Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?
YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
I think it's a consequence of higher interest rates drying up VC money, meaning that tech companies now have to actually be profitable, rather than just grow.
If the plan was grow now, profit later, then later has come
Nailed it, investors are demanding profit increases, it's not just interest rates (though they're the main reason) but also the corporate tax cuts in 2018 basically dumped a ton of profit onto corporations because they repatriated all their offshore cash they'd been hoarding.
That bump lasted 2 years, but the expectation of higher revenue is still there, it doesn't matter if you got lucky at slots last month, if you make your normal salary this month investors will be absolutely pissed.
This sounds too stupid to be real but I was working for one of the largest corporations in the world during this period and we were congratulated on 20% growth even though we did nothing. Of course we didn’t get an extra bonus or anything but they acted like we had an incredible year when we really just had an average year with a massive tax cut.
Then the next year, our goal was to grow at 20% again and when we missed it by 17%, no one got a bonus or raise.
This timeline is the stupid one.
This is what irritates me. You still made money just not as much as you wanted or hoped so your company punishes you. You can't have infinite growth
Every publicly-traded company: "Hold my beer"
Capitalism: "Numbers go brrrrr"
This is also a great example of why higher interest rates aren't automatically a terrible thing. In general, it's probably a good sign for the economy that companies are expected to be profitable. Means resources are being used well. The limitless VC money kinda meant any dumb idea regardless of merit got funding.
I wish we lived in a society where not everything needed to be profitable. People deserve treats and sucks to have things that made our lives better go awake because shareholders demand money
There are a number of ways things can function that way. Unfortunately, they don't scale well.
This is part of my hope of federalisation, it lets a group of small entities act as a single large entity. It also lets non-profit and profit making work together. The for-profit provide the brute force, the non-profits keep them from going off the rails too far. It might be the workaround we need.
Also, be the change you want. For-profit businesses often win due to the far better returns. More people are willing to pour the effort into a business that could make them rich than a charity that never will.
I think we'd see loads of improvements if the philosophy went from "be as profitable as possible" to "just be profitable". You're 15% lower than last year, but still profiting? That's just a smaller bonus for all employees and a smaller dividend for the investors, after putting a healthy amount of it into savings.
There's no concept of "enough". That's the big problem. It goes for both economics and career advancement. There doesn't always have to be a "higher". It's okay to say "it isn't worth it to go further".
Whether we like the ongoing enshittification of Reddit or not, I think it's fair that shareholders expect a return on their investment and they have the right to pressure spez to seek aggressive monetization of the platform.
That problem wouldn't have existed if Reddit was a non-profit though, like the Wikimedia Foundation.
Whilst I agree that investors have everybright to expect a return on investment I think this could have been resolved and a number of ways which didn't include alienating a large proportion of the user base.
Exactly I’m tired of all these capitalism apologists. The aim is to innovate, there must be a more decent way to monetise or profit. If pursuing such hardline tactics means profitable at the expense of your customers and enshitification of your platform, I’d urge you to reconsider your business setup.
The capitalism apologist is going to tell you that this is necessary for innovation as Venture Capital firms fund 100 start-ups of which 99 fail to turn a profit, and thus the 1 that does has to make up for the other 99 by making extreme profits.
But that that is just as flawed logic as thinking that there can be a "decent" capitalism that doesn't destroy everything in its path in its pursuit of profit. If you are trying to be "decent" you will be out-competed by someone else under the current economic setup.
The modern Neoliberal capitalist philosophy of shareholders being the only priority, isn't the only capitalist philosophy.
The Imbeded liberalism after the new deal, worked quite well. Since the employees are making the products, and management is making the decisions, while the shareholders don't directly make anything for the company; People understood that the shareholders were the last priority, in getting profits. It's why worker wages scaled with productivity until the 80s.
That's when the Neoliberal capitalist philosophy took hold and gained power. First the Republicans with Regan, then Democrats with Clinton, then the global economy, since so much of it is driven by the US.
You're right, to some extent, but you have to ask yourself why neoliberalism took hold and gained power. The problem with social democracy, even though it's the best version of a shitty economic system, is that it's still capitalism and at some point greedy assholes are going to want more, and will start influencing politics to get what they want. That's why neoliberalism became a thing, despite the succes of social democracy/embedded liberalism for the 99%, because there still was a 1% with much more power and influence. Neoliberalism was a planned and calculated attack on social democracy decades in the making by groups like the Mont Pelerin Society and individuals like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Reagan was just a public symptom of this disease under the surface. If you keep capitalism in place in any way, it will always eventually trend towards it's natural endpoint of 0.01% being obscenely, unfathomably rich and the rest getting fucked over in every possible way.
I think in part there's an essential misunderstanding of current events at the core of Reddit's behaviour (not yours, I mean - spez/investors/etc).
Historically the rule was supposed to be 'if it's free, you're the product', which is to say that our attention (and profiles and demographics) were on sale to advertisers. The big recent development is someone figuring out, or thinking they've figured out, how to monetise us a different way - specifically, by using the things we create as training data for AI. A sensible organisation would continue to balance these two possible cash flows and, since both really require user retention to remain profitable in the long run, seek a middle ground. But the perception is that there's more money in the training data than there is in the user attention, so they focus on maximising that and spit on the users. The obvious consequence is that they lose users and their source of training data dries up.
You're conflating investors, who lent Reddit the money and want a return on it, and spez, who actually runs the business and made those bad decisions. The investors weren't the ones who told spez how to create the return on investment, they merely pressured him to find a way to do so. Do you think Warren Buffett tells Apple how to run things? I'd be surprised if an old fart like him had any say in how iPhones should be designed or how the Apple Store should operate.
I don't think investors are the ones who told spez how to run things. They likely simply pressured him to make changes as quick as possible to make Reddit profitable. Investors don't usually specify how to generate that profit though, otherwise they'd run their own companies.
Yeah this is critical. These promises for money later mean that all sorts of stupid ideas were being funded, and therefore people hired, etc, but now that's coming to a close. Companies and investors will be more likely to scrutinize spending (as they should) and see how to rightsize with reality and line of sight to profit. For significantly more complex reasons, it's similar to an individual borrowing themselves into crazy debt, and banks eventually determining that they need more than credit/promises to keep seeding you cash.
Time to pay back some promises.
That's still the case and high interest rates haven't really fixed that because they are still not high enough. Just look at how any company mentioning "AI" in their earnings call gets extra billions in market cap overnight without having a real product yet.
This seems like a non sequitur: what is good about only profitable ventures getting funding? These unprofitable ventures were creating good jobs and providing enjoyable and sometimes useful products to consumers for low prices. So why is it good that funding is drying up?
It doesn’t seem completely crazy to me that it would be better for money to go to successful projects than just be sprayed like a fire hose in hope that you land a Facebook or Google sized moonshot.
Of course it sucks for the people that lose their job, but presumably that money should go towards sustainably growing things where they could work.
No. I don't mean to be rude but most of that message is wrong.
VC Money is very much not drying up. 2023 has seen record rounds in most markets. What is drying up is "VC Money for early stage startups with no revenue, no traction, and barely a functional idea", but even that is not new it has been going on since at least 2018. Remember that guy who raised 1.5M$ with an app that just let you say "Yo" to your contacts ? That was 10 years ago. Those times are dead and buried.
Then the link between VC markets health and interest rates is... contentious to say the least. VCs don't borrow money - they raise funds from family offices and individual investors, every 2 or 3 years. So every change to the financial landscape will have a progressive effect over 3 years, not a brutal one after a few months. Also you have to bear in mind that the people who bankroll VCs are looking for performance of at least 2X over 10 years. Interests would have to go up to 7% to even be in competition with VC investment. Of course there's a psychological aspect to investment so the effet is not ZERO but it's not as automatic as saying "interest go up => vc dry up".
