I mean there’s Reddit ofc, as well as Twitter in its entirety, Discord is implementing some dumb updates, there are issues with Tumblr as well as everything to do with Meta, and I’m sure there are plenty more (and I haven’t even touched other digital media, for example the Sims). Why is it all happening in the span of about a couple months?
Late stage capitalism You make a business and it goes well, you make some money everyone is happy.
But with time your profits will plateau or even decline. It’s natural, but businesses don’t understand that it is insane to expect a company to always turn crazy profits when the product does not evolve.
Companies like apple and Microsoft don’t worry as much because they are constantly evolving with new product.
Companies like Twitter, Facebook, reddit, Netflix have hit a wall where there really isn’t anywhere else to go so they start making shareholder centered decisions made by people who aren’t even in touch with the user base of their product.
Lets take the example of Reddit. Reddit could have kept its costs to the minimum and could have run the site with the ad revenue that came in. In fact they could have talked transparently about their opex and asked for a simple donation drive every now and then like Wikipedia. If need be, they could have removed silly GIF replies and other stuff and focused on text alone. However this would not let them become the next Facebook. That’s what they wanted to be. At some point in their story was a choice to be forums 2.0 or get into a race to become a cash grab. Sadly they went for the latter.
n fact they could have talked transparently about their opex and asked for a simple donation drive every now and then like Wikipedia.
Let’s remember this about Kbin and the Fediverse.
I would donate to help counterbalance the wave of migration that brought me here.
It’s the money.
US Fed has raised interest rates, destroying money for the first time in decades in an effort to stop our inflation problem
The knock on effects is that banks literally have less money to lend to companies. Some companies are affected more than others by this environment. Tech was hit hard, extremely hard.
With hundreds of thousands of layoffs, tech industry is contracting. Silicon Valley bank literally evaporated in the span of 3 days. Twitter was losing money and had to sell out. StackOverflow is losing money and is currently selling out.
In this environment, Reddit is about to launch it’s long awaited IPO, the time when the public is allowed to directly buy Reddit stock and invest into the company. That’s what Initial Public Offering means. If Reddit does well, Reddit will pull in lots of money this year through this IPO.
The CEO of Reddit needs to prove Reddit is profitable, or if not profitable… Will eventually be profitable. Stockholders don’t care about Reddit drama for the most part, but most are smart enough to read financial sheets. Reddit needs to show growing revenue, growing profits and cutting costs to attract money.
As such, all of what Reddit’s CEO has done makes sense in the context of the IPO. He is betting that shareholders won’t notice the drop of high quality content creators from Reddit, since that’s not a financial number that’s reported. He can IPO, raising millions, maybe even billions for himself. The golden parachute outta here when everything gets screwed up in a year or two and collapses.
I think today’s investors are smarter though, and the bearish economy and high interest rates means more investors will pay attention to underlying issues.
U just enlightened me sir. Thank you.
Generally the drama isn’t a big deal. But in a specific case the only value of the site is in the community moderation and the depth of data on the site.
He needs investors to buy in but he also needs advertisers to buy in. Advertisers do not love paying for negative drama.
Yeah, investors are going to be even more inclined to identify exactly why the platform might be successful in the future. They’re not going to blindly throw money at new IPOs (as much) because debt isn’t free anymore.
Cory Doctorow has some very interesting blogposts on the topic. He call it enshittification. It’s more or less the business model of plattform Capitalism.
Because of capitalism, no seriously these decisions are based on money and growth. But both of these things are relatively finite. You can’t keep have exponential growth year after year. Eventually you will plateau but there isnt a mechanism in capitalism to accept that. So companies start forcing monetary gain.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of cancer.
And like cancer, it will eventually kill its host once things are beyond saving.
Start making alternatives, open source alternatives.
The VC money is drying up and they’re demanding a return on investment as the world’s economy struggles on at the moment.
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.”
I swear every problem in the modern world is like two degrees separated from capitalism.
Yeah… I mean, we on one hand, we now grow plenty of food to feed almost 8 billion people, cured polio, greatly extended lifespan all over the globe… But on the other hand (waves hand at everything).
Eternal growth on a finite planet ain’t possible, but capitalism demands it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think the free money train in leaving the station and everyone is scrambling to be profitable. But that’s just an assumption based on twitch and Reddit right now.
This is just what living in late stage capitalism looks like.
It’s so weird that stuff is being intentionally designed to be worse.
it’s not, the primary objective is to rake in ever bigger heaps of money. this is just a side effect
So what you’re saying is we should ban money
I’ve never seen a more stupid comment. Your attempt at a satirical remark is at a kindergarten level. From reading it I deduct you believe there are no other solutions to it.
There are solutions to it. You’d find them if you used your cognition beyond playground squabble
Almost like it’s impossible that was the least bit sarcastic.
A lot of these companies have never been profitable and have been running on VC money on speculation alone until they reach critical mass and can turn on the monetization streams.
What were the bad decisions discord is making? Im out of the loop
Because easy money from a decade of low interest rates is disappearing.
This is the consequence of the fed raising interest rates and companies finding it much harder to find money to pay salaries and operating costs. So companies have to actually seek profit or go bust and CEOs and board of directors are getting desperate and showing how little they understand what makes their products great.
You are so right. For social media, The Thing that makes their products great is us. They are really showing how little they understand us.
Hopefully these instances show that we as the user/consumer can make decisions en masse and have a positive influence long term.
oh they’re betting on users/consumers making decisions en masse ; they just want to be able to instruct us what decisions to make and for us to follow through.
That’s what Facebook has been able to do, sometimes (see: targeted advertising that got #45 elected in the US.)
It doesn’t always work (see: numerous articles trying to cajole people to Return To Office work rather than Work From Home, to prop-up the value of office buildings.)
