to grow healthy and not from one day to the next by a Exponent, that’s a fact. But i don’t think it would take years, more users draw more attention, wich leads to more devs helping to improve the quality.
(oh and i kinda don’t care about the “average users” i care about the top 5% of reddit that contribute 50% of the content and 99% of the mod work)
what happened with twitch?
Can’t open the post from jerboa
That’s honestly my biggest point of “needs improvement” we need an easy way to share links that other people can just tap on no matter the server without something breaking
