Seriously, what's up with big sites literally dying as we speak?

notExactlyI20@lemmy.ml to Technology@beehaw.org – 20 points –

First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?

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From Cory Doctorow:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Some of it is because we had a decade of cheap borrowing which has come to an end and many of these platforms were never profitable.

The reality is that nothing is really dying and nothing is really changing. Twitter is still fully operational and other than a small hit nothing happened. Twitch already did a step back. For Reddit we'll see but only a really small percentage of reddit is using third party apps.

I think the "the internet is dying" perspectives are all incredibly overblown. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon. I remember all of the "Facebook is dead, I don't know anyone using Facebook!" posts, but I suspect many here are invested in some index fund that is being pulled upwards by Meta.

But how many people are still exchanging facebook contacts? Because I haven't met anyone anymore ...

Good point! I suspect it's a lot more than we think. My parents are definitively still involved in doing this.

But on the other hand, does exchanging contacts mean anything to Facebook anymore? I don't think that's important to their income stream anymore. If the OP meant "these sites are still going strong but aren't what they were when they began", then of course I agree.

It's not the services that are dying, but the internet as we used to know.

Change is natural, but the services are all changing in a way not beneficial forthe users.

They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.

...jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called "Tiktok's enshittification". It's a four-steps process:

  1. The platform is good for its users.
  2. The platform abuses the users, to be good for its business customers.
  3. The platform abuses the business customers, to claw back all value for itself.
  4. The platform dies.

In my opinion it's also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.

The reddit exodus is comparatively very small. Tens of thousands of users, many of which will not stick around. Reddit has millions of users (hundreds of millions?). They barely notice.

Wait for after 1 Juli if they don't reverse the decision they made. Right now the mods and users believe they can change this madness, but when the go through with it, many more will leave, especially mods and the og users that contribute most content.

There is no way that the Lemmy network can handle millions of users. The big instances are struggling with tens of thousands. I believe many will leave and reddit will become worse because of it, but it's not going to die, it's going to turn into facebook.

No without mods reddit is basically dead. Thats their own system and fault...

And i think the instances need more capacity to support the traffic, but its not impossible. i also hope that at least some of the people coming here start new instances.

Reddit has slowly replaced mods in large subs with employees. And you vastly overestimate the willingness of the average user to put up with quirks of new platforms like Lemmy.

For Lemmy to support the 430 million monthly active users that reddit has - this is currently, in my opinion, impossible. The largest lemmy server has tens of thousands of users, and is running on the most powerful server that VPS provider OVH offers. The lead developer knows that there are big performance improvements needed in the code and has been working on it for some time, but it will be years before the lemmy network can handle even a few million active users, in my opinion.

They can replace who they want in general, but they never cover the thousands of niche and middle sized subs and thats a money issue, they can't suddenly materialize thousand employees to moderate some subs. And the medium and small subs actually draw most non bot traffic. Also its estimated that reddit massively inflates user numbers, especially on their "default subs"

Current lemmy supporting hundred millions is absolutely utopian, but its in active development, there would be a way, but i would be very surprised when more than 5% of reddit users would suddenly end up here, lemmy needs to grow healthy and not from one day to the next by a Exponent, that's a fact. But i don't think it would take years, more users draw more attention, wich leads to more devs helping to improve the quality.

(oh and i kinda don't care about the "average users" i care about the top 5% of reddit that contribute 50% of the content and 99% of the mod work)

We've reached the end of the VC-funded golden age where they are all now demanding a return on their investment, hence why the screws are now all getting tightened.

please can youtube be next?

I really want to stop using my google account and that's the only thing keeping me from moving away from it.

The issue with replacement for YouTube is that it needs to be both sustainable AND pay the professional content creator. This is not an easy task and the main reason why alternatives are usually running behind a subscription service.

Late Stage Capitalism.

There is a crisis of democracy in contemporary societies, every time that you invoke the direct power of the people, the status quo conservationists ban your participation and exclude you of most of the expression spaces.

With great power comes great irresponsibility

-big corps

Higher interest rates means less investment, resulting in these companies racing to make a profit. The reality is that Reddit is bleeding money and has been for years, and Twitter is barely profitable.

Where do you see this information on their profits?

There isn't much public information because all those companies are private. But, various journalists have looked into things and declared it isn't profitable, for example:

That has left Reddit, known as a bastion of free speech, walking a delicate tightrope between its outspoken audience of 330mn monthly active users and new advertisers that can propel it into profitability.

https://www.ft.com/content/c4c01d86-85f5-49c8-9966-cbf935d834a2

Awesome. Thanks for the follow up. Crazy how hard it is to find. I’m sure their income is enough to pay them decent wages though. Not the moderators though, screw those people

The big sites got big by being there when a previous big site died. But nothing lasts forever, and eventually a social site becomes desperately uncool because there are people old enough to have grandkids on it. And they totter on, like a zombie, until they fuck out badly, and most people leave. But not everyone, I still get linked to blog entries on Livejournal now and then, sometimes I even end up on Blogger when I’m following a trail and people are still updating some of those.

Hey, I'm still on LiveJournal!

Okay, mostly DreamWidth with an echo to my LJ. And all of my friends are gone. But it's still a damned good service. Frankly, I suggested it as an alternative to Reddit if Lemmy fell through.

The last straw for LJ for me was when they made any mention of queerness illegal so as to conform to the laws of their new home country. I logged out and never logged in again. I still get badly-translated email about anniversary gifts for my various 13-year-old accounts now and then.

I have a DW account but it lies fallow, mostly because I could never get the auto-crossposter plugin to work on my Wordpress site.

Well, while it is surprising it's all happening within a year or so, it's not unexpected at all.

They're ultimately for-profit companies. They have openly demonstrated the obvious truth that when push comes to shove, users don't matter to them, at least not as much as money. Our attention was the product.

These companies have proven time and time again that a quick moneygrab will win over retaining the people who make the site work. capitalism 101 baby.

Yep, think of the math like this:

1000 users that we can get $1 of profit from totalling $1000 profit

Or 500 users we can get $3 of profit from totalling $1500 profit.

$1500 > $1000 Therefore it's a good decision.

Welcome to the mind of corporate executives

Source: I work with these dumbasses

Reddit is dying? Since when?

Since they bought Alien Blue in my opinion, but now they made a announcement to change completely ridiculous prices for api 12k for 50M pulls (166 usd is the norm for that) they efficiently kill third party apps and probably a lot of community bots.

(for better understanding, Apollo (a third party ios app) has about 7 Billion pulls per month with a user average of 344 per day, wich would cost 2,50 usd per user per Month, totaling 20 Million a year, it goes without saying that this is completely and utterly ridiculous)

Reddit might have pissed off some of its users but most people will just use the official app.
Reddit isn't going anywhere.

"most users" aren't contributing anything either, and the mods are the important people there to run the website, and many of them have been very pissed off by reddit with that.

Reddit is definitely going somewhere, but definitely not to a relevant place, they digg themselves...

But will the mods really end up leaving? I'd wager most of them will stay because they won't want to leave their positions of "power"

They certainly won't be moderating much anymore. Lots of mod tools and automods use the API