Public companies are legally required to always do their best to grow year over year. Eventually these companies get so large they can't realistically get more market share so they have to figure out how to make more money from their users. This leads to them squeezing users for cash in the hunt for short term gains because they've already realistically capped out on how much money they can make per year. It's a dumb system that can't work in the long term.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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I know the system prevents it but they should just be happy with making a steady amount of income each year
Private companies absolutely can, what sucks is alot of owners are looking for a public exit so they can make a ton of money and step away from the company. Valve is a great example of a private company happy to sit back and rake in cash. They have no plans to go public and can continue slowly improving their product because of it.
A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.
This was pulled from Case law on the fiduciary duty of directors to maximize the wealth of corporate shareholders with a few more cases sometimes in favor of the business and others in favor of the shareholder. If anyone else wants to read some more on this. Reading some more based on what searches I find it seems like in reality it complicated. But I'm just a individual contributor all of this is above my knowledge grade.
I do agree though that this model is not realistic long term. Eventually you need to jump into other markets to continue your growth or just squeeze your user base / customers dry.
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.
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Centralization, money, power, money, stocks, money. These are just a few reasons. Did I mention money? Oh, and also, money. They're sucking up to investors, and finding ways to get through the up-coming(or on-going) recession without major losses. The only losses are ours.
Many tech companies were overvalued for a long time. Everyone was happy to invest and pump money into those companies because "those platforms are going to be the future and I want to be part of it when they are starting to make a ton of money". It didn't matter that many of those companies were not profitable because they always promised to make up for that in the future.
This classic idea is starting to break down a bit. Many Tech companies have become profitable in the meantime, but many of them also have various troubles like moderation.
So why are so many media companies making "shitty decisions"? Well, because from a business perspective, they aren't necessarily "shitty decisions", they are kinda smart decisions. Reddit makes money by gathering data and by showing ads. They cannot show ads on apps they don't control. So they have to handle a lot of traffic for which they get nothing back. That's why they are trying to push as many people to use their app as possible. They know that the hardcore oldschool community won't like that, but they are probably pretty sure that enough will switch to the app to make it worthwhile for them.
Meta is fighting to stay relevant as well. Facebook was the foundation of social media for a long time, but in the digital space, this can change very quickly, so they constantly have to try new things.
And if we look at games like the Sims, the game who really escalated the whole DLC thing, it's a similar story. From a consumer perspective, what they are doing is bad. From a business perspective, it's smart. And that's what it ultimately comes down to.
Companies' main goal isn't to satisfy their customers, it's making money. If fucking over customers makes them more money, they do it in a heartbeat.
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I think it has something to do with fear of an upcoming recession, platforms need to prove to their shareholders that they can still maintain profitability even in the face of economic downturn. Keep in mind the US hasn't experienced a real recession since the tech boom, which may explain why all this money grubbing is so severe and sudden.
a lot of people have already basically made this point, but ad revenue isn't really good enough to make massive massive tech platforms profitable, and there's only so much VC money they can all burn. we saw the first stage a few months ago when basically every major tech company had massive layoffs, now all these companies are trying to become profitable all at once
I don't know honestly, greed probably. But it's such a shame. It seems like the internet as a whole is heading in a horrible direction, and not enough people care about it for there to be something done about it.
But here we are dipping our toes in the fediverse, a bit early for the non tech savvy people but from my point of view we are currently proving that monolithic corps are no longer needed. They are convenient, but not alfa-omega.
The climate is heading in a horrible direction, and not enough people care. Politics are heading in a horrible direction, and you know what? Not enough people care!
Sorry, the last 4 years has made me very cynical. And I'm in a particularly blue mood today.
dude i feel that. its just lame and hard to grip with
its like i wish almost that i didnt care
Because easy money from a decade of low interest rates is disappearing.
A lot of them go into business with venture capital, a great idea with future potential, but no idea how to monetize any of it.
Eventually the capital is starting to dry up and the owners will want return on their investments - so the company is forced to start turning profit. Enshittification of service at all costs follows. And then perhaps public IPO and the founders cashing out and buying yachts.
That's the lifecycle of a tech-startup
The other element to this is the lack of competition. Since companies funded this way don’t need to turn a profit for a long time, they can very easily kill their competitors who do need to be profitable to survive.
So when the time comes for the company to turn a profit, there are few if any competitors left to put pressure on them, giving them the power to do what they want, and leaving consumers with no other options.
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They are all just cashing out because they thought they are at the point where the communities will literally put up with anything, and not understanding that the community is their most precious resource.
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.
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Higher interest rates, less vc money, have to actually start being profitable
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We see that Twitter was been purposely twisted to be a comfortable space for neo-Nazis. We know spez's politics. It doesn't take much of a leap to conclude that he's killing off the moderator class to make Reddit more friendly for the neo-Nazis. Most likely though that's just a convenient side-effect of unbridled greed, though.
I mean the guy is literally a millionaire prepper who wants to own slaves in the apocalypse and personally reopened gamergate subs back in the day.
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It's nothing new. It's becoming more spectacular as the people doing it are richer and richer. Geocities sold to Yahoo, who promptly murdered it. LiveJournal sold itself to a Russian banker, which caused most non-Russian users to abandon it. Tom sold MySpace to Rupert Murdoch for like 500 million and bowed out, and MySpace was driven into the ground. The buyers are getting bigger an bigger but the results of trying to squelch users has always been the same - the platform is abandoned.
It's Enshitification https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification
Enshittification is the answer. I mean, everything costs $, but my opinion? That's worthless!
A lot of these companies have never been profitable and have been running on VC money on speculation alone until they reach critical mass and can turn on the monetization streams.