Finally, the companies we are talking about are in vastly different situations and not necessarily looking for VC money. There is no explaining their behaviour with a single cause, what we're seeing is probably a cluster effect, because executives are like fish they always follow the movement of the other fish in their field.
What's left unsaid here (but I'm sure you realize) is that these same users whose monetization is so low also provide most of the content and moderation on the site. When you spread out the value of that among the (human) userbase, the total value returned to Reddit by each human is higher.
Steve thought he was targeting the AI with this move, but in reality he has been charging his most engaged users. If he's upset that Apollo has turned a profit, the correct move was to acknowledge that one guy has done a better job than Reddit's team, not tell all the users that Apollo helped bring to Reddit that they were no longer welcome
I think they're operating under the assumption that there is no shortage of people willing to work for clout on a leading social media. They think the users they lose are replaceable and you know what it's not an unreasonable expectation. It sucks but that's just the way it is, there will always be people willing to post memes and delete nazi comments.
Only time will tell, but it's not uncommon to kick out power users when they get uppity and think they run your platform. Way easier/cheaper to fire unpaid volunteers than tech-bros with Silicon Valley salaries.
I'm not so sure about Google nowadays. What started out as an everyday product killing, ended up as the first of many. They killed Stadia from one day to the other, and then started to basically sell and kill everything that is not massively profitable to the point they sold their domain distribution as well to Squarespace. That does not seem like something a massive monopoly with no regards to investor opinion does.
Couldn't it be argued that it's a mistake from reddit to think of themselves as being comparable to platforms that make more money per user?
For example reddit and youtube are completely different in terms of the nature of the platform. Could attempting to monetize an average reddit user to the level of those using youtube might be a mistake? Keep in mind that reddit has much lower overhead for keeping the service running.
The mental image I'm going after is a country that exports mainly wheat arguing that its' exports should be valued the same as a country that produces complex electronics. The products are at a different realm of complexity. Commodities should be valued for what they are and not be confused with higly refined products.
Short answer : Enshittification.
Long and brilliant explanation here : https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
This concept is also why I’m so hopeful for federated software. The federated model means that there’s no single instance that holds all the power. Many of these instances are run by admins of their own kindness and initiative. And at worst, if any instance were to start being “enshittified,” people could easily move to another instance and continue participating in the greater network.
Between all of what we’ve seen unfold in the last few months, and even weeks, on Twitter and Reddit, it’s safe to say that “enshittification” could be reaching critical mass. That’s why I came here, after all, and I’m looking forward to seeing this community simply persist here on the web.
My fear is that even if you're correct, as the internet monoliths that have been built on the past decade fall to federated software, we will lose forever an immeasurable amount of arts and culture that has been stockpiled in these corporate spaces. Think of all the great educational YouTubers whose videos won't be able to be passed on to whatever the next thing is if YouTube collapses.
I think I can understand your point. Large ‘“media” companies will horde the content and refuse to let it see the light of day because they believe they own it. I don’t think that’s how it would go down. Anything I’ve ever produced to be put on the web still exists somewhere on a hard drive that I control. I doubt the big name educational YouTubers are deleting the source material as soon as it goes up to YouTube.
Besides, a lot of the good ones have already moved to Nebula as well. If thought like educational YouTube you should check it out.
Educational YouTube was just an example. But there is a real danger of culturally important media being lost. See cases like the Operation Soda Steal video
Absolutely. I was a big part of the non professional music production side of YouTube a decade ago. Imagine getting 100+ new songs every week, from talented artists putting everything they had into their work. It was incredible! This year I got into data hoarding and looked into downloading my old favorite songs... Turns out most of them deleted their old work from YouTube when they went pro or simply closed out their channel for personal reasons. Not even the compilation channels were still around. Hundreds of thousands of songs are just gone, along with the records of that community's culture.
Thanks for the link. That was an entertaining watch! Still, the narrator states that he is sure the original exists on a hard drive somewhere. He also gives a solution towards the end of the video. If you really like something download it.
Those folks will re-upload old content onto the new platforms. I know people don't like to talk about money, especially in relation to the fediverse, but it's important. If you want someone to dedicate a large portion of their energy into making high-quality content, it's not unreasonable for them to want to make money doing it. How can we get money into the hands of content creators without allowing centralized control of the content?
Those folks will re-upload old content onto the new platforms.
Unfortunately, this isn't likely to happen. Video files are huge (tens or hundreds of gigabytes) and many creators delete old videos once they are uploaded to Youtube so that they don't run out of space or keep having to buy more and more drive space. Even tech YouTubers like MKBHD pull clips from their old videos directly off YouTube because they no longer have the originals (he did a podcast talking about this)
Not all of them. What about the ones who are no longer active on the platform? The ones people forgot about? The ones who have died? You think there will be 100% coverage? In the case of YouTube, many channel operators don't actually keep a local copy of all their videos, since the files would be too big. So the only copy is the one on YouTube.
What about all the old art and other stuff that hasn’t been kept around? They probably weren’t worth preserving through the ages, if it’s good enough we’ll see it again
Original on Cory Doctorow's own site here
Thanks dirty looking the original article, that was a great read!
Jesus. It's articles like this that make me both be thankful for Doctorow and his ability to put tech shit in terms is non-techies can understand.
I find it fitting that an article on enshitification is so hard to read because of enshitification on the site.
Seeing boing boing articles in my Twitter feed was one of the reasons I started using it years ago. When junk started filtering in, that’s when I stopped using it. When musk started messing with politics and using Twitter to push his views, that’s when I nuked it.
That was an excellent article. Thanks for sharing!
That is one of the best summaries of the Internet I've ever read. Maybe the best. That is quite the article, thanks for sharing.
That was fantastic- sums up the stages pretty well
I'd say because it's in the air. Obviously companies watch each other. Like the layoffs in January. The initial wave was the companies that needed to do it and had been planning it for awhile. Then when there was blood in the water everyone was doing it because then they aren't big mean company, they are just another company doing layoffs right now. Lost in the crowd. It's already come out some companies did it purely because big companies like Twitter and Google did it.
But we are seeing a big increase in anti-consumer moves because there seems to be no backlash. Like there's the vocal minority, but it seems by and large a huge amount of the customers for these tech companies are unwilling to move away.
Every time Twitter does something some move off Twitter, and they get such growth! But then eventually stuff like Mastadon's activity has a noticeable decline over time and Twitter carries on. Some people go back, some quit Twitter entirely. But these are fractions of a percentage probably. They still have the biggest celebrities and a crap ton of users.
Netflix just cracked down on password sharing, in a move that people were calling foolish. The outcry was everywhere and anytime Netflix was mentioned was 20 comments saying they cancelled that day. But subscriptions are up, Netflix won.
YouTube has been pushing more and more ads on users, there isn't as big as a direct backlash. Like there was more outcry on removing the dislike button. Which...no one cares now lol. But YouTube pushing's more ads, and they don't seem to be loosing money for it. I'm sure they are trying to find the 'breaking point' for customers. But either people really are willing to put up with 2 30second unskippable ads every 5 minutes or premuim subscriptions are skyrocketing as they ruin the free experience.
WB killed a ton of shows outright, basically burned a bunch of media and shuttered a ton of HBO Max's staff. People upset... Twitter all a buzz. Now it's back to HBO is the best streaming service (Which it is lol)
Like it just keeps going. I think it's just a combination of companies making terrible blunders steal the spotlight from each other and society as a whole has a 3 day memory. The Reddit protests are already cold news because Twitter just DDOS'd itself. People who saw all this with Reddit and call it disgusting moves by the company and the unspoken bond is broken, always end their diatribe with something like "Well I'll just use old.Reddit with an ad blocker" like they are winning when they still provide Reddit with their usage.
