Why does it feel like we're at a point where every social media + other digital media are making shitty decisions and falling apart?
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?
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This is the consequence of the fed raising interest rates and companies finding it much harder to find money to pay salaries and operating costs. So companies have to actually seek profit or go bust and CEOs and board of directors are getting desperate and showing how little they understand what makes their products great.
What you really mean is that this is the consequences of the Fed's pulling back on the corporate welfare program of qualitative easing.
We've been printing free money for the wealth holding class since they fucked up our economy gambling on poor people not being able to afford housing.
They got used to the welfare and instead of getting their houses in order, they started gambling with our future tax dollars like they were guaranteed forever. That's why Trump was such a bitch about politicizing the fed and blaming interest rates. He, and everyone else, knew our economy was getting artificially propped up and wanted to kick the can down the road four more years.
Now the wealth class is going to take out all their angst out at the American people to see if they can cause the government to flinch first.
The real problem is that the wealth class doesn't give a shit if they're making money of Americans or not. They'd happily follow the economies around the world. The government doesn't have that option.
Everyday Americans, and to a lesser extent, the world, suffer while Mommy government tries to get corporate daddy's wild free money addiction under control.
Dad is going to either go for a pack of smokes and some milk in China, or maybe Russia a few years ago, or beat the kids until mommy lets him drink again.
Blaming interest rates plays a lot better than telling the kids that daddy doesn't have a job and needs to go to rehab because he doesn't know how to make money and just gets it from Mom and the kids college fund/next months rent.
The tech bubble is over (kinda, they're trying to spin it back up with AI) and so is the free money party. Rates are rising, and investors aren't content to throw money at companies that still don't know how they're going to make any money. To make money, they've got to squeeze it out of somebody: either users or advertisers.
In Twitter's case, they squeezed it out of a vain billionaire who they convinced to buy the company. The shareholders got their money, and now making a profit is somebody else's problem. Reddit could've similarly tried to court a buyer, but there's no guarantee they would have found one (maybe Meta?). Instead they're trying to a gin up some revenue either out of third party apps or by pushing third party app users onto the main app so they can advertise to them. I haven't been following Discord and Meta's stuff, but the reasoning is probably similar.
The behavior of corporates and - especially - VC-backed ones was always out there (the dot-com bubble of 2000 was in a context of relatively high interest rate), but Ben Bernanke dumped gasoline on it through quantitative easing, as you rightly pointed out. By trying to save banks and a sluggish economy, the Fed enabled every growing distortions in corporate behavior since 2008. No wonder the 99% are pissed off. These attempts to "save the economy" resulted in ever-increasing exploitation of workers. I still think that it would have been better for the Fed to let a wave of bank bankruptcies sweep the US so that investors and management would be kept on their toes against bad corporate behavior.
You are so right. For social media, The Thing that makes their products great is us. They are really showing how little they understand us.
Hopefully these instances show that we as the user/consumer can make decisions en masse and have a positive influence long term.
oh they're betting on users/consumers making decisions en masse ; they just want to be able to instruct us what decisions to make and for us to follow through.
That's what Facebook has been able to do, sometimes (see: targeted advertising that got #45 elected in the US.)
It doesn't always work (see: numerous articles trying to cajole people to Return To Office work rather than Work From Home, to prop-up the value of office buildings.)
When have people had a positive long-term influence on anything?