It's like an abusive relationship, they know they can do things against their customers but most will come back willing to pay to make it work. This trend will not stop until enough people leave.
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I'm not sure YouTube ever wanted you using adblockers.
They didn't, but they're going on the offensive way more so than before. People think it's related to MV3 crippling a lot of ad blocker functionality.
It's not anything new and nothing "all of a sudden", unfortunately. Facebook, Tumbler, Google - all done stuff like that before. Even for Reddit this is not the first protest blackout and not the first time they treat users and mods like garbage.
It simply is now happening to the apps and services you (and I) use daily, so it hits closer home.
All modern stairs are built on the same terrible foundation: Attract users, no matter how much money you lose. Once you feel strong, introduce fees, ads, hike the prices and try to regulate years of financial loss.
Happened like clockwork, and companies going public are a clear sign it's just around the corner. (Kind of like any free mobile app will ask you for a 5 star review, just before introducing monetization schemes)
$.
The answer is AI. Amongst other things. Reddit is about to go public and wants everyone on their main app for advertising and tracking. Twitter is dealing with hosting issues with Google.
Plus AI companies are extracting content from Twitter and Reddit to train their AI models like chatGPT which is a huge money maker, and these platforms aren't getting any money from it so they're trying to make it more difficult to get access to it. They want companies like OpenAI and Stability and Microsoft and Google to pay large sums of money for access to their content to train AI on.
The biggest problem is that average people are used to the tech big companies provide, and lazy so that they won't move to overall better alternatives. This means the companies don't care about consequences of their actions, because there is NONE. Looking at it from the company's perspective, why not make more money from people that won't leave the site anyways?
It's all about the money, money
Just wait till you have to pay per email. You're not still using Gmail are you?
Their cash overlords want returns on their investments.
They haven't yet realized that a platform dependent on user created content and user run moderation, is infinitely replaceable. See Fark and Digg.
Reddit and Twitter and just the latest to learn the lesson. Without your users, you may as well be MySpace.
You are used to a time where money was essentially free for companies. Whenever they needed money, they could loan money almost for free.
As interest rates are up, that's no longer the case and priorities have changed from growth to plugging holes.
All VC backed tech companies have been operating on the assumption that they can focus on growth and then make a profit later. That hasn't happened for most of these companies and VCs are starting to demand returns. It was always going to happen, I'm surprised it took this long.
The tech companies tend to follow the leader on unpopular actions. The first-mover bears the brunt of the backlash, allowing the copycats to implement the same policies without the same flak. Witness Twitter introducing fees and then Facebook following suit. Witness Twitter banning third party apps and Reddit... you know the rest.