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

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.

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).

As a phenomenon you'll see a lot of people call it "enshittification." The term seems to originate with Cory Doctorow who writes, "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

The whole article on his blog is worth a read here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys. His Mastodon handle is @pluralistic if you'd like to follow his work there (woohoo federation!).

I literally just came across an article that talks about why and how it happens https://open.substack.com/pub/catvalente/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

These companies are overvalued. Currently we're operating in supply side economics where the wealthy have all the money and companies do everything they can to attract those big investment dollars.

But the truth is social media companies (despite being household names) don't really make the revenue that warrants their high valuation by investors. Investors are starting to figure this out, and now they're desperately throwing shit at the wall to try to keep from losing those big supply side dollars.

Social media companies can break even and employ a lot of people while doing so. They could have a good user experience, and it would be all fine. But they wouldn't have sky rocketing share prices doing that. The leadership wouldn't get fat bonuses. So they implement all these crazy schemes so they can make projections about future revenue.

It doesn't matter if these schemes actually will make money or not. They just need to show X number of users multiplied by Y additional revenue per user and that's enough to attract investment. And it doesn't matter if it destroys the company either, the people at the top will get their bonuses.

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.

This is the consequence of the fed raising interest rates and companies finding it much harder to find money to pay salaries and operating costs. So companies have to actually seek profit or go bust and CEOs and board of directors are getting desperate and showing how little they understand what makes their products great.

ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are the reasons. I’m starting to see commercials that are using highest tier video tech. Just keep pushing.

That’s one community that’s worth supporting.

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.

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.