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This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.
I've always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn't invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I'm probably on here too much though!
They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.
...jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called "Tiktok's enshittification". It's a four-steps process:
In my opinion it's also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.
Doctorow's Enshittification describes it pretty much dead-on. It's basically the cancerous form of late-stage capitalism that we're living under now.
Some people have come up with the word "enshittification" to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.
The cycle consists of three parts:
I am under the impression that the term was popularized, if not invented, by Cory Doctorow. See his many writings on his ad & tracker-free website; https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/
All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.
The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet's history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the "next best thing".
Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It's only just getting started, you watch.
Note that they are cashflow negative because of expensive advertising features.
Twitter is pretty cheap to run for base functionality and if you open up dev console and see all of the resources Twitter is requesting its like 90% ad stuff and suggestions.
You can't lose money forever, not as a business. What's great about the Fediverse is that it makes social media something that can be done as a hobbyist project. Money is nice, but the hobbyist isn't necessarily out to make money.
The line has to go up.
The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don't demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don't sell and bail.
Now, with Twitter there's a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn't the place for it.
Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it's money.
Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it's Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they're making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.
Facebook: I don't even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it's just ads.
Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn't feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they're a bad thing, just using an example)
Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.
We've reached the end of the VC-funded golden age where they are all now demanding a return on their investment, hence why the screws are now all getting tightened.
I have a sinking feeling that these moves are not about money, but more about power and manipulation. If you squeeze these user bases such that the savviest users are forced out, those more likely to ask "Why?" about damn near anything, you will own access to a group of people that can be influenced to think/do/buy whatever the top management and/or majority shareholders want. If you lose a few million users, what does it matter if they were dissidents to your goals?
I don't think all that many redditors are moving to Lemmy. Judging by the stats on join-lemmy, there are only several thousand monthly Lemmy users, which is nothing compared to reddit which had tens of millions daily users
When I joined lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, the stats on join-lemmy.org were just over 100/month.
Now it's at 1K/month for beehaw and 1.6K/month for lemmy.ml
There's also a HUGE list now, where as when I joined last week there were maybe 8?
Small numbers, ya, but Reddit still hasn't done anything. I am sure July 1st will bring a huge wave of people who are still sticking with Reddit since apps still work.
Counting methods are probably different, Lemmy stats only count users that posted at least once in the interval. I assume Reddit counts anyone who opens the site.
The Twitter exodus (which is still limited) was because all of the problems at Twitter were sudden. Huge staff cuts meant lower quality, way more bots, and of course, the owner's mercurial impulses.
Reddit is a bit different. It's more of a boiled frog situation. A little tweak here, a little change there, all definitely for the worse (and Reddit is going down hill) but so far nothing seismic. Even the number of users affected by the third party apps thing is pretty small because most users just looking at memes and sharing news just use the native app (my wife does).
I'm not sure whether that really results in an exodus.
Look at Amazon: it just gets worse and worse, but have people stopped buying from it en masse? Nope. It's getting worse, but ever so slowly.
From everything I have observed, businesses are hunkering down for a recession in the next fiscal year. It explains the lay offs, the penny pinching, and puzzling decisions that look like business suicide.
For services that are free for users, advertising revenue and investment fund raisers are the only thing keeping them afloat. With banks like SVB getting seized by the FDIC, it's starting to scare investors. Advertisers are seeing the writing on the wall that people will stop spending as much as they used to. We are also probably seeing jacked up pricing across the board because businesses are taking what they can before it's gone.
So what's left? Squeeze users for money. Additionally, shed users that actually cost them money and these tend to be power users. The question, which everyone seems to be assuming is a foregone conclusion, is if this shedding strategy will end up killing the service. In reality, we don't know but the idealists would sure feel good if someone else ate their market share.
I'm just glad that federation is picking up steam in the social media space.
Facebook dies due to privacy concerns and misinformation. Twitter under threat because Elon. Imgur just deleted their NSFW content. Reddit with its API pricing. Twitch executives also getting greedy. Youtube has been going down for years.
It feels like we're seeing the natural life-cycle of social media companies in real time.
Everybody just wants money now. Some of that is reasonable, these companies tend to work if not with a loss, then with quite unpredictable margins.
Now that tech investors have found a new bubble - AI - they are no longer willing to sponsor old-fashion internet stuff and wait if it ever turns a profit.
Especially since many got used to becoming all that richer during the pandemic, and are looking to keep those numbers rising.
But there's also some sudden hatred of porn, and I don't know where that is coming from. Tumblr, Imgur have limited it completely, OF wanted to, Reddit probably will, coedcherry shut down. The owner of coedcherry said it was really a sudden 180° turn of the banks to no longer wanting to do anything with porn, and nobody knows why.
It's especially bizzare considering how these platforms keep assuring us that we'll still be able to post and see blown off heads and all kinds of other nasty stuff, it's just the titties that are being banned! Eh?
