No Stupid Questions

Because of capitalism, no seriously these decisions are based on money and growth. But both of these things are relatively finite. You can't keep have exponential growth year after year. Eventually you will plateau but there isnt a mechanism in capitalism to accept that. So companies start forcing monetary gain.

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.

Public companies are legally required to always do their best to grow year over year. Eventually these companies get so large they can't realistically get more market share so they have to figure out how to make more money from their users. This leads to them squeezing users for cash in the hunt for short term gains because they've already realistically capped out on how much money they can make per year. It's a dumb system that can't work in the long term.

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!).

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.

Because you are the product, not the client. You are only catered to enough so that you may be coralled. You are basically cattle to these corporations.

As for why this is happening now:

• The economy is in a downswing right now so we are going to see cost cutting and belt tightening.
• Entrenched proprietary social media platforms are basically monopolies. You cannot choose to use an alternative because these are walled gardens and leaving means losing your ability to communicate with large groups of people. The larger and more entrenched these big firms get, coupled with lack of regulation means they can do whatever the fuck they want. You have no power and no choice (except for the Fediverse, a one-time pain to migrate to).

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.

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.

Because most services we are using aren't sustainable. They all bleed money.

What are the dumb updates discord is doing? I haven't noticed anything different, except for the username change that doesn't have a gamertag anymore.