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?
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!
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.
Was going link this.
You beat me to it, the man is an oracle.
Really great article. I’ve been hearing about it for a while, but finally managed to read through it fully. Very well thought out and a brilliant write-up IMO.
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.
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.
Spot on! We are seeing it happen before our eyes and I love it!
Definitely accurate to the situation lol
Thank you for this! I never really thought about late stage capitalism but this post helped a lot.
Wow that’s a great read!
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.
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.
The line has to go up.
The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don’t demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don’t sell and bail.
Now, with Twitter there’s a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn’t the place for it.
Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it’s money.
Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it’s Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they’re making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.
Facebook: I don’t even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it’s just ads.
Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn’t feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they’re a bad thing, just using an example)
Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
It also coincides nicely with web3 becoming a less nebulous thing and investors starting to shift their focus from user created content to practical applications of ai.
is reddit a zirp phenomenon?
I don’t think all that many redditors are moving to Lemmy. Judging by the stats on join-lemmy, there are only several thousand monthly Lemmy users, which is nothing compared to reddit which had tens of millions daily users
Everybody just wants money now. Some of that is reasonable, these companies tend to work if not with a loss, then with quite unpredictable margins.
Now that tech investors have found a new bubble - AI - they are no longer willing to sponsor old-fashion internet stuff and wait if it ever turns a profit.
Especially since many got used to becoming all that richer during the pandemic, and are looking to keep those numbers rising.
But there’s also some sudden hatred of porn, and I don’t know where that is coming from. Tumblr, Imgur have limited it completely, OF wanted to, Reddit probably will, coedcherry shut down. The owner of coedcherry said it was really a sudden 180° turn of the banks to no longer wanting to do anything with porn, and nobody knows why.
It’s especially bizzare considering how these platforms keep assuring us that we’ll still be able to post and see blown off heads and all kinds of other nasty stuff, it’s just the titties that are being banned! Eh?
Their death is waaaay overdue. We literally jumped one cycle because the 2008 financial crisis and 0% interest rate.
Now there is no free money, and they need to extract value to seem a good investment, so they canibalize themselves and turn into shit.
Most of Elon stuff is doomed once reality catches on. Same with Uber. Same with streaming platforms. Same with Meta.
Also there is a new/old boy in the bubble and burst town, Microsoft and their AI push. It’s going to destroy them pushing them into overspending to keep up.
Facebook dies due to privacy concerns and misinformation. Twitter under threat because Elon. Imgur just deleted their NSFW content. Reddit with its API pricing. Twitch executives also getting greedy. Youtube has been going down for years.
It feels like we’re seeing the natural life-cycle of social media companies in real time.
Course-correcting, maybe? Web 2.0 really overstayed its welcome with Facebook/Twitter/Reddit being such dominant websites over the past 15+ years. Various reasons of greed, narcissism, and other factors finally popped the bubble.
I’m really enjoying the Feder-verse or whatever we’re calling it since decentralization can prevent a lot of this nonsense from ever occuring. It feels like a new approach to the late 90’s era of message boards and such.
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.
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 think this is the most tragic thing about leaving Reddit… The tech subs, the politics subs - those are easy communities to make replacements for on any platform. But the in-depth analyses and discussions of Star Wars lore or joke communities around Garfield will be tougher to replicate I think.
Yeah, I heard someone pitching the old let “AI” handle it line. Machine learning can’t moderate those communities to even a mediocre standard. It’s just too variable, subjective and nuanced. Even actual members of communities can be crappy at moderating them!
Even actual members of communities can be crappy at moderating them!
Ummm…have you been on Reddit? 😆
As a mod of a small community on reddit, I’m weary of building up from scratch again. The sub is about polls, which isn’t a feature on Lemmy. So I guess I’ll just give up on my moderating hobby for now.
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.
Same, but ReddPlanet. I paid for Redd, but not Apollo because you can’t convince me to pay for something if I don’t have a chance to see if the features are worth it.
ReddPlanet, slide, Relay were all amazing.
I recently saw my wife use the official Reddit app. I… can’t take that kind of user experience.
What about switching back to YouTube from twitch? Some streamers I follow stream on both.
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.