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Literally taking away the bread and circuses
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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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what is happening? Is big tech profitability collapsing? It seems like every big website is trying very hard to cut costs and find new sources of revenue right now
i firmly believe it's the interest rate hike. the fed rate has been set to "free money" since the GFC in 2007.
[aside from a little blip between 2016 and COVID when rates were gradually increased up to a whopping 2% over 4 years before being flattened to "free money" when COVID hit].
now, in less than 1.5 years, it's gone from "free money" to 5.5%. that's enough to make "investors" [aka, people who negotiate giant loans from investment banks to invest in companies] squeamish about negotiating additional operating loans and pressuring executives to find money under the couch cushions, so to speak..
to be fair, i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism, but the rise of interest rates so high over such a short window set a fire under it.
you could even call it enclosure
Digital enclosure is exactly what it is. Reddit did it to forums but the squeeze right now is to fully enclose the attention economy itself.
Retvrn to phpbb
I was a big fan of Invisionfree. used to play Survivor ORGs on there. Tapatalk bought out zetaboards, the supposedly "upgraded" version of invisionfree that actually was worse, then transitioned all the already-zeta boards to tapatalk's own system which is WAY WAY WAY worse (zeta was at least usable) but they just straight up deleted any invision boards that weren't "upgraded" to zeta on time. They were doing transfers from the servers for awhile and I was able to "rescue" the games I hosted that way but so many boards are just gone now. And Invision had custome themes so the boards were pretty but tapatalk has just one ugly ass theme that sucks ass and I hate it.
They also bought out Yuku, deleted a bunch of inactive boards (including mine, that had some important memories on it) and transfered the active ones to their shitty system.
I fucking hate them.
that's pretty much lemmy/hb/etc
Link aggregators with comment threads are not the same as forums
I mean yeah, I used to post on a half dozen BBS forums
Now now, lets not let tapatalk off the hook here.
my guess is that gulf state monarchy investors (Saudi, Qatar, UAE etc) haven't been satisfied with the profit margins and are demanding more control over the companies, whereas American/European investors are possibly more focused on market share
could be rising competition from Chinese tech companies as well
It could also be a collapsing bubble where everyone's realizing personal data sold to advertising companies isn't as valuable as everyone assumed it was 15 years ago. They ran out of people to scoop data from. Everyone's already got every possible type of targeted ad pointed directly at their eyeballs 24/7. The market is cornered and there's nothing left to speculate on
it was never profitable. Its all sort of been a big scam from the beginning
the tech industry now is a lot like the 1800s rail industry in that it's changing society and hype drives investment but profitability just isn't there
the metaverse is the 21st century equivalent of plots of land next to planned railway developments
Death to America
yeah but also stupid
Apparently Google does not reveal YouTube profitability: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us-about-youtube-and-cloud-profits.html
I think this is normal Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall stuff