Like many people I’m here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I’ve been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?
The web sucks honestly. everyone is either buying, selling, or being sold. The foundations of the web, open information sharing and interconnected servers, is collapsing behind paywalls and corporate greed. You can’t even have a homepage or hobby site any more as the biggest indexer is drowning in a trash ocean of generated seo-honed content.
There are some beacons of hope to be found still, but mostly I’m disgusted to see how the larger ecosystem has evolved.
It should happened years ago. The fact that “free speech” has been gardened, moderated and owned by companies like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit is mad. Kbin, Lemmy and Mastodon gives individuals the tools needed to retake their power of expression, for good and for bad. Together with Pixelfed and Nextcloud all needs are met - except for server hosting, that is.
This is why a self-hosted WordPress blog is a good place to store all tour posts, media, etc. It can’t get shut down because you can just move it. And WordPress is a sane company.
However, you really got to work to get traction from a blog post on social media. It can be done but does takes work.
The bigger problem, yeah, is most social media is walled silos and the companies are treating users like the enemy. I was really active in/tax, people thanked me for advice I gave. However, I’m done with Reddit. Let it rot.
I guess we need to create our own communities!
Doesn’t need to be WordPress btw. For example, I made my blog using Jekyll with my own theme. Probably way more cheaper as it’s only a static site, no need for database, only bunch of markdown files.
VC’s are calling in their debts. We should expect to see more.
Ngl i think we’re finally seeing a lot of the social media bubble burst. Companies which have spent years in the red, now are being asked to make a profit, however they never had to before and never planned for it. If that sounds like they’ve spent the last 15 years thinking about growth over profits, it 100% is. Growth is important but growing a Losing venture is inherently unsustainable. They should’ve planned for this but most CEO’s have no idea how to plan for the future.
Just my 2¢Not just you. I don’t know if anyone’s made it official yet, but I call what’s currently happening the “social media collapse.” Corporations have been sinking their teeth into popular social networks, only to realize that they’ve never been profitable and that the people who use them don’t want to live with advertising or restrictions. The annoying paradox of social networks is that by the time they’re popular enough to be worth using, they’re already too popular, and are doomed by the whims of a meddling executive.
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Exactly, the venture capital is finally drying up and the services can’t figure out how to sell anything to enough people to recoup their investments. Why reddit has to pull out third party apps and shove ads and reddit gold down our throat, why Elon has to shill Twitter blue and cap our view counts. Facebook and Google services exist because their business model is selling ads foundationally and not selling services. It doesn’t matter that their socials are losing money because it’s always been a branch of their advertising business and not the other way around.
There are larger macroeconomic issues at play here which are a big contributor to it. High inflation and an uncertain US economic situation has caused tech companies (as well as others) to lay off people and is making it harder for startups and smaller companies to raise capital to keep the lights on. So yes, there is something bigger going on that is indirectly causing all of this.
Yeah. It’s like it’s 2000 in the Bay Area all over again.
Ya also Pinterest has been accidentally banning people I know bc a friend (who I know even irl not just online) got suspended even tho she doesnt post anything and doesnt spam. And I keep getting emails from them about pins I made being taken down then put back up BUT I don’t make any pins I only save them and I dont save innapropriate stuff so idk. Ive read this is something a lot of people are dealing with on Pinterest lately too.
It’s not even social media alone. The magazine National Geographic had the last of its staff fired last month. Now all of their articles are written by freelancers and there’s no longer a physical copy being sold.
Wasn’t national geographic bought by disney a couple years back?
Actually it went from Fox to Disney. Fox sank the magazine, really… they were still publishing it, but it was an embarrassment, the kind of vapid trifle that you’d find on a supermarket checkout aisle next to People and the National Enquirer. Remember when David Hasselhoff had a drinking problem and his daughter filmed him eating a hamburger off the ground? It was the magazine version of that. The absolute rock bottom for a cherished institution.
Yeah, Disney is trying to make National Geographic more “profitable”.
God forbid we return to loss leader journalism… =(
What’s that?
Asking for a friend.