People like us who walk away and move to spots like this are the minority of a minority. It's up in the air how many will stay and how many will slowly forget their outrage at Reddit and go back.
People! What a bunch of bastards!
Thanks for putting this into words, so frustrating but true. People just can't be assed to care if it means a mild inconvenience for themselves.
If I wasn't already that truth would make me depressed.
Venture capital has shifted very quickly from companies HOSTING content to companies SCRAPING content (LLM’s). This means renting compute is now very expensive and moving into the hands of ‘AI’ companies. It’s like trying to fly a plane while monkeys are tearing the wings of.
Most of the aspects have already been covered but I would want to add one:
This was always the plan, it just wasn't as highly prioritised as growth.
I work as a developer at a big tech company. We (the company) had our roadmap and it was mostly about getting more users. The more users you have the day the economy turns - the better off you are (... If you manage to turn an profit).
So when the economy went to shit and we (and other tech companies) no longer can loan money for free to cover our running expenses - the priorities shift. Working towards attracting more users is only going to increase your costs at the point and you don't want to run out of money. So all roadmaps changed and cost saving efforts became the highest prio all of the sudden.
Gain a monopoly, get users addicted and reliant, then change the rules of the game and hope they stick with you. It's happening now because of the economy for sure, but it's not like it's surprising.
This was always the plan, to put a world in your hand...
And then squeeeeze it until the last drop of blood dripps out of it.
As discussed here:
If interest rates are high, I'm sure they're hard up for capital. The free money they've grown to depend on is drying up and they need to make money themselves asap.
Yup, tech bro culture is wasting someone's else money to play with computers. No money, no game time for baby. Silicon Valley is in a panic because the infinite spout of money suddenly stopped, and there's a line of pissed people asking for their money back. They promised the world, now it's time to deliver and turns out they have nothing of value.
I was in the Tech game back in the late 1990s and in the Tech Startup game recently and this time around it's not techies that are Startup Founders, it's people from Sales, Marketing and Finance.
The whole "making something cool" ethos of Tech has been replaced by "Find a market niche that you can grow in until you have an exit strategy (IPO or sale to a larger company)" or in other words, make a company that looks like an infinite growth venture and sell it to some suckers for a ton of money.
As it so happens I was in Investment Banking in between those two periods in the Tech industry and immediatelly recognized the same spirit as in Investment Banking when I went into Startups in the late 2010.
At least the previous generation was driven by the "play with computers" drive. This one is all about borderline fraud (often outright fraud - just think Theranos or all the "coin" "tech startups") in the pursuit of personal upside maximization.
Tech bro is a derogatory term for a reason. It's still just a bro. Generally a cis genedered heteronormative affluent white male. With all the worse parts of MBA culture. Certainly they're sales, marketing and finance types. But they want to be tech adjacent to disrupt the market. They like to portray themselves as techies but are actually about get rich quick schemes. Their one and only interest on NFTs, crypto, AI and all tech in general is how can it enable them to exploit others into making them billionaires.
I heard the same about the movie industry: it used to be run by movie people, now it's run by finance people. The greedy producers of old came from the industry and understood the business; today's greedy producers don't understand anything about movies, so if you're pitching them a project, you need to speak their language: here's a market niche, here's similar projects that have been profitable, here's the return on investment we can expect.
I wish i knew how true that is, but it does seem to explain a lot of what we see from Hollywood these days.
What I find interesting is that I'm starting to hear this same story (in different words) from very different sources.
Lefty bloggers are saying, *"The hype economy is over, and vaporware companies used to never delivering are suddenly gasping for air in an economy that requires them to actually provide value." *And at the same time, mainstream financial podcasts are reporting that "Outlooks for 2023 anticipate a hostile market environment for disruptive innovators as they attempt to leverage their brands to monetize large user bases with low profitability. Meanwhile, the market is being buoyed by legacy firms with reliable cashflow from existing sales and services."
It shocked me when I noticed how different people are seeing the same thing, and it seems overdue.
Great point that shareholders ruin everything. I invest but I’ll avoid certain companies or industries that don’t align with my values, even if those stocks have the most potential profitability. But this seems to be a very uncommon habit in the investing world.
Ads pay basically nothing now and VC funding has dried up. Most of these tech companies operated at a loss and are now being pressured into becoming profitable since investors don’t want to throw money at them anymore.
Data privacy laws have also gotten better, cutting off another revenue stream that was typically used.
Interest rates def have a factor in this also
But when did VC money get flushed in? I doubt that it just somehow stops out of nowhere. I mean all these companies weren't exactly founded at the same time.
During the pandemic VC slowed to a crawl and the stock market went to shit. While the market eventually rebounded VC is doing so MUCH more slowly. VC scum doesn't care about innovation, it cares about making money. If there's some level of risk it shrinks like balls in a January pool and it takes forever to coax the little guys out.
They need money for their greedy venture capitalists.
It's the end of cheap credit.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=16J5X
That graph shows the Federal Funds Effective Rate. Until recently, VCs could borrow money while effectively paying zero interest. That meant their investments weren't under any pressure to become profitable any time soon. Now, borrowing is expensive. VCs don't want to loan any more money, and want their investments to pay off. Reddit and other pre-IPO companies are scrambling to become profitable.
I assume the big companies like YouTube / Google going against people blocking ads are just taking advantage of the chaos.
As for Twitter: Elon Musk is an idiot.
You forgot one thing. Fuck /u/spez
I respect you took the time to link this
Part of it is the standard crisis of capitalism, the profit you get from doing the same thing always declines, so over time you have to push up revenue (increasing prices, forcing people to pay, showing more ads, gathering more data, etc) & push down costs (fire engineers, run on less hardware, etc)
Part of it is capitalisms natural tendency to create monopolies, and the lack of competition in a given field causing the company to then lose sight of what it's good at to compete in a bigger field.
Part is that interest rates mean loans are no longer cheap, so taking on debt to get customer, to at some point down the line make money, is a less viable plan. Twitter is a special case where the bad loans are because that was the original deal not interested rate related, and Musk is trying to pull all of the enshitification levers at the same time.
Part is that CEOs generally don't have a fucking clue about their products or what they are doing (it's a circuit job about who you know/blow, not what you know), so once one CEO starts firing/enshitifying, the rest just copy them so as to not be left out.
It's simple, despite what big tech companies are telling themselves, current algorithm for personalized online ads doesn't actually work, because you can't force people to be interested something just by shoving media in front of them.
Instead of realizing that people want genuine human engagement to tell them HOW your product can help solve their problems, we are at the phase where tech companies double down on their incorrect assumption and thinks to make people want things, they just need to shove more things people don't want to see in front of them.
Algo ads could be good, if they weren't primarily advertising stuff to me after I already bought it.
I look up a specific type of product that isn't consumable, buy it, then get ads for it for weeks.
How many mattresses or tires can one person need?
That's the problem with personalized algorithms, because they don't understand what people actually needs.
(What people actually need is tickets to "Barbie")
The advertising companies, Google & Facebook, absolutely do understand this and are happy to mistreat small companies.
The worst part of using Google Search without uBlock is that if I'm just trying to get to a specific website without typing out the full html address, I have to scroll passed the top result which is an advert for the website I already typed.
Google charges companies for customers they already had.
It's even worse than that. The ad is often a fake version of the website you are looking for. Ublock protects you from phishing and malware.
It's even worse than that, Facebook and Google have been selling "impressions" that are actually bots for decades at this point.
