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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
U just enlightened me sir. Thank you.
$
Running out of VC dollars, now they gotta actually make a profit.
Higher interest rates, less vc money, have to actually start being profitable
Honestly I think it’s this. All these tech companies finally being pressed to show ROI now that the risk-free rate of return is much higher.
VC money drying up means enshittification machine slamming the gas
No doubt. Instead of slowly making it shittier bit by bit so that we didn’t noticed, they had to go mask off an remind us that we are the product.
Everyone’s a genius in a bull market with a near zero interest rate.
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.
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.
Related question: why does it feel like hollywood is intent on completely destroying all of our beloved franchises? It’s not like the place isn’t overflowing with incredibly talented artists, writers, actors, producers, etc. I just don’t understand why it’s so hard for them to make something that isn’t garbage.
Personally I feel like the Mario movie was one of the best movies like that to come out. Sure it’s nothing too amazing, but for a video game adaptation it’s definitely up there. It does seem like everything has to be remade to be almost deliberately awful though.
This video explains it well: Basically, its greed and the fact that franchises are safer bets. And of course many people still watch them. https://youtu.be/p4GERuvdhYI
I mean they’re not… There’s been some amazing films recently.
Not what, destroying our beloved franchises? You’re telling me star wars, star trek, and lord of the rings are in a good place right now? The ghostbusters remake, the insultingly bad fourth matrix movie, that attempt to revive the X files a few years back, the list goes on.
I’m not saying NOTHING good is coming out at all, but I AM saying just about everything coming out “related to franchises you used to love” is total crap with rare exception.
Because they know it will sell.
They don’t need to make a good Star Wars movie because they don’t need to onboard new fans. They make them only to squeeze out existing fans who will pay regardless of quality.
The new Matrix movie was actually a masterpiece. The Wachowski’s didn’t want to revive the franchise since they considered it complete - but the studio insisted that if they didn’t make it, the studio would get it done itself. So they accepted the offer, and made a movie so bad that it killed any attempts at reviving the franchise for good. The Matrix is now dead, and it will stay that way (hopefully).
I guess Star Wars is too strong to kill even with multiple shit movies.
Besides that, for how long can you squeeze the same universe? I’d rather have something new.
LOTR ROP is pretty good.
Because easy money from a decade of low interest rates is disappearing.
Many tech companies were overvalued for a long time. Everyone was happy to invest and pump money into those companies because “those platforms are going to be the future and I want to be part of it when they are starting to make a ton of money”. It didn’t matter that many of those companies were not profitable because they always promised to make up for that in the future.
This classic idea is starting to break down a bit. Many Tech companies have become profitable in the meantime, but many of them also have various troubles like moderation.
So why are so many media companies making “shitty decisions”? Well, because from a business perspective, they aren’t necessarily “shitty decisions”, they are kinda smart decisions. Reddit makes money by gathering data and by showing ads. They cannot show ads on apps they don’t control. So they have to handle a lot of traffic for which they get nothing back. That’s why they are trying to push as many people to use their app as possible. They know that the hardcore oldschool community won’t like that, but they are probably pretty sure that enough will switch to the app to make it worthwhile for them.
Meta is fighting to stay relevant as well. Facebook was the foundation of social media for a long time, but in the digital space, this can change very quickly, so they constantly have to try new things.
And if we look at games like the Sims, the game who really escalated the whole DLC thing, it’s a similar story. From a consumer perspective, what they are doing is bad. From a business perspective, it’s smart. And that’s what it ultimately comes down to.
Companies’ main goal isn’t to satisfy their customers, it’s making money. If fucking over customers makes them more money, they do it in a heartbeat.
They’ve also made a lot of shitty decisions. Reddit decided to invest in NFTs when they had cheap money. That’s been about as successful as a lead balloon. That also burned a bunch of user good will in the process. Meta went all in on VR and the Metaverse. They’ve admitted that’s been a bust. This seems more like an A and B with A being cheap money evaporating and B being bad decisions.
I’m reluctant to call the latest Reddit thing enshittification, but it really seems like they’re between steps 2 and 3.
On a slightly different note, does any think enshittification will be the word of the year?
They’ve also made a lot of shitty decisions.
That’s the thing with tech companies. They are fast to rise, but also fast to fall, so they are always on the lookout for the next big thing. Blockchain tech was supposed to be the next big thing. Crypto currency was at the time already kinda the big thing in the tech industry’s eyes. And of course when that happens, everyone wants to be early bird for the next big thing and caution is pushed to the side.
VR and AR are the same. It was and still is supposed to be the next big thing. Another one would be language models and “A.I.”. But because all those “new things” tend to be massively over hyped by people who often don’t really understand it and just have dollar signs in their eyes, they inevitably support the wrong thing every once in a while.
I think also we’ve become so dependent that they can just do whatever the fuck they want.
I’ve lived in a bunch of countries and FB messenger is the only way for me to keep in touch. FB can do whatever they want to me because I’m never going to persuade a bunch of people to all move to signal or something.
Reddit has communities that simply don’t exist on any other platform.
They have the critical mass.
It’s basically the lifecycle of any big corporation.
When the industry is new and there’s tons of new users to reach, everyone tries to be the most friendly corporation to build a name for themselves. Positive press and the halo effect helps bring in more people.
Once an industry matures and growth slows, the focus shifts to nickle-and-diming customers to squeeze more profit out of them.
I was going to say that I wish there was a decentralised way of sending messages… And then I remembered text messaging is a thing.
Incredible how quickly these things become embedded in everyday life
Unfortunately this doesn’t really work with international mates
What were the bad decisions discord is making? Im out of the loop