Having a highly educated populace tends to be bad for business. Workers need to be educated just enough to work and not ask any questions. A desire to read publications that might expand one’s knowledge or communicate new and different ideas correlates to education. Just work hard and buy these distractions. That’s why there is a war on education in red states. Of course no one is buying National Geographic anymore. They’ve spent the past 30 years dumbing down the US on purpose.
This is the enshittification of the Internet. Cory Doctorow wrote about it here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys and it explains why this was always going to happen.
I’ve been saying this will happen for years and people just dismissed it, I’m feeling quite vindicated now
Thanks for sharing this. I learned a lot.
I dunno. If the general trend is to move toward the fediverse then things might actually get better.
Meta has already expressed interest in the fediverse. It’s going to be up to everyone who likes it to defederate from every corporate instance.
There are no good corporate actorsI don’t know it off the top of my head, but I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere that over on Mastodon, a large number of instances have banded together to collectively block all Meta owned instances, and publish a list of them and so on.
I think convenient-to-add, publicly viewable blocklists will be a thing on here sooner rather than later.
You’re telling me I can just block Meta/Facebook altogether here in the Fediverse?
I think I’m going to like it here. :)
Yes, blocklists are excellent, if you’re looking to advertise those sites.
I hope that will be the trend, but I think the VC funding cycle will continue
Interesting read.
The likes of Spez were just not that intelligent enough to figure out how to make Reddit pay before the VCs called in the investments. Not that it’s an easy problem to solve, but if you’re going to take on money like Reddit did you sure as hell needed a better plan then leaving it up to later to figure out. Amazon had a plan clearly, Reddit did not.
Also, what Reddit is now doing mimics a little of what Facebook did too, the enshitification of your feeds (just look at the app). They’re just hoping Reddit is as addictive as Facebook is and you’ll stick around regardless. I wonder if they recent;y hired some new advisers that told them to make these recent changes too?
Here’s the play, charge a reasonable amount for API calls and people will either pay with money or with data, some will even do both.
Instead you and I are having this conversation on kbin.
After the way shithead acted and talked, well I waste less time on the internet, and yeah, it’s a little harder to find results on google, but that is just making me realize how much I relied on Reddit.
I need to find another search engine too, I rely too much on too few providers.
They got us one convenience at a time.
It’s a failure of a business mind all of this.
- Failure to understand the users
- Failure to realise who actually makes and owns the content
- Failure to control costs
- Failure to adapt and change how they charge
- Failure to use the community to improve the product
I had a reddit account for 16 years, and as soon as Apollo stopped working a few days ago, I logged out everywhere and not going back
A better option might be to require third party developers to use a Reddit based advertising API with the benefit of free API usage and revenue sharing. Everyone’s happy. Third party developers would get paid for ads, they can show more ads and use other ad providers along side Reddit if they want to, the API gets paid for by advertising revenue for all of the third party apps, Reddit gets to track it’s users by requiring API Ad calls to send a user id, etc., etc…
Some search engine options aside from Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo:
https://search.brave.com/ (Brave also has their own browser; I’ve been using both and liking them)
If anyone knows of and likes any other search engines, please post a reply here and/or tag me!
I will never go back to twitter or reddit.
If it weren’t for MLM Huns and boomer memes of ice cold takes from 2013, Facebook would be long gone too.
Even just taking the huns out probably would have killed it 3 years ago.
Can we think of a better word than this enshitthing?
Mistifying / Mistification works if you like Anglo-German puns. Emmerdification for an Anglo-French equivalent.
If you’re against anything to do with faeces at all, I’m not sure there’s as short and easy a neologism that as fully captures the meaning and, importantly, disdain without being a mouthful.
You need an en- of some sort because it’s clear that something is changing and then the action is the attempt to squeeze as much profit out of an enterprise with the expectation that nothing much will, er, change. This inevitably ruins or destroys the nature of the enterprise from the users’ point of view.
Then the CEO immediately has cognitive dissonance between their own ego and self-belief of infallibility versus the fact the enterprise isn’t working or has changed far more than their expectations. Their ego, and desire for profit, inevitably wins.