Long ago I was searching for a new printer then the printer ads started following me to different places on the Internet. Places that should not have known I was searching for a printer. I decided I wasn't going to have any of that and installed an ad blocker.
Not sure how effective that will be in future. Pretty sure ads as content written by AI is going to be the hot new thing. And by hot new thing I mean thing that can die in a fire.
Surely the fact that you bought a toilet recently means that you're now a toilet enthusiast and will happily click on ads to add to your toilet collection!
We hear you like toilets
I’d say synchronous targeted ads work very well. I.e. showing me ads when I am searching for something explicitly on Google or Amazon. Asynchronous targeted ads - yeah, less so.
Tech companies were only favorable to their users during the corporate Web 2.0 genesis when these companies had to lure educated users in with extremely convenient free services, but they always did and continue to do so under terms of service that are intentionally made as hard to read walls of legalese bullshit, so they always click accept and hand them power by moving there.
These companies usually are either publicly traded or aspire to be publicly traded, and are backed by venture capital loaned to them by banks and investors.
Then during the late 2000s and early 2010s these corporations gobbled up web traffic by having all the valuable information and communities behind their walls. This drove their operating costs up a lot but it was no problem, since the zero interest rate policy was in effect so these now-megacorps had basically interest-free loans to get infinite money to finance the platform. However they realized around the mid 2010s that they controlled the vast majority of the web so they realized they could be as greedy as they wanted since no one is going to ever step up to them (YouTube is a shining example of this) and ever since the mid-late 2010s they started nerfing and crippling the user experience in order to please their investors and ad networks. This process was extremely slow initially to minimize the backlash. They applied the boiling frog strategy and it worked.
By the early 2020s this was in full effect: websites do not respect your privacy and try to shove trackers and ads whenever and wherever they legally can, search engines are manipulated to put sponsored and SEO spam links first rather than useful answers, sites are implementing login walls to make sure the valuable content they hold hostage can only be accessed once they have the data of users, discourse is being controlled and micromanaged by corporations with automated censorship, mystery echo chamber algorithms, shadowbans and wordlists, news sites have article limits and paywalls now. It got so bad that it's already harming society as a whole because it's causing polarization and these platforms now have enough power to theoretically manipulate elections in some really bad cases.
This is a process known as enshittification: start great then become shit and die. Now that the zero interest rate policy is over, and interest rates started climbing up it means silicon valley free money is over so they can no longer afford to be boiling frogs, they are turning up the heat to 11 and just roasting the frog alive. In other words, the enshittification cycle is becoming exponentially faster and it's only going to get worse for the corporate web and its users. The only solution is returning to decentralized technologies like Web 1.0 used to be, but it's extremely hard since free as in you pay with your data services are addictive like crack cocaine.
I am starting to miss the echo chamber of YouTube. I am a fairly leftwing atheist in a solid blue state that ranks near last in religious observance. And yet roughly a quarter of the suggested videos/ads I get are for things like Epoch Times, Prager U, HeGetsUs, PJ Media.
Alright so the only way I am clicking on that stuff is by accident. From the advertisement point of view this is worse than selling iceboxes to Inuit, this is like trying to sell ribeye steaks to vegans with no money.
Which makes you wonder what the future holds. Say you are Epoch Times and you find out the YouTube is pushing your product on people who actively don't want to buy it how much longer are you going to pay Alphabet for a failed advertising campaign?
It's either that, or these specific groups are opening up their parameters and trying to reach/convert outside their base. Which sounds about right for religious groups.
There's also a political agenda at play. The Wall Street madman caste finds left wing popular movements to be obnoxious, as they undermine their business model and cost them money.
Note how Reddit's admins would turn a blind eye to Nazi subreddits and shit like r/The_Donald for years, until the entire planet screamed at Reddit to exercise some basic asshole control.
But when people started talking about punching Nazis, the banhammer came out immediately. Gotta love Reddit's totally unbiased policies...
When left wing groups get big enough to get things done, Wall Street pulls strings and then you see bans, shadowbans, biased policies & enforcement against activist groups and marginalized groups (LGBT groups getting NSFW'd out of existence), trolling & astroturfing campaigns, mass propaganda, abuse of user data (Cambridge Analytica), ratting activists out to authoritarian governments, nerfing community moderation and letting Nazis go to town while yawning when users complain, while at the same time, anyone left-wing gets instabanned for jaywalking...
Interest rates go up > VCs can't barrow free money and demand a return on investment > companies try to demonstrate profitability > enshitification
free money has dried up, now they need to monetise your habits.
It's a process known as Enshittification.
The rest of the read is quite good.
Not really "all of a sudden", this has been a long process. The often repeated enshittification thing is fully valid. The short version is:
start out
grow and expand as much as possible
bring in advertisers
make everyone depend on your service
abuse your powers, since everyone "needs" your service
Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter are the more obvious culprits, but every big tech company does something similar, one way or another, even hardware companies like Intel or Nvidia
Great article thanks for the link.
Greedy capitalists believe line must always go up. They will sacrifice every moral principle to their invisible hand god.
What's their alternative?
Fail and let the internet no longer be for profit.
Be satisfied with just making a profit instead of wanting infinite growth.
Others have basically captured it, but my read is a massive change in the overall risk profile held by venture capital firms. The time of reckoning has come, and it’s time for everyone’s (or at least VCs’) favourite three letters: ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).
The last twenty years, we’ve seen this sort of spray-and-pray model, where 99 bad investments could be offset by 1 “unicorn”. The risk appetite seems to have shifted largely because 1.) there’s a higher volume of early stage concepts (so there’s more bad ideas), and 2.) there’s either fewer unicorns, or the unicorns that mature are ultimately less valuable.
Crunchbase put out a good analysis of the current trend of global venture dollar flow:
The Party’s Still Over: The VC Downturn In 6 Charts
You can read news from various outlets - some say it’s a post-pandemic correction. Some say it’s because labour is too expensive. But the bottom line is that VCs aren’t willing to spend money on “users-in-lieu-of-revenue” like they once were, and I honestly don’t blame them. There were a lot of really, egregiously stupid ideas coming out of SV, and their wax wings melted. sad_trombone.mp4
Adam Kotsko summed this entire phenomena up nicely:
I think you really hit the nail on the head.
Crudely it can be summarised as a change from investors throwing money at tech in the hope of buying a share of future profits to wanting to see those profits. That means business models have to now actually deliver and a lot of then just don't - twitter, reddit, Gfycat - they're all part of the same phenomenon. Big revenues is meaningless without profit. While they may have value to the users, it seems the advertising funded models and data harvesting models just don't deliver profit for these kinds of services.
So they desperately try to adjust the models to maximise income and reduce cost. Enshittification ensues.
Great explanation. The days of the "web 2.0" fantasy dream are officially over, investors needed their money back at a certain point and that point is now.
That doesn't fix YouTube's core issues with the ads that they run, impacting every free user without an ad blocker: 1) Not 100% safe 2) Unscrupulous advertisers, sometimes running scam ads 3) Poor user experience re: ads (far too many in general, and multiple mid-roll ads per video make for a horrendous time).
I'm not going to reward them for these misbehaviors toward their user base by buying their "Premium" service. Same for any other site that does this and offers a "Premium service" to fix the problem that they, themselves, created. There are ways to have safe ads, and fair user experience even with them in play.
The bottom line is that I decide what content is received, interpreted, and rendered by my hardware. Youtube can kick and scream all they want, the nature of the internet is not in their favor.
