cilantrilloWhy do so many tech companies, like Reddit and Twitter are making their platforms worse for their users all of a sudden?
breadsmasherCapitalism. Monetise everything no matter the cost to the users
applejacksdo you think this move will be good for their business?
You ask on Lemmy…
infotainmentExactly -- this is almost certainly bad for Reddit's business at this point. The problem here isn't necessarily capitalism so much as it is a egocentric CEO gone mad with power.
Yea, I am not a capitalism enjoyer, but it's comical watching people insert their favorite pet politics as the sole reason for everything that's happening.
I don’t even think it’s a bad business decision.
Most people didn’t use 3rd party apps to begin with. I’d guess about 75% of the vocal minority who protested, will continue to use Reddit.
And a very small % of people will quit Reddit in favor of Lemmy.
Cheers for being the very small %
I’d argue it is, because of the damage they’re doing to their brand.
I’ve said it in a couple other threads, but Reddit has other ways they can monetize their 3rd party app users, such as requiring subscriptions to use third party apps, or even by simply giving third party app devs a longer lead time to change to a paid model. Instead of doing either of those things, the CEO had a tantrum and alienated a bunch of people.
To expand on this, it’s not just capitalism - it’s greed.
B. A. BalackusWell,greed causes capitalism
To expand on this, it’s not just capitalism - it’s greed.
No it’s just capitalism lol. Every company has to continue reaping in profits for capitalists or else it dies. This is just Reddit’s way of doing that.
KabeHere 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.
from Cory Doctorow's article on 'enshittification', which has become mandatory reading.
That was a good read, the thing is that it seems that all of a sudden a lot of tech companies are getting more and more anti-consumer. I mean it’s not only the whole Reddit and Twitter thing, now Youtube is getting more aggressive with adblocking, Stackoverflow and their mod protest, Google dropping support for the open source diaper and messaging apps on Android…
Many companies are getting more aggressive against their customers, and in the end it feels like the internet as it used to be is really dying, and we might end up with the whole “dead internet theory” becoming reality. I don’t know it just feels very depressing.
lightrushInterest rates. Money isn’t free anymore. It’s still not super expensive but it’s 5x more expensive than what it used to be since 2008.
If you haven't already, I suggest reading Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media, a blog post by Catherynne M. Valent. (It's actually referenced in the article above.)
It's long and angry but damn, did it strike a chord with me. It was written in December, '22 so pre-Reddit meltdown but still very relevant to it.
Some highlights include:
Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters... It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.
Over and over again ... I’ve joined online communities, found so much to love there, made friends and created unique spaces that truly felt special, felt like places worth protecting. And they’ve all, eventually, died. For the same reasons and through the same means, though machinations came from a parade of different bad actors. It never really mattered who exactly killed and ate these little worlds. The details. It’s all the same cycle, the same beasts, the same dark hungers.
All ... gone. Dismantled for parts and sold off with zero understanding that the only thing of any value the site ever offered was the community, its content, its connection, its possibilities, its knowledge. And that can’t be sold with the office space and the codebase. These sites exist because of what we do there. But at any moment they can be sold out from under us, to no benefit or profit to the workers—yes, workers, goddammit—who built it into something other than a dot com address and a dusty login screen, yet to the great benefit and profit of those who, more often than not, use the money to make it more difficult for people to connect to and accept each other positively in the future.
It does end on a hopeful note, though.
Don’t ever stop talking to each other. It’s what the internet is really and truly for. Talk to each other and listen to each other. But don’t ever stop connecting. Be a prodigy of the new world. Stand up for the truth no matter how often they take our voices away and try to replace the idea of reality with fucking insane Lovecraftian shit. Don’t give up, don’t let them have this world.
Don’t get cynical. Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in. Us doesn’t have a web address. We are wherever we gather. Mastodon, Substack, Patreon, Dreamwidth, AO3, Tumblr, Discord, even the ruins of Twitter, even Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok, god help us all. Even Diaryland.
It doesn’t matter. They’re just names. It doesn’t matter who owns them. Because we own ourselves and our words and the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis. We make our place when we’re together. We make our magic when we connect, typing hands to typing hands.
Hello, world. Come in from the cold. This will be a good place. For awhile. And then we’ll make another one.
Stop buying things and start talking to each other. They’ve always known that was how they lose.
ExecMany companies are getting more aggressive against their customers, and in the end it feels like the internet as it used to be is really dying, and we might end up with the whole “dead internet theory” becoming reality. I don’t know it just feels very depressing.
With all the distributed social networks getting popular only among tech-literate people it feels like we’re getting a reverse- Eternal September as well.
Just to add, the concept of a bait and switch, where you lure a party in with something and then swap it out once they are committed, is not a new idea in the slightest. This is just a modernized, refined tech version.
Uber and Lyft are good examples. Drive out most of the competition with an aggressive early phase where you spend most of your capital to shore up a massively negative balance sheet. You are baiting the customers to you with very low prices.
Then once the competition is eliminated, you raise your prices on the captive consumers that rely on the service to recoup your costs and start making money.