Much like badly managed corporate take-overs, all the smart people leave as soon as they can assuming they haven’t already been fired and replaced by an inferior of some sort.
Thus, the whole thing turns to… well. Is there a better word?
I’ve seen rentrophy thrown around, the decline in service as rent increases.
The tech bubble is starting to show signs of bursting. SVB alongside other large investent firms going down has shown companies that just being on the internet is not a sign of making money. Essentially the internet bubble is popping…again, as interest rates skyrocket and realized gains become smaller, internet-based companies seem to be scrambling to outpace the likes of Machine Learning and the new technological curve coming. Reddit going IPO, the Twitter shenanigans, etc… Essentially they’ve all realized that their sites and business models are being made obsolete by the “new wave” of businesses/startups relying on newer technologies and novel revenue models.
Tldr; this is the cycle, new tech comes out, old tech dies. It happens all the time, just that this time it’s not happening in our physical world but rather the virtual.
Yeah, except machine learning is also another bubble which I expect is going to burst pretty soon, so who knows where things will end up after that.
With interest rates going up it’s costing more and more to have borrowed money sitting in the likes of Reddit hoping for a nice payday one day.
Sounds like a promising venture for wallstreetbets people
This is really the biggest part. There isn’t room for the future right now, gains need to be realized to pay other investments and if not portfolios leaned out.
I think another major factor is that this is really the first time since 2008 that companies have had to deal with interest rates on their loans.
For 15 years, corporate money was functionally free from the government banks. It allowed a lot of things to happen that could not have otherwise happened.
Now that its not free anymore, the bar of profitability is suddenly a lot higher than it was last fall.
Most sites that rely on user generated content are a huge black hole of investor cash (Meta and YouTube are the only ones I can think of that aren’t) and have a natural lifespan where increasingly desperate attempts to extract value from it eventually kill the site. It seems like everything is going downhill at once because the web stopped innovating sometime around 2010 and the unprofitable experiments became pillars of the online experience. It’s why I’m excited about the fediverse - a return to community-led projects at last.
It’s definitely frustrating. I’ve been finding myself really missing the internet of the 2000s/2010s, when new and interesting things were popping up and were worth talking about to friends. These days, it just feels like a chore to do anything online, like I’m just ticking off boxes on my to-do list but no longer having fun with the discovery process at all.
Hopefully this shake-up of some of the big tech giants brings some of that back.
I personally can’t wait to see it all burn. This last year especially has shown me how many people are just getting fucking sick and tired of centralized, corporate bullshit, even if they aren’t consciously aware of why (things like issues listing items on Marketplace due to false auto-removals, no way to contact a human being for help with a business issue, spam, bots, unintentional bans/excessive moderation, etc.) At the end of the day, when the average person starts to complain about shitty UI and too many ads, you know a platform has peaked - and it’s happening everywhere. Social media has had its time in the sun. I want it to fucking crumble now.
Automation in the realm of customer service drives so much of the enshitified experiences. If I’m not talking to a robot/chat engine, I’m talking to a human with such overbearing rules/scripts they might as well be a robot. And I know they hate it as much as I do.
The otherside of this, is that when I encounter a kind human who has actually been empowered to solve problems I tend to leave glowing feedback and share the experience.
Office Space got it right 24 years ago. “I’m a goddamn people person.” First people they cut, and it just got harder for the customers.
It’s so sad how awful the end user support has gotten. Even when you’re paying Big Money to big hardware makers who make you pay for support packages, you’re talking to Malaysia or India or a few in South America. Pinching pennies into dust when they’re making money hand over fist for the support contracts. When most end user engineers are only opening tickets when it’s dire problems due to how awful the experience is.
Most web companies never turned a profit and have business models that wouldn’t ever be profitable, endless growth propped up by venture capital was all they strived for. Then hope they get acquired or do an IPO and let somebody else hold the bag - basically a Ponzi scheme. Investors realised this doesn’t really work anymore, so the free money ran out. Also, the AI gold rush means VCs have something else to throw their money at.
