Im glad decentralized social media is picking up steam. No more of these major communication platform rug poolings for everyone. Now at worst individual instances can implode and everyone just has to move to a different instance or self-host, and still access communities on every other instance.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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So first thing, Twitter is different than the rest. Elmo purchased it and he is doing some things to it that looks crazy.
Reddit CEO admitted that his API changes are inspired by Elmo's Twitter changes, he likely wouldn't double down if that didn't happen to Twitter as well.
Anyway, to show inflation the government increased interest rates. Which made investors thinking, "why should I put my money in this risky business that doesn't even generate money, when I could purchase government bonds and add long as government doesn't default I will get 5%?
This actually put pressure on trash startups that don't generate profits.
Ironically it is more like how much interest have been historically. It's just that after we had recession it was lowered to not turn it into depression. Then it was kept at nearly 0% until now.
Side note: if your bank still offers still nearly 0% interest rate in your savings account, they are making killing on your money and they are counting you won't notice, because people got used to those low interest rates.
re: your side note, if I had any money in my bank account I'd be furious!
tl;dr: Blitzscaling only works with cheap money.
I wouldn't be surprised if pigboy isn't intentionally tanking news aggregator website to screw over the investors.
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For sure... Non-decentralized social media has value created by the immense number of connections and content created.
It also has the risk of abusing those connections and making the network less valuable by a centralized decision to clog it with paid content... Which alienates users and makes the experience less efficient.
Facebook did it, reddit is doing it, Twitter is trying to do it. The move is almost inevitable.
Decentralize it and it takes almost all potential greed out of the equation so the network stays most valuable to users.
This makes me wonder whether decentralized social media is actually immune to enshittification, or will it just take a different form we can't even imagine at this moment in time.
There is nothing too complex for the ingenuity of advertisers to corrupt eventually.
Decentralized social media needs the users to understand the importance of keeping it free from corporate interests.
This fediverse is a version of the commons, and it's up to each of us to acknowledge this in order to keep it that way.
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I think it's orchestrated. I think it's intentional. I think the internet is under attack in the capacity that we know it as. I know it makes me sound conspiratorial but ever since Musk overtook Twitter every big social CEO has praised is approach. Musk fucked the internet up as we know it and Rupert Murdock showed media moguls that they can push trash and make heaps of money. There's no incentive to run quality content online and Musk started the downturn of that realization. I think we're in for some troubling times.
Musk didn’t start shit. FB is far more to blame for the current web, than a few months of Elon running Twitter into the dirt.
That's fair. I just associate it with Musk since it's become much more blatant through him.
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This is the enshittification of the Internet. Cory Doctorow wrote about it here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys and it explains why this was always going to happen.
Interesting read.
The likes of Spez were just not that intelligent enough to figure out how to make Reddit pay before the VCs called in the investments. Not that it's an easy problem to solve, but if you're going to take on money like Reddit did you sure as hell needed a better plan then leaving it up to later to figure out. Amazon had a plan clearly, Reddit did not.
Also, what Reddit is now doing mimics a little of what Facebook did too, the enshitification of your feeds (just look at the app). They're just hoping Reddit is as addictive as Facebook is and you'll stick around regardless. I wonder if they recent;y hired some new advisers that told them to make these recent changes too?
Here's the play, charge a reasonable amount for API calls and people will either pay with money or with data, some will even do both.
Instead you and I are having this conversation on kbin.
After the way shithead acted and talked, well I waste less time on the internet, and yeah, it's a little harder to find results on google, but that is just making me realize how much I relied on Reddit.
I need to find another search engine too, I rely too much on too few providers.
They got us one convenience at a time.
It's a failure of a business mind all of this.
- Failure to understand the users
- Failure to realise who actually makes and owns the content
- Failure to control costs
- Failure to adapt and change how they charge
- Failure to use the community to improve the product
I had a reddit account for 16 years, and as soon as Apollo stopped working a few days ago, I logged out everywhere and not going back
A better option might be to require third party developers to use a Reddit based advertising API with the benefit of free API usage and revenue sharing. Everyone's happy. Third party developers would get paid for ads, they can show more ads and use other ad providers along side Reddit if they want to, the API gets paid for by advertising revenue for all of the third party apps, Reddit gets to track it's users by requiring API Ad calls to send a user id, etc., etc..
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I dunno. If the general trend is to move toward the fediverse then things might actually get better.
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Unchecked corporate greed and no regards for users or communities that were built on these platforms. Hopefully the centralized ones will die from too many ads and user abandonment and the decentralized ones will rise and thrive.
Exactly this. The money tap has dried up post pandemic and they are seeking new revenue streams while also slashing costs. The hunger for perpetual growth to sate the investor class and their matyroshka nesting yachts is driving these decisions.
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Not just you. I don't know if anyone's made it official yet, but I call what's currently happening the "social media collapse." Corporations have been sinking their teeth into popular social networks, only to realize that they've never been profitable and that the people who use them don't want to live with advertising or restrictions. The annoying paradox of social networks is that by the time they're popular enough to be worth using, they're already too popular, and are doomed by the whims of a meddling executive.
Exactly, the venture capital is finally drying up and the services can't figure out how to sell anything to enough people to recoup their investments. Why reddit has to pull out third party apps and shove ads and reddit gold down our throat, why Elon has to shill Twitter blue and cap our view counts. Facebook and Google services exist because their business model is selling ads foundationally and not selling services. It doesn't matter that their socials are losing money because it's always been a branch of their advertising business and not the other way around.
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There are larger macroeconomic issues at play here which are a big contributor to it. High inflation and an uncertain US economic situation has caused tech companies (as well as others) to lay off people and is making it harder for startups and smaller companies to raise capital to keep the lights on. So yes, there is something bigger going on that is indirectly causing all of this.