Intel is about to disagree with their DRM bullshit baked right into your CPUs silicon. Welcome to the "You will own nothing" future
I'm pretty sure if they actually do that it has far reaching consequences and will get killed within a year by financial institutions. That is a massive security issue. Also AMD would rub their hands because it will flush a lot of money into their pockets to develop alternatives. They are already winning with CPUs.
Yeah, Youtube seriously needs to improve ad quality. I personally totally get that it's an expensive site to run and have no problems with the fact that it needs to turn a profit (not every site can get by on donations alone and that's okay). But the ads can get really bad sometimes. The majority are fine, but the number of scams and NSFW ads are still too high.
TBH, I just paid the extra $2 to go from Youtube Music to Youtube Premium because I really didn't want to see those ads and didn't wanna deal with figuring out ad blocking for a Chromecast. But Youtube Premium isn't worth it if you're not already using Youtube Music (I would not have paid $12 for it) plus you have to use Youtube a certain amount for it to be worth it. Plus, of course, it shouldn't be necessary to pay them not to see ads just to avoid seeing the bad ads.
And all this does nothing about Youtube recommending videos (not ads) that are unethical. They don't do a good job at curating videos. Heck, there's been times where they age restrict LGBT videos for simply having any LGBT references but they'll leave up crypto scams and hate speech filled alt right videos.
For me personally, its not even the principle with the bad ads. The reasons I won't pay for preemium are:
The 'trust thermocline' occurs when an organization repeatedly takes their customers for granted, and they reach a critical point of 'no trust return' and just leave. Essentially, if you gradually provide less quality while charging more money, you erode trust- and if you lose trust, you don't actually ever get it back. See: Twitter. And possibly now Reddit. Great term, I love it even, but I hate that the lesson these people are learning isn't 'hey maybe we should stop pissing people off without good reason' and is instead is "this is acceptable risk and we should continue playing chicken with dissatisfied users to make our shareholders happy."
Red Hat fell for this same trick too, the new enterprise pricing is unacceptable.
Capitalism.
Capitalism is like cutting off your wings because you believe the reduced weight will make you fly higher.
It’s shocking how accurate at how the oblivious and infuriating it is.
No tech burst.
It's just a cold recession. No one is admitting it, including consumers who keep spending away savings.
But companies are aware of it enough they are tightening purses preparing for harder times ahead.
Of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If everyone makes their products worse chasing this quarter's dollar, and people leave, those companies are going to have a harder time.
Especially as it becomes easier and easier to compete against them at scale.
Just wait until new feature requests and bug reports for something like Lemmy can be handled within moments by AI at dirt cheap pricing.
A very interesting future awaits around the bend.
They've reached such an economic power that now they just want to be as profitable as possible, crushing any kind of competition of popular pro-user participation while profiting over our data and content
WE, the users, made them able to do so, giving them economic and sometime even geopolitical power. But WE still determine whether they can exist or not man, we still have the power to bring them down. It's time to take back what's ours!
Well, I hope the Fediverse works out. Otherwise I think were gonna have to go back to hand printing zines.
You joke, but Reddit did something to piss me off a few months before the current fuckery, and I decided to find an alt and there weren't really any, like I found Mastodon but that's more of a Twitter replacement, never encountered this site while searching. What I ended up doing was downloading a bunch of books and putting them on my phone, then putting the books app where my Apollo app used to be on my homescreen. Now, more often than not, when I go to scroll, I end up just opening a book. I've got a little over 40 on there, they keep my progress, even across devices, and they work when there's no signal so I no longer have to fear public toilets with shitty cell signal lol.
I would also love to know the app! I actually did the exact same thing except I used my To-Do list app where Reddit is Fun used to be and it has honestly helped already.
I used Libby. (Just go grab a local library card and see if you can dig up any old library cards from anywhere else you've lived... You can have multiple libraries linked.) Also great for audiobooks.
That's a good idea. There's so much stuff I should/could be reading in the time I'm browsing social media.
Especiallybas a software dev with all the new tech that is coming out, will hopefully get myself to do the same (with Lemmy as a backup of course)
Yeah, I did download a few SW engineering books, but I haven't gotten to them. I've been reading Chris Hadfields books, the Apollo Murders and and Astronauts guide to life on Earth, a few cooking books like The Food Lab, The Wok, Salt Fat Acid and Heat, Mi Cochina, and some books on playing pool like The Pleasures of Small Motions.
Yes! That's awesome. Come join us in !bookclub@lemmy.world to discuss books!
Because investors are tired of the model where they dump a shit load of cash into something that has no good path for monetization. So they’re forcing them all to make money which hurts users.
Yup. You can't monetize something whose value is determined by the whims of the people who use it. There are a million websites streaming porn that do a better job of monetizing content than YouTube.
How did the "investors" think this business model was going to work, again? "Let's get millions of people to donate their time and content . . . pay them pennies in return, monetize all their content for ourselves and here's the good part . expect them to PAY for the privilege of accessing it?"
A lot of the 2010's tech was fueled by venture capitalists looking for the next big thing. They saw things that were extremely popular, like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, etc, and figured "well we've got a ton of users, surely we can find a way to make money off of this."
Some investors are starting to realize they aren't actually making much money or costs are blowing up without revenue following. People are starting to back out of this bubble without clear goals towards profitability.
Yeah it's mostly investment people that have a lot of money and are basically the ones pulling the strings. Because if they don't like you then the value of your company goes down and poof you were deeply s***
I find it the ad bubble is bursting so companies are increasing costs for api access and divert people into using their own apps (so they can't block ads and such)
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Enshitifacation. Twitter onlyy turned a profit once, YouTube is about 20% of global bandwidth and has turned a profit. companies don't just want money they want the amount of money to always increase. So they turn to ever more exploitation to try to get it.
We have reached the stage where the snakes have grown large enough that they must prey on their own tails, for there is nothing left to eat.
Because the days of just shoveling money into various silicon valley projects in the hope that maybe they'll turn a profit eventually is over. Big investment firms now want an actual return from their investment, and because of that, tech companies are desperately trying whatever they can to turn a profit from these massive services that are also very expensive to run. That usually comes in the form of changes that makes things harder for the users, but is significantly more profitable for the companies that run them.
For some more context, this is probably tied into at least two things. One is that the bubble was starting to be recognized for what it was. The other is that interest rates became positive again, so the bar for a good investment suddenly went from "I'll be happy if I get my money back" to "I want to be paid back double within 20 years".
I'm just waiting for the ads bubble to explore. There is very little real ROI. As a user, my eyes and mind are well training to avoid seeing any ad that traverses the adblocker, I never clic on any PROMOTED content nor on any link of the ad-top results. Always REJECT cookies I've the option. The advertising companies pay on what they believe I'm seeing, but on what I really see (and care). Just waiting for the day they realize and stop wasting money and disturbance.
Seeing that so much of the traffic on the big social media sites these days is bots, I'm thinking the day that bubble pops is close. Advertisers tend to get upset if they're spending good money to serve ads to bots that will never buy anything. That, and ad-blindness like you mentioned, and blowback because ads are getting really fucking obnoxious right now. And with Elon's platforming of hate, and Reddit's nerfing of moderators, advertisers are going to see their ads displayed next to some nazi toxicity, and that'll make them upset.
The advertisers will run their analytics, and find that the ads they're paying for are doing less and less in terms of actually getting people to buy,
I agree with you, but recently started a Distillery and I'm able to get a positive Roi from Facebook ads. To be fair, I have a very compelling offer. Also to be fair, it's the first time I've ever made something that can generate a positive Roi so your point stands.
The hard part for advertisers is there's very few options to get your message out these days as traditional media has died and people spend so much if their lives on their phones.
Also I think it's worth noting that if you are on Lemmy you are probably in a class of more savvy and - dare I say - intelligent than the average bear scrolling Facebook.
