Technology

big money ruins everything

in this day and age, you have to be really screwing your customers to get any money from investors

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.

What's going on with Twitch ?

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 internet users are learning about corporate greed and rights!

The big sites got big by being there when a previous big site died. But nothing lasts forever, and eventually a social site becomes desperately uncool because there are people old enough to have grandkids on it. And they totter on, like a zombie, until they fuck out badly, and most people leave. But not everyone, I still get linked to blog entries on Livejournal now and then, sometimes I even end up on Blogger when I’m following a trail and people are still updating some of those.

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.

Rich people like money, and will destroy anything to get it.

I think it's all part of a cycle. Right as a phoenix burns off the last of its light the eggs can be seen forming within the ash.

Twitter, Reddit probably won't be going away anytime soon but they could feasibly end up as the ashes of what they once were.

What's happening with Twitch? I haven't heard anything.

The post title implies it were prevalent. Which it is not. Three platforms is not a lot overall.

The reasons between Twitter and Reddit are very different.

Twitter was fine. It's on a single Person - Elon Musk - who bought Twitter. All changes after it were through them.

Reddit became a big platform. Now it's run not by a small team but by a big company with management and CEO. Supposedly targeting going public, and probably focusing no longer on usefulness and the service but on profitability and growth. An inherently, broadly, and very different mindset and goals.

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.

I don't think that's true. The web is growing.

However what you might be seeing is a natural progression of a web project. Reality is that not many business projects in IT make it to 10+ years.

Companies trying to squeeze every penny out of their employees and customers leads to catastrophic damage that is very visible, then everyone has to suffer, except the execs with their big fat bonuses.

louis rossman talks about this in two of his recent videos on twitter and reddit. obviously he tackles it using layman's terms, but there's still a lot of valuable insights and it's super palatable.

essentially it boils down to what @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml says here:

"The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company."

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for them to die and for federated or privacy-conscious alternatives to take their place. But I don't think they're all dying that much.

While it is true that more people complain and leave for alternatives than before, long term it doesn't seem like the masses are really switching yet. I feel like people are becoming more aware of privacy, market-monopoly, and other related issues, but at the same time don't want to hand in convinience, pay money to stop it, nor move somewhere when the rest isn't there yet. We see a spike on alternative SNS like Lemmy and Mastodon around the time news regarding some drama with big SNS releases, but we also see many users leave the alternatives after a time and that they never left the first platform that had drama to start with. They're just used both to eventually return. It's generally only a specific crowd that really leaves for good to go elsewhere, but not the masses.

As for the many lay-offs lately. Don't forget that during COVID the sky was the limit for tech. They all predicted that after the time being locked in our houses doing everything remotely, we'd keep doing that, and they invested accourdingly. However, as the world opened up more that predictioned turned out wrong, causing them to have over-invested and needing to make budget cuts to fix their mistake.

Increasing profits has become more important than user experience. Diminishing user experience to raise profits inevitably leads to the collapse of profits due to users abandoning the platform. We are also seeing users become more educated and aware of these issues (myself included). At some point people get tired of being squeezed, and thankfully there are alternatives.