Yeah. It's like it's 2000 in the Bay Area all over again.
The tech bubble is starting to show signs of bursting. SVB alongside other large investent firms going down has shown companies that just being on the internet is not a sign of making money. Essentially the internet bubble is popping...again, as interest rates skyrocket and realized gains become smaller, internet-based companies seem to be scrambling to outpace the likes of Machine Learning and the new technological curve coming. Reddit going IPO, the Twitter shenanigans, etc.... Essentially they've all realized that their sites and business models are being made obsolete by the "new wave" of businesses/startups relying on newer technologies and novel revenue models.
Tldr; this is the cycle, new tech comes out, old tech dies. It happens all the time, just that this time it's not happening in our physical world but rather the virtual.
With interest rates going up it's costing more and more to have borrowed money sitting in the likes of Reddit hoping for a nice payday one day.
This is really the biggest part. There isn't room for the future right now, gains need to be realized to pay other investments and if not portfolios leaned out.
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I think another major factor is that this is really the first time since 2008 that companies have had to deal with interest rates on their loans.
For 15 years, corporate money was functionally free from the government banks. It allowed a lot of things to happen that could not have otherwise happened.
Now that its not free anymore, the bar of profitability is suddenly a lot higher than it was last fall.
Yeah, except machine learning is also another bubble which I expect is going to burst pretty soon, so who knows where things will end up after that.
I personally can't wait to see it all burn. This last year especially has shown me how many people are just getting fucking sick and tired of centralized, corporate bullshit, even if they aren't consciously aware of why (things like issues listing items on Marketplace due to false auto-removals, no way to contact a human being for help with a business issue, spam, bots, unintentional bans/excessive moderation, etc.) At the end of the day, when the average person starts to complain about shitty UI and too many ads, you know a platform has peaked - and it's happening everywhere. Social media has had its time in the sun. I want it to fucking crumble now.
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Well I didn't know about Gfycat shutting down but I do now. :/ Damn, not even it is safe.
I've never been able to read gfycat as anything but "go fuck your cat," so that's a thought I never knew I'd miss.
uh. i’ve always read it “giffycat” but the other way might be the gold standard.
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VC’s are calling in their debts. We should expect to see more.
It's not even social media alone. The magazine National Geographic had the last of its staff fired last month. Now all of their articles are written by freelancers and there's no longer a physical copy being sold.
Wasn't national geographic bought by disney a couple years back?
Yeah, Disney is trying to make National Geographic more "profitable".
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Ngl i think we’re finally seeing a lot of the social media bubble burst. Companies which have spent years in the red, now are being asked to make a profit, however they never had to before and never planned for it. If that sounds like they’ve spent the last 15 years thinking about growth over profits, it 100% is. Growth is important but growing a Losing venture is inherently unsustainable. They should’ve planned for this but most CEO’s have no idea how to plan for the future.
Just my 2¢
I think a lot of people have been weary of the current 20 year run of corporate social media, but didn't know where else to go. Now they do.
I wish this was the cause but I think it's more insidious. When cash supply was cheap and people were stuck at home these companies saw explosive growth. Now the market is down and investors smell blood. They want payouts. This is for sure the story with reddit and it's upcoming IPO as well as Musk burning down Twitter trying to make up for the 1.5bn in debt it's accruing.
Facebook/Meta is trying to expand into new markets since their main service hit saturation ages ago and they've cut all they can. That means killing gfycat, making a Twitter clone, etc.
The web sucks honestly. everyone is either buying, selling, or being sold. The foundations of the web, open information sharing and interconnected servers, is collapsing behind paywalls and corporate greed. You can't even have a homepage or hobby site any more as the biggest indexer is drowning in a trash ocean of generated seo-honed content.
There are some beacons of hope to be found still, but mostly I'm disgusted to see how the larger ecosystem has evolved.
This is why a self-hosted WordPress blog is a good place to store all tour posts, media, etc. It can't get shut down because you can just move it. And WordPress is a sane company.
However, you really got to work to get traction from a blog post on social media. It can be done but does takes work.
The bigger problem, yeah, is most social media is walled silos and the companies are treating users like the enemy. I was really active in/tax, people thanked me for advice I gave. However, I'm done with Reddit. Let it rot.
I guess we need to create our own communities!
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It's definitely frustrating. I've been finding myself really missing the internet of the 2000s/2010s, when new and interesting things were popping up and were worth talking about to friends. These days, it just feels like a chore to do anything online, like I'm just ticking off boxes on my to-do list but no longer having fun with the discovery process at all.
Hopefully this shake-up of some of the big tech giants brings some of that back.
As other people have said, we may very well be watching a bubble burst.
Many social media companies rely on VC money to get themselves started, to handle large initial costs, but the problem is many of them (Reddit included) have been suckling on that VC money for too long, and have been too lax on figuring out their monetisation.
The reason that is a problem now is because we're not just feeling the effects of the pandemic monetarily, but there's all sorts of things pulling at the global economy right now including the Ukrainian war...
It's made VC money harder to come by, so these companies are having to figure out their monetisation strategy now or die, hence the sudden death and enshitification of many social media (and related) sites.
Though if anything, it gives us a chance to exist, so that's cool. Only problem is even on a small scale, I can't imagine these Admins have an easy time monetising either, so I suspect this won't last in it's current iteration either.
Ya also Pinterest has been accidentally banning people I know bc a friend (who I know even irl not just online) got suspended even tho she doesnt post anything and doesnt spam. And I keep getting emails from them about pins I made being taken down then put back up BUT I don't make any pins I only save them and I dont save innapropriate stuff so idk. Ive read this is something a lot of people are dealing with on Pinterest lately too.
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