YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
Because investors are tired of the model where they dump a shit load of cash into something that has no good path for monetization. So they’re forcing them all to make money which hurts users.
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)
Ads pay basically nothing now and VC funding has dried up. Most of these tech companies operated at a loss and are now being pressured into becoming profitable since investors don’t want to throw money at them anymore.
Data privacy laws have also gotten better, cutting off another revenue stream that was typically used.
But when did VC money get flushed in? I doubt that it just somehow stops out of nowhere. I mean all these companies weren’t exactly founded at the same time.
During the pandemic VC slowed to a crawl and the stock market went to shit. While the market eventually rebounded VC is doing so MUCH more slowly. VC scum doesn’t care about innovation, it cares about making money. If there’s some level of risk it shrinks like balls in a January pool and it takes forever to coax the little guys out.
Interest rates def have a factor in this also
It’s all about money
We are the most disposable asset they have. They need to turn a profit so we are being squeezed.
enshittification
Give it a Google.
The biggest problem is that average people are used to the tech big companies provide, and lazy so that they won’t move to overall better alternatives. This means the companies don’t care about consequences of their actions, because there is NONE. Looking at it from the company’s perspective, why not make more money from people that won’t leave the site anyways?
Could it have something to do with inflation?
It’s the end of cheap credit.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=16J5X
That graph shows the Federal Funds Effective Rate. Until recently, VCs could borrow money while effectively paying zero interest. That meant their investments weren’t under any pressure to become profitable any time soon. Now, borrowing is expensive. VCs don’t want to loan any more money, and want their investments to pay off. Reddit and other pre-IPO companies are scrambling to become profitable.
I assume the big companies like YouTube / Google going against people blocking ads are just taking advantage of the chaos.
As for Twitter: Elon Musk is an idiot.
You forgot one thing. Fuck /u/spez
I respect you took the time to link this
This meme is repeated everywhere ad nauseam and is blatantly wrong. VCs do not borrow money from the banks. The argument goes the other way around, and implies that the people who bankroll VCs would rather lend their money through banks than invest it - but even that is bullshit, you’d need interest rates in the double digits to even begin to be in competition with your average VC performance.
Also not 100% of VC money is american so Fed rates are not as relevant as you think. Please stop spreading that nonsense.
It’s not just the american federal reserve that’s increasing it’s rates. We live in a globally connected economy and almost all countries are impacted by the american economy as well as some of the reasons causing inflation in the US (the pandemic and the war). Most countries are affected by the inflation and most countries are combating it by hiking interest rates.
Of course everything is connected but it’s not always 1 to 1, nor are the effects always immediate. Some economies absorb different impacts in different ways.
The point being made is that it’s more expensive to borrow, do you dispute this?
Of course i don’t. I dispute the fact that interest rates are a significant factor in the VC market.
Tech companies were only favorable to their users during the corporate Web 2.0 genesis when these companies had to lure educated users in with extremely convenient free services, but they always did and continue to do so under terms of service that are intentionally made as hard to read walls of legalese bullshit, so they always click accept and hand them power by moving there.
These companies usually are either publicly traded or aspire to be publicly traded, and are backed by venture capital loaned to them by banks and investors.
Then during the late 2000s and early 2010s these corporations gobbled up web traffic by having all the valuable information and communities behind their walls. This drove their operating costs up a lot but it was no problem, since the zero interest rate policy was in effect so these now-megacorps had basically interest-free loans to get infinite money to finance the platform. However they realized around the mid 2010s that they controlled the vast majority of the web so they realized they could be as greedy as they wanted since no one is going to ever step up to them (YouTube is a shining example of this) and ever since the mid-late 2010s they started nerfing and crippling the user experience in order to please their investors and ad networks. This process was extremely slow initially to minimize the backlash. They applied the boiling frog strategy and it worked.
By the early 2020s this was in full effect: websites do not respect your privacy and try to shove trackers and ads whenever and wherever they legally can, search engines are manipulated to put sponsored and SEO spam links first rather than useful answers, sites are implementing login walls to make sure the valuable content they hold hostage can only be accessed once they have the data of users, discourse is being controlled and micromanaged by corporations with automated censorship, mystery echo chamber algorithms, shadowbans and wordlists, news sites have article limits and paywalls now. It got so bad that it’s already harming society as a whole because it’s causing polarization and these platforms now have enough power to theoretically manipulate elections in some really bad cases.
This is a process known as enshittification: start great then become shit and die. Now that the zero interest rate policy is over, and interest rates started climbing up it means silicon valley free money is over so they can no longer afford to be boiling frogs, they are turning up the heat to 11 and just roasting the frog alive. In other words, the enshittification cycle is becoming exponentially faster and it’s only going to get worse for the corporate web and its users. The only solution is returning to decentralized technologies like Web 1.0 used to be, but it’s extremely hard since free as in you pay with your data services are addictive like crack cocaine.
I am starting to miss the echo chamber of YouTube. I am a fairly leftwing atheist in a solid blue state that ranks near last in religious observance. And yet roughly a quarter of the suggested videos/ads I get are for things like Epoch Times, Prager U, HeGetsUs, PJ Media.
Alright so the only way I am clicking on that stuff is by accident. From the advertisement point of view this is worse than selling iceboxes to Inuit, this is like trying to sell ribeye steaks to vegans with no money.
Which makes you wonder what the future holds. Say you are Epoch Times and you find out the YouTube is pushing your product on people who actively don’t want to buy it how much longer are you going to pay Alphabet for a failed advertising campaign?
There’s also a political agenda at play. The Wall Street madman caste finds left wing popular movements to be obnoxious, as they undermine their business model and cost them money.
Note how Reddit’s admins would turn a blind eye to Nazi subreddits and shit like r/The_Donald for years, until the entire planet screamed at Reddit to exercise some basic asshole control.
But when people started talking about punching Nazis, the banhammer came out immediately. Gotta love Reddit’s totally unbiased policies…
When left wing groups get big enough to get things done, Wall Street pulls strings and then you see bans, shadowbans, biased policies & enforcement against activist groups and marginalized groups (LGBT groups getting NSFW’d out of existence), trolling & astroturfing campaigns, mass propaganda, abuse of user data (Cambridge Analytica), ratting activists out to authoritarian governments, nerfing community moderation and letting Nazis go to town while yawning when users complain, while at the same time, anyone left-wing gets instabanned for jaywalking…
It’s either that, or these specific groups are opening up their parameters and trying to reach/convert outside their base. Which sounds about right for religious groups.
I’m pretty sure that most of the companies do this type of crap because they know that we need their product.
Combination of VC money drying up and fear of LLM sucking up their future revenue streams. I think the former is the the logical driver and the latter is the secret fear.
Turns out hiring thousands of people and hosting tons of data gets expensive, especially as your customers (advertisers) stop spending as much on your product. After a decade of cheap money being thrown at them by investors to grow grow grow, interest rates has made new debt far more expensive and the need to turn a profit is here. On top of this, their primary source of revenue has shrunk as most companies cut back on their advertising budgets, again because money has gotten tighter now very quickly.
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.
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.
