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Check out Cory Doctorow's post on a term he coined called enshittification. Good primer to some of the same patterns we are seeing.
I believe there is another comment that breaks down a supposition for Reddit's enshittificationw, too, in this thread.
You can provide quality services only for so long. Eventually quality will get in the way of profits.
Rabbits
Money. It really is that simple.
Reddit wanted to kill third party apps because they have ad blocking features and don't show unwarranted sponsored posts. Reddit wants to serve users as much ads and sponsored content as possible, which was not really able to happen with third party apps.
The other issue to consider is MBAs. Or at least the MBA way of thinking, that "caring about customers" actually means "leaving money on the table." The relentless search for "business efficiency," evaluated in pure accounting terms, can easily lead to destroying the core business due to a lack of understanding of how the core business shows up on a P&L statement.
Any company with a MBA at the helm always seem to make poor choices. Look at the all the companies that have started switching back to engineers for leadership they've started making comebacks.
Cory Doctorow termed it "Enshittification", and wrote about the process here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
I'm glad I read through the whole thing.
Bummed that I won't be winning a testicle π°
I'm glad I read through the whole thing.
Bummed that I won't be winning a testicle π°
capitalism β they want more money
Interest rates go up. Quantitative Easing go down.
They might have to play with real money lol
This is it. 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.
Deleted.
Dr. Capitalism, or How I listened to stop worrying and love the dollar.
The user bubble has popped now that investors started questioning why the fuck theyβve been investing huge amounts of money into companies that make no money just because they have lots of users. With that investment money drying up, these tech companies are desperate to start making a profit so they can survive and grow their value still.
TLDR: investment in unprofitable tech companies is drying up and companies that arenβt profitable are scrambling to make money.
Rabbits
I feel like they all see the inevitability that AI will drastically change the money model very soon. And it will not be to their profit, so best make every penny they can right now is their mentality.
Stupidity and greed, a great combination!
It's not necessarily greed. The infrastructure to keep Reddit alive can't be cheap. How do you pay for that? VC money has dried up so these services that have been free to users are all quickly scrambling to make money. I definitely think they did it wrong. They should have planned the API fee changes out for years instead of trying to force it in a month.
They make money by serving adds to the people providing their site content.
And no, that is not what happened. They were trying to increase their valuation for future share holders.
Edit: adding it is the only greed, that is the reason.
I'm wondering if it's a domino effect. Now that one major company made an announcement that fucks over their users, they're all doing it. We even now have YouTube cracking down on Adblockers. The Golden Era is coming to an end imo
This basically. Companies see that others can do it without consequences and so they do too. The age of acting like your "friend" is over and they are gonna squeeze ever last cent they can from users. Twitter, Reddit , YouTube, discord. I expect to see smaller players doing the same soon.