No ROI?? Google 60b, Apple 99b, msft 72b. You are delusional.
I've expressed wrongly. My intend was to refer the companies paying for the ad not the ones managng the ads. Also ROI wanted to refer to the return for the investment on ads. Edit: typo
People like you and I are very rare. Advertising is effective. About 5% of people buy something because of any given ad (if you think about it, even we can probably admit to buying something now and then after seeing an ad). If you pay a little to reach millions of people, that converts into a really good ROI.
Yeah, it's not just the current state that's the problem.
If these companies didn't spend 20 years not worrying about making a profit, they'd have had sustainable growth and be able to stand on their own long ago.
At this point no one could turn them around, it's too late.
And it's not just the lack of big money. The entire startup business model is the main investors immediately selling very small chunks to normal people. With the whole economy in the shitter, the big investors after an IPO are going to have to hold for a while before they can sell without nosediving the price.
Interest rates went from almost zero to real rates. If you're sitting on a pile of money you can invest it in internet companies with crazy valuations and no profit or near zero-risk Treasury Bills and interest-bearing certificates.
Many investors know they are betting on the greater fool instead of any real value in these internet companies. There are now fewer greater fools.
If your business model was to give out free stuff paid for by piles of investor money, you suddenly had to find cash to keep the lights on.
Elon has to pay $1B in interest every year for Twitter. That's still a lot of money.
Elon being a cartoon villian gave other people cover to do the same. You're less likely to be singled out by the media.Your taking candy from a baby is just part of the trend or the run of bad luck falling on those poor billionaires.
Helps if you own that media, too.
Who knew that online spaces based in capitalism would be a bad idea??
Everyone wants a piece of the AI pie
Maybe Spez and Elon can use AI to write all the posts on their platforms to keep the advertisers interested.
So, no changes?
Yeah, very likely. Platforms/Investors see a way to make money besides the usual Ad- and Subscription-Based monetization models
Cheap/free money has dried up.
That and market share. Between 2007 and now, a website could reliably grow as new people got connected to the internet and as internet usage naturally grew. Up till recently, a large proportion of people either didn't use the internet at all, or had the internet, but didn't use much. Prior to 2020 I knew lots of friends and family who simply did not own a home computer or maybe had like one laptop for the whole family (and a bunch of phones).
During that era, the attention was all on getting new users in the door. Make a good, cheap/free product, and people will come.
But NOW, most people already are using the internet like 14+ hours a day and have become full netizens. If companies want to keep growing, they can't rely on new blood, they need to pivot to harvesting more from the people they already have.
Companies expect infinite profit growth
I always found this particularly odd. Is it greed, or some sort of business culture that is ingrained?
Correct me if I'm wrong but this is baked into capitalism. Stocks are attractive to investors because they want to sell them for a higher price later on, and stock prices increase when the company grows.
It's just capitalism. It's built on infinite growth.
Combination of VC money drying up and fear of LLM sucking up their future revenue streams. I think the former is the the logical driver and the latter is the secret fear.
Oh you thought the end goal was to make a good website. Hahaha.
It's so common there's even a term for it now, "enshittification"
To quote the article that describes it:
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ The source is about TikTok but the author has gone on to describe how this applies to basically every modern tech company in various interviews.
Cory doctorow is an incredible (journalist?) (blogger?) idk something, his posts are good
His blog "Boing boing" was a luminary of the early blogosphere when that was a thing people believed would replace traditional media. He was very active with the EFF, copyleft/CC culture, the early maker scene. He was an okay novellist too ! All in all if you grabbed a copy of "Wired" from 2006 there's a 100% chance his name would be mentioned at least once in it.
Because they don't have too be. Most people are so dependent on social media that they'll keep using a service even though they hate it. Like a drug addict who keeps using even though it's killing them.
That's certainly what the companies believe, is it actually true though? Musk said everyone but the bots came crawling back... Without showing numbers
I think tech CEOs badly want to believe this is true, because it would be an easy solution to all their problems. And with everyone doing something similar, there's no competitor for them to jump to
I think they're about to realize no one has to go to them, entry were just the convenient choice. Once they're no longer convenient, people will turn elsewhere
I agree with you of course, proven by where we are having this conversation. However, I have my doubts about the majority of Reddit users switching, at least currently. Most people don’t understand what is going on and are even more confused by the alternatives.
That's certainly what the companies believe, is it actually true though? Musk said everyone but the bots came crawling back... Without showing numbers
I think tech CEOs badly want to believe this is true, because it would be an easy solution to all their problems. And with everyone doing something similar, there's no competitor for them to jump to
I think they're about to realize no one has to go to them, entry were just the convenient choice. Once they're no longer convenient, people will turn elsewhere
They were like this before also, but you're right: now they're much more overt and like they're pushed or hurried by something... And that something is the prospect of recession. They're not publicly announcing it, but their liquid assets are running low and they hit the ceiling for growth. YouTube is trying to maximize their exposure and revenue for ads by cracking down on adblockers; Twitter and Musk doing the dumbest decision just for money, the last one for the rate limitation being connected with not paying the bills to Google Cloud; Reddit introducing 3rd party API usage fees for, maybe, the same reason... They ran out of "smart" and covert solutions to milk their product, partners and clients of money and they would rather go down in greed. And they won't even be directly responsible due to those golden parachutes
In fact almost all companies start off willing to accept low profit margins, or even losses when they get started
They are building a client base that will allow them to reach economies of scale or the ability to raise their prices based on reputation
Social media companies are a special case because they use the general public to provide a large part of their product (content, and access to a marketable audience)
None of these platforms can exist at break-even or better without charging users or leveraging users to charge advertisers
As for the fediverse, I'm grateful that app devs and instance hosters are doing what they do for free, but wouldn't begrudge them one bit if they charged me or served up ads to pay for their expenses and time. Anyone that demands this must remain cost and ad free better be building their own app and hosting their own instance
Like the downfall of everything in our society, greed.
It's more like you now notice this because it have visible effects, but it's been going on for years. Restricting content, abusive rules and stupid changes have been the norm, all toward a centrally controlled experience geared toward generating internal profits on the back of users and content creators.
It's also why some prominent content creator started their own platforms, too.
It's just that now it reaches "intolerable" level for most end-users.
It's the Romulans, they're holding back human progress.
Unlike the Vulcans, who helped human progress!
All of a sudden?
My dear, sweet summer child.
english is not my first language, maybe I should've used a different phrase but my context is recent events
You used the phrase correctly, and your English is great!
The above commenter was rudely stating that your observation is not correct as it's has always been this way.
Because usually the greed, money and power corrupts, no matter how good you are in the beginning.
There are a lot of reasons for this general trend, but let me add my two cents to make a case for the sudden influx of user-opposed changes:
I don't have a source for this, but I remember that Linus spoke about this on the LTT WAN-Show. Basically, abunch of big silicon valley investors are pulling out of all of the big platforms, therefore leaving them with a huge hole in their profitability. This means, that right now a lot of them are scrambling to scrape together more money over time, so all of those platforms are sustainable.
Obviously this has to observed in conjunction with all of those are trends that are already mentioned by other comments, but this gives more basis as to why now, and why to this extent.
If someone else knows what I'm talking about please add quotes and sources because I don't like the good old 'dude trust me' guarantee one bit.