The porn thing comes from sex trafficking. No one wants to be caught accidentally financing it (as no one would ever want to because it’s Fucking horrible).
Their death is waaaay overdue. We literally jumped one cycle because the 2008 financial crisis and 0% interest rate.
Now there is no free money, and they need to extract value to seem a good investment, so they canibalize themselves and turn into shit.
Most of Elon stuff is doomed once reality catches on. Same with Uber. Same with streaming platforms. Same with Meta.
Also there is a new/old boy in the bubble and burst town, Microsoft and their AI push. It’s going to destroy them pushing them into overspending to keep up.
The twitter/elon thing is hilarious. I honestly do think he accidentally got himself into quite the pickle and now his pride is keeping him there. As for reddit and twitch, I don't assume these are the surface-level-dumb moves that we think they are. My guess is that this is a calculated means of rolling out the changes they actually want by:
Internet users love to cancel shit, but at the same time, are always looking for the next thing to cancel. So as much as people hate twitter or facebook or tiktok or youtube or windows or nintendo or chick-fil-a or whatever, they're all just looking for an excuse to forget all about it, and continue using their product as quickly as possible. And corporations know that, so they've worked "giving them that excuse" into their plans.
For a minority of users on reddit, there's a line. For me, it's forcing me to use new reddit. If that happens, I just have to quit, I can't stand it. I don't want to quit, I have a lot of subreddits I read.
But I saw the stats for the old school users vs new reddit/app users, and we're outnumbered. Reddit knows they might lose thousands of redditors but they don't care because lots will just switch to their toxic app and if they lose 5% of the stubborn old folk then so be it.
The twitter thing is sad, but honestly not a huge deal. I rarely used it anyhow.
The reddit thing is depressing, since I've been a huge supporter and user of Apollo for many years. It feels like getting stepped on and I feel for the developer Christian Selig who devoted so much time and energy to the app.
I hope nothing happens to Twitch in the way that Twitter and Reddit have though, the small time streamers I follow and support won't survive a thing like that.
Course-correcting, maybe? Web 2.0 really overstayed its welcome with Facebook/Twitter/Reddit being such dominant websites over the past 15+ years. Various reasons of greed, narcissism, and other factors finally popped the bubble.
I'm really enjoying the Feder-verse or whatever we're calling it since decentralization can prevent a lot of this nonsense from ever occuring. It feels like a new approach to the late 90's era of message boards and such.
Outside social media, we also have Netflix pulling their own BS, and then lesser know sites/services that are near and dear to me are RARBG shutting down and Mullvad VPN removing port forwarding on July 1st. It's been a rough month for me in my little online sphere.
The reality is that nothing is really dying and nothing is really changing. Twitter is still fully operational and other than a small hit nothing happened. Twitch already did a step back. For Reddit we'll see but only a really small percentage of reddit is using third party apps.
It's not the services that are dying, but the internet as we used to know.
Change is natural, but the services are all changing in a way not beneficial forthe users.
Big sites have made surfing the web so boring. I will end up spending the day on 2-3 sites. All this shake up will hopefully force me to look at more websites again.
The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company.
Hah! Are we so inured to the death march towards dystopia that it is surreal when something good happens? All of these large social media sites are privacy hating monopolies that actively disrespect their members and misuse their information.
They should die. Let them. We should celebrate!
I think this is "normal" and the previous status was a glitch due to the low interest rates. Investors threw money at tech companies and didn't care whether they made any money. Not any more. It's now "make money or go bust". I am not sayiny these new trends will make them money, but IMHO it's what's driving them
On one hand, I can name sites that, in 2023, either screwed over their user base, or just went under.
I have been considering a domain name to access hypothetical home servers as of late, just so I don't have to worry about shit like this.
I suspect that we're at end-stage capitalism, essentially every company feels they should be constantly making record profits and they think of predicted profits as granted, when they didn't reach predicted profits it was seen as losing money which in the CEO's eyes meant they needed to increase their income to make up for losses and the only way for companies that rely on user generated content for revenue was increased advertising which is the route youtube is currently going for the rest they had no way they could see to increase their income till elon decided to crash twitter with introducing the payed blue checkmark. What we saw when elon did that was a failing company but what twitch and reddit saw was an opportunity to not be blamed for following musks example, funnily enough though they fucked up on the attempt and everyone saw them as money grabbing
Although there's a lot of protesting going on over at Reddit right now, I really don't think it can be compared to twitter. 6 months from now, I doubt things will be all that different at Reddit. A small number of users (relatively speaking when compared to their total number of users) will leave, and that's probably it.
COVID.
COVID changed everything. In an attempt to recover quickly, companies ramped up their abuses to new levels. While billionaires defending them all had their masks removed as the world collectively realized that it's impossible to make a billion without exploring others.
Toss in back to the office mandates and rising costs while those same companies post record profits...all while the population is Uber sensitive to that kind of thing, and we're in the middle of a not so quiet proletariat revolution.
