The Summer of enshittification continues apace.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Wow the internet really took a nosedive the last few months.
I like to think of it as a reset to early 2000s internet, which was basically the golden age.
I hope you’re right. Everything was a lot more wild. You’d discover a blog through some link and feel like an adventurer explorer a blank part of the map. It was much more fun.
Yeah, it seems like people made the internet something valuable, a bunch of commercial businesses turned up to take the reins so they could harvest hat value for wealth for investors, it's reached a point where that juice is no longer worth the squeeze for them and we'll go back to a phase where the progress and generation of value will revert back to regular people again for a while. Likely that balance will then tip back towards profitability again and the cycle will start anew.
@Piers @z500 I remember in the early days of commercialization of the interwebs, the capitalists just could *not* wrap their heads around the idea of *sharing*. Legalities aside, putting music or art or whatever that you had spent money and time on, and then just... putting it out there for anyone was so foreign to them.
Tech bubble is over.
Let's hope the old web returns.
I don’t believe that
You know, come to think of it, the internet has been oddly stable for the past decade. Prior to modern social media, sites used to come and go all the time. I had to switch forums twice because the ones I was using shut down. Same for my image hosting sites and flash game sites. We were honestly due for a major shake up.
The link rot from this is going to be monstrous, RIP
The money ran out, now we have to face cold hard decisions regarding what parts of the internet we are wiling to pay for.
It's better than ads
I am going to not be able to find obscure gifs i remember from the 2000's 😩
So what you’re saying is nothing important is being lost.
I mean, if you don't convey emotions to friend via gifs I don't know what to tell ya!
it's our generation's Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say the reason why gfycat integrated into basically everything was because they launched themselves at the tech giants and gave everything for basically nothing.
I thought it was pretty suss that they suddenly showed up on every platform.
They were purchased by Snapchat last year. So this is probably Snapchat seeing it as only a cost center with no return. Which tbh, it probably is.
Woah, that sucks. More ruined links across the internet
TIL that Snapchat bought it, any idea why they're now killing it? The usual reason would be that it contained/owned something they wanted (tech, IP, data, etc) and they didn't actually care about the service, reckon that's the case here?
Saving money is my guess. Running it is costing more than it makes. Company shuts it down.
Stolen from another discussion thread: Interest rates are up and quantitative evening is over. For nearly 15 years money was basically free for tech companies. Banks don't pay anything, bonds don't pay anything, the stock market is overheated and investors are still looking for return. So if your tech company was already public you could borrow in the form of bank loans or bonds for dirt cheap and if it was still privately held you can get money from individual and corporate investors.
Now that the free money era is over a lot of companies have had to finally think about making a profit so that they can keep the lights on. This is why there have been tens of thousands laid off in the tech sector in the last year or so.
As far as Reddit goes I have no idea what they've been thinking. It seems like they've been spending money developing features nobody wants or needs: locally hosted images and video which have to cost a fortune, live chat, and NFTs, to name a few. They've got the ~20th most popular website in the world with millions of daily active users and they can't figure out how to make it profitable?
The API the third party applications used doesn't serve ads. All they had to do for a bump in revenue is to insert ads and require third party applications to display them or risk losing their API access. Users would grumble but it's a pretty reasonable ask. The fact that they didn't do this demonstrates to me that they don't think the money is in serving ads, they think it's in data mining and they can only get the data they want from the official app.
What I never understood was why not tie API to Reddit premium. Such a simple thing and it would’ve converted a lot of users without all this fuss.
Because it was about control. They want you on their app where they decide what you see and track how long you see it.
I can't say I knew anything about how they operated to begin with. How did they pay their bills?
I'm glad one of GIF platforms went down. GIF format is disgusting anyway. APNG is superior in every way and should replace ugly GIF garbage format.