Technology

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.

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.

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.

Things come and go in cycles. There was a time when Fark, Digg, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. were all a big thing and then they slowly went away or declined as something new arose in its place. I think a lot of the more tech-savvy users of Reddit will migrate to various fediverse instances and that you'll see other microblogging platforms arise to fill the void of Twitter, a la Bluesky. You'll still have somewhere to go, it just may not be the place you were used to going to.

I've been on the internet since the mid-80s, so I've pretty much seen it all. The current era has been characterized by widespread corporate takeovers, relegating independent sites to the backwaters of the internet at best. Forums for public comment used to be common, particularly on news sites; now they're mostly gone, relegated to a few massive sites and services which are heavily censored, swarming with bots, and easily controlled.

Free speech was mostly the rule; now it's strictly forbidden, particularly speech against the interests of corporations and the ruling class. Even if you DO find a place online where you can speak against the oligarchy, it's guaranteed that you'll be speaking into a void.

You can have all the free speech you want, as long as no one ever hears you.

The process of enshittification rules the day. Search engines which used to provide useful results now produce nothing but advertising and bot-fodder; on a recent Google search for blog entries about a topic of public interest, I literally got no results other than advertising. Blogs have effectively been eliminated from general public view, unless you go specifically looking for one that you already know about.

Technologically, broadband is the sole province of massive corporations which provide the shittiest service possible at the highest prices. There used to be talk of setting up small internet networks that would be outside the control of corporations and the government (which are now, of course, the same thing); that's utterly forgotten now. Governments all over the world now have kill-switches for the internet that can be used at any time, and that very definitely includes the United States.

There was a time when it was hoped that the internet would finally give power to the people. Instead, it's being used to enslave us even more.

The closest thing I've seen to any sign of hope over the last several decades is the development of the Fediverse.

Why is gfycat shutting down?

I think this is the web bubble bursting again. Venture Capitalists have piled money on a bunch of sites and products, we've become used to good free services.

The economy has taken a down turn and there is a increased demand for instant profitability and more and more social media companies realize they have overestimated how many people are willing to become paying customers. So they are forced to cut the product in order to save money instead.

They just happen to be reaching a breaking point to you, because of how tendencies work, most people reach a breaking point at roughly the same time.

Analogous to this, think of how when you're in a shitty relationship, you don't break up for one red flag or another, eventually you reach a breaking point and decide to not deal with the bs anymore, but when you look back you realize you were in a sea of red flags and should've ended it a long time ago... Either that or you never reach your breaking point and just sink lower and lower and become more miserable. That's about how it goes with most things in the consumer world. It's a good thing that we reach these breaking points, otherwise things never improve.