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.
What happened with Twitch? I’m out of the loop there.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Some people have come up with the word “enshittification” to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.
The cycle consists of three parts:
- You make the service that attracts new users by providing what they want. Often you do that at a loss, because your goal is to gain a big enough userbase for steps 2 and 3.
- Once there’s enough users, you shift to attracting commercial interests instead – vendors if you’re running a store, advertisers or celebrities or other “big clients” if you’re a social network, etc.
- Once both users and commercial interests are hooked, you can start tightening all the rules and switching completely to profiting yourself and your shareholders.
I am under the impression that the term was popularized, if not invented, by Cory Doctorow. See his many writings on his ad & tracker-free website; https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/
Wiktionary gives him the invention credit (although its source does seem to be KnowYourMeme).
The bestest of sources.
I disagree, we all know that any article that cites the onion is 100% infallibly correct 100% of the time
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
Gotta convince some of the tech guys coming over from Reddit to spin up their own Lemmy instances so we can properly be distributed and share the load.
There are 150+ instances listed on the lemmy site. If we somehow managed to get all those instances running on hardware that could handle thousands of users, then we managed to find enough new techie people to get 10x as many instances, then we worked out some way of getting the load shared evenly so the new users didn’t all congregate on one instance and you manage to do this without confusing non-techie people about how it works, if all that goes to plan and you get each instance to support 10,000 users - you’ve now managed to support 15 million reddit users.
Reddit has over 430 million active monthly users. It’s just not feasible to do by 1 July, we need to let the community grow organically.
true enough, but I don’t think i’m going to care that much as long as the community stays big enough to stay somewhat active. I feel much more engaged in the community here than I ever did on reddit.
To me, day 1 here, it feels like a niche subreddit about something you enjoy but that’s the whole platform. The federation and the ability to have multiple of the same communities moderated differently is intriguing idea to me. I think reddit’s troubles began ultimately with it’s popularity. More content, less quality, more of an inclination of reddit for monetization. This is going to be an interesting month that will test the capabilities of this idea we are participating in. I feel like it is entirely possible but I hope that not too much strain is placed on each instance operator and their mod team. I want to be somewhere to anonymously socialize without being the commodity. I do have some concerns about Lemmy, primarily, it’s lack of a privacy policy and a tos. Really my concern is, if I delete my account for example does it and my content also get deleted? What’s the data retention policy? We are seeing this federation could easily be made into a archive like what pushshift for reddit l became which was a major frightening idea that everything you ever posted or commented was archived without your consent or knowledge. This truly is the wild west right now. It’s exciting and I’m glad to be here. Just want some understanding of what we are signing up for. Lemmy’s dev did say there is no logging of your IP address anywhere except web server logs which is to be expected.
I have some similar concerns, although reddit does hang on to deleted comments and posts for themselves/their monetization and tracking purposes. That’s why those reddit account deletion scripts edit all comments before deletion, and people are (were?) advised to let the edited comments sit for 24 hours before finally deleting them. I don’t know if that actually works anymore to delete the comment from reddit’s servers, though; somebody said they started keeping the pre-edited versions of comments to get around it.
At least with Lemmy you also have the option of hosting your own instance, which I would think could get around some of these concerns? I haven’t looked into it much.
If you post on multiple communities, too, I think your info is spread around multiple servers. And there’s no monetary incentive for people to be trying to track us, except perhaps on instances hosted by companies.
But the only company I know of that currently has an instance (I think) is Mozilla, and since I use Firefox, they’d have a heck of a lot of other options if they wanted to invade my privacy.
Edit: I dislike that when I delete a comment, it just deletes the text and leaves my username there above the deleted comment marker. I can kind of see why it might be desired for accountability purposes, but also, ehhh.
big money ruins everything
money ruins everything
Ayyy that’s capitalism, baby!!