Reddit API charges: Reddit announced it would begin charging for use of its API, specifically for companies that crawl Reddit for data without providing any value back to the users. This change does not apply to developers building apps and bots that enhance the Reddit experience, or to researchers using the API for academic or noncommercial purposes. Reddit's move is tied to its attempt to monetize the vast array of user-generated content on its platform, which includes data used to train text-generating machine learning models like OpenAI's ChatGPT. This announcement comes as Reddit is preparing for a potential IPO later this year. It is estimated that Reddit made $350 million from ads in 2021, a figure that pales in comparison to Meta's and Twitter's ad revenues 1
Twitter's "Ad-pocalypse": Twitter saw a significant drop in advertising revenue in December 2022, with ad spending from top brands falling by 71% compared to the same month in the previous year. Major corporations have been pressuring Twitter over its decision to restore banned conservative accounts. There was a similar decrease of 55% in November 2022 compared to November 2021. Twitter relied on ads for 89% of its $5.08 billion revenue in 2021, so this decrease in ad revenue is likely a significant factor in Twitter's estimated value reduction. Corporate advertising boycotts have often been used in the past to pressure social media platforms into adopting stricter censorship policies 2
VC moving to greener pastures: There has been a significant increase in VC and PE investment into climate tech, which includes technologies focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the first half of 2021 alone, climate tech attracted over $60 billion in investment, which is a 210% increase from the $28.4 billion invested in the 12 months prior. This shift has been driven by a renewed focus on ESG in private markets, emerging regulations and standards, and more companies committing to net-zero strategies. The United States leads in climate tech investing, attracting nearly 65% of VC investment, $56.6 billion from H2 2020 to H1 2021 3
Note: Sources not all quite unbiased. Take a grain of salt.
Can tell this was old data chat gpt generated
Because users are not the customer but the product for others. And with network effects meaning there's less competition (ie no place to go to), then they no longer have to attempt to appease the product and can focus on appeasing customers.
enshittification
Give it a Google.
Money is tighter since the inflation affects VC and stupid money flowing in. Stock prices are not going up, people have no money to play with (see the death of NFTs at the same time, the definition of a stupid investment).
Wouldnt even be surprised if Musk wanted to convince huffman to do this to split the outrage.
LIke how all the tech companies did layoffs at the same time this year
And before anyone says this sounds like a baseless conspiracy theory, remember that the big tech companies got fined a few years ago for having an agreement not poach each other's employees to keep wages down. They do talk to each other, and for things that matter.
Spez already admitted he talked to musk and got inspiration from him.
They forget the users are their base, not their employees, or are bought by idiot billionaires who think they can turn the platform I to another money printer (or tax write-off)
Spez in particular saw Twitter and thought that would be a great idea.
I don't think he understands he's about to be CEO of Tumblr 2.0
Or famously digg
It's like an abusive relationship, they know they can do things against their customers but most will come back willing to pay to make it work. This trend will not stop until enough people leave.
When billionaire fascists start being held to account, they lash out.
Let's stop misusing the word fascist.
Elon Musk just said that people without children shouldn't be allowed to vote.
It's unclear whether it's a misuse of the word in this case... though amassing billions is a fascistic event. You can't do it without stepping all over people. Many people.
It’s called Enshittifiction
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
It's not anything new and nothing "all of a sudden", unfortunately. Facebook, Tumbler, Google - all done stuff like that before. Even for Reddit this is not the first protest blackout and not the first time they treat users and mods like garbage.
It simply is now happening to the apps and services you (and I) use daily, so it hits closer home.
All modern stairs are built on the same terrible foundation: Attract users, no matter how much money you lose. Once you feel strong, introduce fees, ads, hike the prices and try to regulate years of financial loss.
Happened like clockwork, and companies going public are a clear sign it's just around the corner. (Kind of like any free mobile app will ask you for a 5 star review, just before introducing monetization schemes)
I have sustainable stairs at home which have plateaued at two users. Not all stairs.
i hope that the internet becomes sort of how it used to be, made by the people for the people and ran by the people instead of made by a few huge corporations that sell our data and constantly try and squeeze profit out of their platforms. i love the sense of community in decentralised social media and there seems to be next to no arguments most places. im really enjoying everything so far after joining
Me too. I feel much calmer scrolling through Lemmy as opposed to Reddit or Twitter. I have way less of an urge to troll over here.
Same. Well I didn't necessarily troll reddit, but I also had no problem telling bigots where to go or what to suck. Less people to yell at on this platform lol
$.
It's all about the money, money
The biggest problem is that average people are used to the tech big companies provide, and lazy so that they won't move to overall better alternatives. This means the companies don't care about consequences of their actions, because there is NONE. Looking at it from the company's perspective, why not make more money from people that won't leave the site anyways?
Which is bad for society, but necessarily bad from a community stand point. Reddit has only gotten worse the more popular it had gotten. Starting over again in the next platform, maybe it could be better (without the monetization aspect). But someone has to cough up the dough for the servers. Non profit funding is happening; we'll have to wait and see if that is enough.
You are used to a time where money was essentially free for companies. Whenever they needed money, they could loan money almost for free.
As interest rates are up, that's no longer the case and priorities have changed from growth to plugging holes.
All VC backed tech companies have been operating on the assumption that they can focus on growth and then make a profit later. That hasn't happened for most of these companies and VCs are starting to demand returns. It was always going to happen, I'm surprised it took this long.
More importantly, the IPO market collapsed a couple of years ago. That is the VC's payday. Now that we're not in an IPO buying frenzy, investors are wanting to see positive cashflow before they buy.
I've worked in the tech sector for a LONG time and have met and worked with some of the most shockingly brilliant and insightful people in my life….and many that are far less so.
As with any population.
Bad decisions, lack of strategy or plain old monetization motivated by greed or a desire to cash out before the cash runs out are sadly commonplace. The method taken says everything about the quality (or lack thereof) of leadership.
Some real stinkers lately.
They have grown to the point where they are now focusing on being more profitable. And apparently they are not scared of losing users.
I'm not sure YouTube ever wanted you using adblockers.
Google needs to understand, that is not a choice that they have.
So much of the internet is covered by sites that don't take the time the vet their advertisers and the ads that are being placed on their platform.
Advertisers who, in turn, advertise on legit sites spreading scams and malware wherever they go, and Google and YouTube are no exception to this. These companies really brought The Age of the AdBlocker on themselves, by not making sure that the ads they are allowing on their platforms are safe for users.
So now, me and about a bajillion other people are in a position where we don't go out onto the internet anymore without protection. Ad blockers for everyone.
So, YouTube's actual choice is this: do they want me to continue to visit their site and drive their traffic metrics?
Because that's all they are getting from me, and if they find a way to disable all ad blockers, than they are clearly saying that they don't want me and others like me to boost their visitor numbers. Simple as that.
I've been using the internet since the 90s. Originally I was very pro ad, since it meant that we wouldn't end up with paying subscriptions for every site on top of internet utility bills. But around 2010 or so I got malware from an ad I didn't even click on - all it had to do was load on the page. The site issued an open apology but it's not like they were going to pay repair costs for everyone's computers. After that I knew neither websites nor ad suppliers were vetting what they display to users. Companies only get more complacent as time goes on, and once the option was out there bad actors would only get more creative. I've used ad blockers ever since.
They didn't, but they're going on the offensive way more so than before. People think it's related to MV3 crippling a lot of ad blocker functionality.
They haven't yet realized that a platform dependent on user created content and user run moderation, is infinitely replaceable. See Fark and Digg.
Reddit and Twitter and just the latest to learn the lesson. Without your users, you may as well be MySpace.
Their cash overlords want returns on their investments.
AI training and data mining. The value of data has surpassed the value of oil long ago. The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil.
Oil companies have assets and cash in the trillions it's not even funny. Even openAI who has the most state of the art AI systems on the planet right now is worth at best a billion, and is getting heavily subsidized by Microsoft. AI companies will probably get larger in the future, but the modern world depends on oil for literally everything including the making and the shipments of parts used to run AI shit. You seem to be grossly overestimating how much data is worth and grossly underestimating the power and money oil cartels wield.
