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.

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

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.

free money has dried up, now they need to monetise your habits.

Interest rates go up > VCs can't barrow free money and demand a return on investment > companies try to demonstrate profitability > enshitification

It's a process known as Enshittification.

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.

The rest of the read is quite good.

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.

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)

Well, I hope the Fediverse works out. Otherwise I think were gonna have to go back to hand printing zines.

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.

Companies expect infinite profit growth

Short answer : Enshittification.

Long and brilliant explanation here : https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

When billionaire fascists start being held to account, they lash out.

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.

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).

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.

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

Because usually the greed, money and power corrupts, no matter how good you are in the beginning.

Oh you thought the end goal was to make a good website. Hahaha.

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

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.

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)

Just wait till you have to pay per email. You're not still using Gmail are you?

Their cash overlords want returns on their investments.

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."

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.

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!

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.

Capitalism.

Capitalism is like cutting off your wings because you believe the reduced weight will make you fly higher.