Like many people I’m here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I’ve been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?
I wish this was the cause but I think it’s more insidious. When cash supply was cheap and people were stuck at home these companies saw explosive growth. Now the market is down and investors smell blood. They want payouts. This is for sure the story with reddit and it’s upcoming IPO as well as Musk burning down Twitter trying to make up for the 1.5bn in debt it’s accruing.
Facebook/Meta is trying to expand into new markets since their main service hit saturation ages ago and they’ve cut all they can. That means killing gfycat, making a Twitter clone, etc.