this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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The Great Internet Recession™ has begun
Forreal, what's going on? Why does it seem like so many separate sites are suddenly so much worse/going downhill quickly?
Our entire Internet enjoyment has been heavily subsidized by venture capital for the last 30 years which hoped to monetize us more than they have been able (believe it or not).
Now they are calling in their bets...
Apparently they have been living on life-support.
I can't claim to fully understand how it worked, but apparently as long as sites could show user growth they could attract investments, but with inflation causing interest rates to go up (and other economy hocus pocus) , that money is quickly drying up.
I don't know if the investors believed that if the user base could grow large enough, someone would buy the companies, or they suddenly could come up with some fantastic monetization of said user-base.
Now as companies are listed on the stock exchange, and facing the falling investor interest, they are expected to react (aggressively) to secure future revenue.
Adding to what you said about interest rates: We're at the end of a long period of cheap borrowing (very low interest rates) during which overvalued assets were used as collateral to secure loans for investments. These propped-up assets are beginning to drop to their true (intrinsic) values. In other words, speculation and irresponsible practices were propping up a house of cards that's starting to collapse, and now investors are scrambling to cash in or cut losses wherever they can. So they're deciding that time has run out for online platforms that promised to grow but still haven't hit their numbers/monetization goals.
tl;dr: Infinite money glitch got patched (because it was wreaking all sorts of financial havoc) and now investors need to end life-support for risky/unprofitable investments.
Same thing is happening to streaming services
Streaming fell apart quickly, it's so hard to find anything decent on most of them. It's become clear they can't curate new content as readily.
It'll be even worse when there are no new series to watch because all of the people who write them are on strike. The content mines are drying up.
Billionaires bought the internet and now they're realizing that it isn't profitable.