No Stupid Questions

I think the free money train in leaving the station and everyone is scrambling to be profitable. But that's just an assumption based on twitch and Reddit right now.

Cory Doctorow has some very interesting blogposts on the topic. He call it enshittification. It's more or less the business model of plattform Capitalism.

Start making alternatives, open source alternatives.

Economy is going bad, interest rate are up, and all Silicon Valley's company are built upon VC loans and expansion goals. Scale economy is bound to fail, and it's happening now.

I don't know honestly, greed probably. But it's such a shame. It seems like the internet as a whole is heading in a horrible direction, and not enough people care about it for there to be something done about it.

Capitalism slowly shits up everything. Even the things it helps create.

I mean this in the most general way possible. Not just platforms. Even if reddit was profitable it would still continue. It's just part of the cycle of seeking not just profits but ever rising profits.

It's just more obvious lately on digital platforms because it has been kind of compressed into smaller amounts of time.

That which is free must find a way to cost.

That that makes money must find a way to make more.

And slowly but surely its takes on a fine shine. A glean seen from a distance. But when you get close you realize. "oh, its fucking shit all over it."

These companies are overvalued. Currently we're operating in supply side economics where the wealthy have all the money and companies do everything they can to attract those big investment dollars.

But the truth is social media companies (despite being household names) don't really make the revenue that warrants their high valuation by investors. Investors are starting to figure this out, and now they're desperately throwing shit at the wall to try to keep from losing those big supply side dollars.

Social media companies can break even and employ a lot of people while doing so. They could have a good user experience, and it would be all fine. But they wouldn't have sky rocketing share prices doing that. The leadership wouldn't get fat bonuses. So they implement all these crazy schemes so they can make projections about future revenue.

It doesn't matter if these schemes actually will make money or not. They just need to show X number of users multiplied by Y additional revenue per user and that's enough to attract investment. And it doesn't matter if it destroys the company either, the people at the top will get their bonuses.

Over-centralisation.

This kind of slow degredation of services is quite normal, however, this time around the wider use of these degrading platforms is hitting harder. Even 5 years ago, most communities had an IRC rather than a discord, and most ran a forum, or a community forum, with other info being on a wiki.

These days a lot of content that used to sit on a forum now sits on twitter, or on reddit. Discord is the new IRC, and so on. These separate services were a lot less convenient, but more resilient.

Odds are, we might see similar smaller communities pop up again as things get worse in the larger ones. Folks are pinched for cash at the moment, and so free services like neocities might see a boom as fandoms abandon larger sites (again).

This is the consequence of the fed raising interest rates and companies finding it much harder to find money to pay salaries and operating costs. So companies have to actually seek profit or go bust and CEOs and board of directors are getting desperate and showing how little they understand what makes their products great.

Because capitalism, that's why.

As a phenomenon you'll see a lot of people call it "enshittification." The term seems to originate with Cory Doctorow who writes, "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 whole article on his blog is worth a read here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys. His Mastodon handle is @pluralistic if you'd like to follow his work there (woohoo federation!).

Greed. It's all driven by greed. It's not just social media companies either. My best guess to why it's happening now.. The boomers are aging out and want to take every last bit they can squeeze out before they retire/die.

Reddit, Twitter, etc, have been running at a loss for ages, burning through vulture capitalist money to build up a solid userbase. Now they need to start turning a reliable profit, which means enshittification of the user experience to make more money per user.

All these companies have done about as much growing as they can. I remember listening to the radio on my drive to work a year or two ago, and they were talking about how Facebook had done internal research and concluded that they had captured something like 95% of the possible user demographics, meaning that they were unlikely to be able to reach new customers because either you have Facebook and you use it, or you've already heard of it and you don't want it/don't use it anymore.

It was interesting, because Facebook/Meta, like Twitter, Reddit, Discord and Tumblr are all for-profit companies that exist to make money, and yet, the expectation of infinite growth from the market never ceases. There will never be a time when the company has grown "enough". Enter the short-term smash-and-grab strategies. The idea is that they know that their business model has peaked in terms of growth and profit and they now need to extract value from the company before the market catches up to that fact. Social media is inherently unprofitable. Nobody wants to actually pay for it, and they do not produce a product, so eventually once the ad revenue has reached critical mass, the users become the product and are essentially ransomed off. Reddit just tried to pass the buck onto the 3rd party app developers rather than the users, but since the API restrictions affects regular users as much as it does developers, it had the same effect.

Suffice to say, unless you are a member of a social media platform that is a non profit, this is going to keep happening. Even if you land on a site that prides themselves on being excellent stewards of their company and never prioritize profits and growth over stability and customer satisfaction, eventually they will be forced to make a decision - lose a lot of money or lose some customers. The answer, sadly, is all too obvious to them by now.

@VoidCrow https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification

Capital only looks out for itself. Online communities are a product to be exploited in the eyes of investors. The purse strings are getting tighter with rising interest rates, and investments that relied on potential are suddenly less exciting when the price to service goes up. Profit is king at the end of the day. It sucks, but that's capitalism.

ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are the reasons. I’m starting to see commercials that are using highest tier video tech. Just keep pushing.

That’s one community that’s worth supporting.