YouTube is blocking adblockers? News to me
they are "testing" it. But yeah it's all over tech news right now.
I hope it goes the same way as the time they “tested” playing like 10 super short ads before the video. That and this are both plain awful sigh
VPN thru Albania is no longer blocking ads on YT for me any longer.
That's a oddly specific way to block ads, why not just use a regular adblocker?
Just wait till you have to pay per email. You're not still using Gmail are you?
The answer is AI. Amongst other things. Reddit is about to go public and wants everyone on their main app for advertising and tracking. Twitter is dealing with hosting issues with Google.
Plus AI companies are extracting content from Twitter and Reddit to train their AI models like chatGPT which is a huge money maker, and these platforms aren't getting any money from it so they're trying to make it more difficult to get access to it. They want companies like OpenAI and Stability and Microsoft and Google to pay large sums of money for access to their content to train AI on.
The thing with AI is that it is both a parasite to the content it is trained on and an alternative to it because people who ask AI don't ask in forums
These tech giants are searching for a way to keep everyone happy but I honestly don't see any
Reddit just realized it has been sitting on a pile of gold the entire time and now it wants to reap its rewards
Makes me wish there was a way to force them to remove everything I ever posted on their site.
But... It's their site and I put the shit there. Who knew it would come to this, though?
You can use powerDeleteSuite to delete everything from your reddit account
Word on the street is reddit just restores the comments and posts you mass delete. Haven't tried myself so I'm not sure but that's what I've been seeing around lemmy.
Not in my experience, only a handful of comments were restored after 2 weeks in my account, just delete them manually and you're good to go
It's easy to work around the AI issue by providing the devs an API key for Apollo, RIF, etc. and charging a reasonable price. Instead Spez took the nuclear option like all platforms these days. They don't give a single fuck about the users.
Anyway it's been happening for years like others have mentioned. Once stakeholders are involved if you have to ask a question the answer is always money
You are the product and right now the product is falling in value. I have known a few people who raise exotic animals and they treated them as nicely as a parent treats their own child. Now compare this to people who raise chickens.
The easy money is drying up. Hence you, the product, are worth less money. I personally don't really care all that much. The market was due for a correction well over a decade ago. The average person is worth about a dollar to Alphabet and when you think about how much you are getting the numbers never made sense. This dead weight mismatch has been skewing our entire economy. Engineers and project managers that would have gone into tangible items and paid for services instead were recruited to keep you on social media all day.
There are only a finite amount of techies and no one is going to care if slack integrated with Google maps if we are drowning in human sewage.
The tech companies tend to follow the leader on unpopular actions. The first-mover bears the brunt of the backlash, allowing the copycats to implement the same policies without the same flak. Witness Twitter introducing fees and then Facebook following suit. Witness Twitter banning third party apps and Reddit... you know the rest.
Why are companies not favorable to people?
Unchecked profit motive.
Because the users are their product.
In the fediverse you are a person and you are imporant, not a product to get the max profit from
OP didn't mention Fediverse. How's your comment relevant?
It always boils down to corporate greed unfortunately
the problem is businesses r built on the concept of infinite growth, profit isn't the thing that determines success, it's the constant increase in profit, now things r quickly hitting the limit and they're desperate to find any way to keep the number going up
It’s all about money
I think part of it has been watching Twitter just completely abandon any attempts at treating users and developers well, and seeing that people are still active there. Reddit sees Twitter completely fuck over third party devs, and realizes they can do the same and weather the storm, and have it all work out well enough for them.
When interest rates are low the difference between a dollar now and a dollar later (discount factor) is negligible. In this environment the math favours businesses that can grow revenue really fast.
Now that rates have risen, the discount factor has become more expensive and so firms want their dollars today. A lot of companies need to come up with a path to profitability quickly to shore up their stock prices and have a sustainable business.
We're not people to them, just part of a product. Why do anything more than absolutely necessary to keep the money flowing in? Save a fraction of a penny on bandwidth, earn another fraction by selling more complete data and ad views. Multiply that by the number of users and if enough will tolerate it, somebody at the top can buy a shiny new yacht.
We are the most disposable asset they have. They need to turn a profit so we are being squeezed.
You forgot discord and the username changes, which happened a few weeks ago
and now they're advertising stuff like subscription tiers and server shops, which makes me feel like they're using a completely different service than I am
Chatgpt is using up all their resources and inflating viewership by logging into these sites millions of times. And ad companies are mad that they can't catch eyeballs anymore so they are pressuring social media giants to search for alternative income
Just my headcannon
Could it be related to the silicon valley bank going under maybe?
Kinda? The bank going under is indicative of financial instability in the wake of COVID, and it's that same financial uncertainty coupled with rising inflation that has put an end to the bottomless well of venture capital that tech companies used to take advantage of.
SVB was killed because their customers did a run on the bank (withdrew large amounts of money in fear of a collapse) and they didn't have enough in assets to cover it all, which led to the inevitable collapse. A bit like how early in the COVID days, there was fear that stores would run out of supplies, so people bought up everything they could in bulk and then the stores ran out of supplies. Panic about a potential outcome which then causes that outcome to happen.
Everyone's rushing to implement/improve AI. AI needs a ton of data, Reddit/Twitter are good available sources. Reddit/Twitter would prefer to sell this data as opposed to having it gathered from under them by bots, for free.
I think that's why Twitter and Reddit are rushing to restrict access (directly or through the API).
Youtube are just aggressively serving you ads, and limiting ways for you to circumvent ads. I think that's just what they do as they have the market sewn up
YouTube can try lol. But they've never cared about users. They're just all at about the same point where they have to stop pretending in order to feed that capitalism machine (or try to at least). It looks like hostility, but it's just them finally being honest.
While these changes will eventually happen, as all of these companies are meant to make a profit from the start. The reason they're all happening now is because of the coming recession, or at least the believe that it will come.
I don't think reddit started out as a for profit company. iirc it started as some dudes sharing links. I knew a site like that back in the day. Link aggregator and forum made by one dude because he liked the community.
Could it have something to do with inflation?
The opposite. Inflation makes debt cheaper. If you borrow at 10%, and inflation is 10%, its like you borrowed money for free.
The issue is that central banks increased interest rates significantly. If you need to borrow more money, its at 14%, 16%, or higher now.
All of the sudden? This has been happening, maybe slowly at first, since every one of those platforms started, imo.
Another step in the enshittification cycle just happened to affect three companies that you noticed at the same time.
Another day, another big website taking steps to make their user experience actively worse.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
i saw a comment on hackernews about how chatgpt and LLMs really caused reddit's recent changes and conflicts. and that made sense to a degree. the regular user is perpetually online and i guess big tech is all about grabbing users' limited attention at this point.
It's because the 2024 election is coming up.
Money.
Turns out hiring thousands of people and hosting tons of data gets expensive, especially as your customers (advertisers) stop spending as much on your product. After a decade of cheap money being thrown at them by investors to grow grow grow, interest rates has made new debt far more expensive and the need to turn a profit is here. On top of this, their primary source of revenue has shrunk as most companies cut back on their advertising budgets, again because money has gotten tighter now very quickly.
I'm not sure YouTube ever wanted you using adblockers.
My guess is their calculations are that they're not necessarily being unfavourable to their more casual users. Which are probably the majority. People who have digested the idea of ads, don't create content and casually scroll around for a laugh or for some biased news and surface level discussions probably don't feel that much has changed.
Yep and we have a right to not use their shit services and start a new one while the investors get pissed