Silicon Valley Bank collapsing is putting pressure on tech companies to actually turn a profit, so they’re turning to slimy tactics just to survive IPO

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).

I honestly feel like - and this is just my thought, no data to back it up - all the major companies or sites felt like they were the only ones around, there was nothing to replace them, so they could make whatever decisions they wanted to make.

Like when we all left Digg for Reddit - Reddit was already a thing so it was a relatively “painless” switch. With this one it’s like… Musk took over twitter and I sort of heard about the fediverse but I’m personally waiting for Hive to get a desktop - but once Reddit started doing it’s thing it was like “yeah I really need to move now” and kbin had a much better landing page than any of the other fediverse things I’d stumbled upon which really helped with the onboarding… And it’s been nice watching it grow.

But yeah previous to this it was like…there was nothing else available so why did they have to care about what they did if we were “stuck” there with the decisions they were making anyway.

lol…and yet here I am on kbin so - yeah looks like that plan (assuming it’s at all correct) didn’t pan out entirely like they were hoping.

Higher interest rates, less vc money, have to actually start being profitable

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.

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.

only now? to me most social media platforms were shitty to begin with, or had become shitty long before.

I feel this is a matter of perspective. The average Joe whose concept of “social media” is Facebook probably has never noticed anything getting any worse. The mainstream users who just want to see funny pics and couldn’t care less about 3rd party clients might actually be quicker to side with Reddit than with the protesters.

Twitter has never been attractive to me. Even back when its API was public (ancient history). Not only is their feed noisy and of poor quality, constantly swayed by “trending” stuff I don’t care about, it also has always had you depend on a privative and closed source walled guarden. Things were much more open before twitter, when people used blogs to post their stuff instead.

Reddit might have been a bit more open once… but it stopped being so long ago, this is not a change in behavior. Maybe this is an unpopular thing to say, but I’m actually glad this is happening. I think the API fiasco might be an overall good thing if it helps people get away from Reddit, and if so I hope Reddit does not backtrack.

I think also we’ve become so dependent that they can just do whatever the fuck they want.

I’ve lived in a bunch of countries and FB messenger is the only way for me to keep in touch. FB can do whatever they want to me because I’m never going to persuade a bunch of people to all move to signal or something.

Reddit has communities that simply don’t exist on any other platform.

They have the critical mass.

What were the bad decisions discord is making? Im out of the loop

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.”

Running out of VC dollars, now they gotta actually make a profit.

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

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.

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.