Thanks to COVID a lot of people realized that despite the elites best efforts, the enemy isn't left or right, it's us versus the super rich. And it's having a trickle down effect.
I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES
Hell, any such company is going to pursue infinite growth and always aim to squeeze as much money as possible from it's costumer base in the short term.
My guess is that because there is currently a big possibility of economic turmoil and these companies are appealing to investors, advertisers,etc. and trying to gain as much capital in order to look stable.
Logged into youtube today and discovered that the subscription page is absolutely fucked now. It only shows three thumbnails per row on my 13" laptop screen and they've removed the separation by date, so now it's way harder to tell if any of my subscriptions have uploaded today. Seems like everything is going down the shitter.
twitter was overvalued. reddit has made a lot of questionable business decisions over the last decade or so but their recent API change will be their death knell. it feel like a cash grab. I personally only use Twitch to watch Bob Ross reruns :P
The time of free money is over
Good maybe we can start going back to communities taking care of each other instead of hoping some central authority eill do it for us
Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter seemed more like an extremely elaborate shitpost that went horribly wrong. It's like Musk never intended to buy them in the first place but was legally forced to do so (he tried to back out of the deal beforehand.)
As for Reddit, that place has been going down the shitter since around 2016. Power users have ruined that site, especially the handful of moderators that control hundreds of subreddits between themselves. Spez is a blithering idiot who has done more to censor and subvert the site than Ellen Pao ever did (ironically, everyone accepted it and didn't revolt against him because he wasn't a woman.)
That being said, I really hope Steve Huffman doubles down on the API changes and kills Reddit as a platform. Nothing would make me happier.
Twitch and YouTube literally think they're too big to fall and work actively to fuck over the content creator, when decent competitors like Rumble and Kick are coming along. Mixer could have been decent but Microsoft's strategy was literally to offer two streamers nine-figure contracts and somehow think this would drive people to their Twitch-clone. At least Rumble and Kick are competently run.
The reddit exodus is comparatively very small. Tens of thousands of users, many of which will not stick around. Reddit has millions of users (hundreds of millions?). They barely notice.
true enough, but I don't think i'm going to care that much as long as the community stays big enough to stay somewhat active. I feel much more engaged in the community here than I ever did on reddit.
With great power comes great irresponsibility
-big corps
Dying? Twitter is very well "alive" despite everything that has happened. I don't know what will happen to Reddit and Twitch but I doubt these platforms will "die". They aren't dying really. Just becoming worse over time. People will continue using these platforms up to a certain degree.
Agreed. By the same definition fb has been dying for almost a decade, but I'm still forced to use the messenger app since all my friends are on there.
It's not just tech companies like Reddit and Twitter, it seems like it's most companies. Ever since the COVID lockdowns prices have been going through the roof, you get less for what you pay for, they're laying off workers, and all while raking in record profits while also crying about how no one wants to work and how they can't afford anything because of the economy. I've never been more cynical about companies than I have been the last year.
People aren't reacting to this sudden interference with content aggregation with as much outrage and fear as they should.
The thing that Twitter, reddit, and so many other sites that have recently been bought up and swallowed, do so well is aggregate information for us. It provides us a pool of information, with which we as a collective society can sift through and analyze together through the lens of our experience, our professionalism, and our intelligence.
Before these types of sites, we were segregated and isolated. As much as I miss forums, for the most part they became bubbles that hyperfocused on singular categories. This kept us in our place. This kept us from venturing out and sampling things that were different and other. When sites like Fark took off, we suddenly had insight into things we may never have had interest in or knowledge of before.
Corporations and governments are trying to dismantle aggregation because it keeps us informed and it keeps us involved. It informs us of the other, and allows us to co-mingle in an environment where we might be exposed to new ideas and new ways of doing things that were otherwise not available.
We shouldn't just be lamenting the downfall of reddit due to our lack of entertainment. We should be very, very afraid of the day when the only way you can find 'other' information is by using very specific search terms.
People in power have been working very hard for a very long time to take us back to a time before the Internet, and a time before aggregation. What I sincerely hope comes out of this is the realization that we are all stronger together with our complex variety of ideas and perspectives, and our ability to question things and provide information to each other.
In case anyone has forgotten, Twitter is a lifeline to many corners of the world most of us will never touch and have no way of accessing otherwise. Twitter was the tool for dozens of uprisings and protests around the world. Twitter was the catalyst for so many young people to connect and realize that the situation they were in could be changed. And that's been taken away. It's been made a joke, and people are leaving in droves. People whose experience and support could help the next protest. That's exactly what they want.
But what do I know, I'm just a rando on the internet, who may be able to tell you the answer to your very niche question, who may say just the right thing when you're needing support, or who may pass on your story to someone else who knows a journalist, which may lead to your voice or your injustice being heard.
They're trying to isolate you. Don't let them.