Because of capitalism, no seriously these decisions are based on money and growth. But both of these things are relatively finite. You can't keep have exponential growth year after year. Eventually you will plateau but there isnt a mechanism in capitalism to accept that. So companies start forcing monetary gain.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Because easy money from a decade of low interest rates is disappearing.
I feel as though the user base is a large part of the problem. I might be wrong but the accessibility of social media that have apps is a lot easier for the younger population who these days are flooding social media. I don't think a lot of people use forums or currently Testflight apps such as Memmy (for Lemmy). The iPhone is the phone for influencers and if Lemmy officially releases an iPhone app the same problems may happen.
Higher interest rates, less vc money, have to actually start being profitable
VC money drying up means enshittification machine slamming the gas
No doubt. Instead of slowly making it shittier bit by bit so that we didn't noticed, they had to go mask off an remind us that we are the product.
Everyone’s a genius in a bull market with a near zero interest rate.
Honestly I think it’s this. All these tech companies finally being pressed to show ROI now that the risk-free rate of return is much higher.
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.
It's basically the lifecycle of any big corporation.
When the industry is new and there's tons of new users to reach, everyone tries to be the most friendly corporation to build a name for themselves. Positive press and the halo effect helps bring in more people.
Once an industry matures and growth slows, the focus shifts to nickle-and-diming customers to squeeze more profit out of them.
I was going to say that I wish there was a decentralised way of sending messages... And then I remembered text messaging is a thing.
Incredible how quickly these things become embedded in everyday life
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Capitalism. Companies go public (or already were public) and then they can no longer be happy with what they had and need to acheive infinite profit growth. That's partially why companies like Valve, that are still luckily entirely private, can make seemingly consumer-focused decisions and not just chase infinite profits. That's how they've been able to invest so heavily in Linux with such little short term gains. Valve still makes shitty decisions sometimes but it would be 10x worse if they decided to go public.
I hate to break it to you, bud, but Valve is not consumer focused and are definitely focused on maximising profits.
Sure Valve might be more interested on maintaining good relations with customers, but that is just because they want to keep you around so you can make them more money in the long term. Maybe this in itself is worth praising, but at the end of the dat Valve is just another corporation who want your money and I really wouldn't go out of my way to defend or get emotionally attached to them.
And Valve want to invest in Linux because they are scared that Windows is going to do something to force them out of the PC space. Linux provides a fallback to this. Also, Linux allows them to undercut any potential Windows competition in the handheld gaming space as they can save on a Windows license. Eventually Valve hopes to corner the emerging market here by doing this. Linux support is very much a business and not altruistic move on Valve's behalf.
What are the dumb updates discord is doing? I haven't noticed anything different, except for the username change that doesn't have a gamertag anymore.
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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.
But the good news is, tech is a highly disruptable industry. Barrier to entry is accessible for regular people.
And that's why we're here.
Reddit doesn't die because we left. They die in a few years when the Fediverse just works better than Reddit. And we fund that.
Speaking of, how do I kick in a few bucks to help out various Lemmy servers? Anyone know?
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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.
I wish it was just the boomers. We have a whole new generation of greedy corporate bootlicks on their way up.
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Digital Sharecropping:
"What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy."
Reddit, Twitter, etc, have been running at a loss for ages, burning through vulture capitalist money to build up a solid userbase. Now they need to start turning a reliable profit, which means enshittification of the user experience to make more money per user.
And the worst bit it even happens to non free platforms.
Like Spotify pushing a TikTok style interface, and ramming my home screen full of things I don't care about. Like, you've known me for a decade you should know I'm not into drake and podcasts by conservative men.
I don't understand why Reddit doesn't just buy up one of the 3rd-party apps that have the tech that people say is so badly needed. If the 3rd party apps actually make money then just buy one of them and make money with it.
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