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?
As other people have said, we may very well be watching a bubble burst.
Many social media companies rely on VC money to get themselves started, to handle large initial costs, but the problem is many of them (Reddit included) have been suckling on that VC money for too long, and have been too lax on figuring out their monetisation.
The reason that is a problem now is because we’re not just feeling the effects of the pandemic monetarily, but there’s all sorts of things pulling at the global economy right now including the Ukrainian war…
It’s made VC money harder to come by, so these companies are having to figure out their monetisation strategy now or die, hence the sudden death and enshitification of many social media (and related) sites.
Though if anything, it gives us a chance to exist, so that’s cool. Only problem is even on a small scale, I can’t imagine these Admins have an easy time monetising either, so I suspect this won’t last in it’s current iteration either.