this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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So many social media services are going to shit right now, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube... This might be the time to shine for fediverse.
Either this is the year where people start to realize you can do things without a profit motive, or the fediverse is destined to be like irc - too good to die, too scary to grow
It sure does feel like a race to the bottom.
right? It seems like this summer is just the time everyone decided "naa, we'll be the worst"
I think -- and I don't claim familiarity with the details of each company's situation -- that this may have something of a common cause.
As long as investment dollars are readily available and growth possible, it makes sense to stay in "growth" phase, burn investment dollars, lose money, grow userbase.
Once they are not, then it becomes more important to switch to monetizing the userbase that has been built up.
My understanding is that the post-COVID-19 environment -- with higher interest rates, tighter capital -- is less-amenable to obtaining investments for growth. And all tech companies will be affected by that, will tend to shift away from "burn easily-available now capital to try to increase revenue later" more into generating revenue.
Cory Doctorow described this phenomenon best with his "enshittification" stuff. First platforms give all their surplus value to their uses to drive adoption, then they shift it to their customers once the users are locked in, then they shift it to themselves once their customers are also locked in, so at the end you have a platform that's not serving the users or the customers, only the shareholders.
Yeah, the big spike in interest rates is causing all the big tech players to make the pivot to enshittified profitability fast enough that it’s way more visible than usual.
Is there a good Youtube alt yet? I'd love if there were.