If you, in a video game, have ever lured something in with ranged attacks and then switched to melee to kill it, by plan, you executed this same strategy.
Every single discounted trial period for a subscription is employing a riff on the same concept, where they hope you're too lazy to cancel.
Fools been falling for the bait and switch since ... oh dawn of civilization maybe? Awareness of it defeats it, people don't take bait when they know it's bait. It is not complicated though, and does not require complex understanding to grasp.
IIRC, it’s in the article, but what makes enshitification so prevalent in tech is that it mostly involves networks, wherein part of the value of using the application comes from the presence and concentration of other users and providers on it (network effect). Even Amazon, Netflix, and Uber, are subject to that effect because they capture providers, not just users you will interact with. It’s a somewhat uniq trait that really exacerbates the problem. This trend will probably continue untill interoperability is legislated.
hawkwindI think the exception is companies “too big to die.” They serve as the archangels of tech so ALL other goals lead to being bought by FAANG or dying.
Apparently neither Twitter nor Reddit was too big to fail.
This, just this
PerogiBoiThe companies want to make more money, and they have (what they think) a captive audience that will put up with the increase in costs. Pull off the bandaid all at once to maximize the probability that everyone will shrug and take it.
𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆The interest rate hike in the USA by the federal government caused this. The companies can't borrow money for nearly free any more. All the entities who would have been offering these loans are now able to buy government bonds with a much more guaranteed return on investment. This means the corporations must squeeze more profit out of their products to pay back loans. There are an enormous amount of large money transactions like this used to run a large business. They do not operate on cash reserves all the time. They have assets and are always evolving to stay relevant. Most businesses have enormous asset holdings but limited liquidity.
NaNThis best answers the OPs question. We know why it happens in general, but this is why everything is doing it in overdrive right now.
I also think Spez is trying to rush into an IPO before the bottom truly drops out and the company folds.
poVoqThere is a significant change in investment climate since the beginning of the year.
Before you could basically get another round of investments very easily even without being profitable as central banks were lending money for free more or less. This meant that the current VC investors could usually find a bigger fool to offload their investment to.
However now the few remaining new investors actually want to make a return of investment from the company itself and not just artificially pump it up further to find another buyer for their exit. So the current investors are putting a lot of pressure on these companies to appear profitable no matter what so that they can exit their investment.
Both Reddit and Twitter are losing a lot money. They want to squeeze their users for profit.
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.
BitsOfBeardI think it had more to do with tech companies using their API heavily to train their language models. Getting users over to their app is just a bonus, probably.
Tbh, not sure many of us would behave differently in the same situation.
Imagine you can get a billion dollars, and in exchange you need to destroy your product.
Would you take the deal?
When a company goes public it becomes something that needs to “appeal to the public”. It’s like when a movie wants to appeal to everyone. By doing so it ends up appealing to no one in particular and it’s a successful meh movie.
Going public then you have a committee of board members making decisions. And who’s going to be on a board? Bunch of rich people who only care about making it the best company for the public. Effectively ditching everything that makes a company risky or unique.
Going public can also be good cos you’ll have public money to invest in new and better tech or systems or acquisitions. So the future they have in mind seem to not include a lot of us. It’s a direction that’ll strip anything unique about reddit and become a successful meh platform
Scroll ResponsiblyEnshittification and the raising of interest rates.
randomguy2323Inflation , and late stage capitalism.
Paolo AmorosoBecause they realize they can get away with pretty much anything.
Sploosh the WaterCapitalism. The incentive for any large, profit-motivated firm will always be to get the most people to pay as much as possible for as little as possible.
Frater MusDr. Capitalism, or How I listened to stop worrying and love the dollar.
Dr. Capitalism, or How I listened to stop worrying and love the dollar.
Probably enshitification!
Look it up.
MisanthropeProbably enshitification!
Look it up.
Interest rates had been historically low for a long time. Loans were cheap and venture capital was flowing freely. Tech companies could focus more on growing their market share with lots and lots of runway before they needed to become profitable.
Then during the pandemic, Congress gave a massive bailout to businesses. Inflation went skyrocketing, and the Fed had to raise interest rates to limit the damage.
Now money isn’t flowing nearly as freely for tech companies. Loans are more expensive, and investors are more content to leave their money in high-yield bonds instead. Tech companies are pivoting to stop chasing market share and instead start taking their profits from their current market share, even if it means their market share stops growing.
SaltySalamanderAs always, $$$
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆I wonder if restricting API access might be related to the explosion of GPT where ML companies need training data and they’ve been sucking it up from everywhere they can. Reddit and Twitter realized that they could charge these companies for access instead and hence all of a sudden API access costs money.
In the case of reddit, I’ve heard a theory that the company’s planning to go public, and so the API changes were designed to make the platform look more appealing to shareholders (no more 3rd party apps blocking ad revenue).
chirospasmCheck out Cory Doctorow’s post on a term he coined called enshittification.
Check out Cory Doctorow’s post on a term he coined called enshittification. Good primer to some of the same patterns we are seeing.