I think the free money train in leaving the station and everyone is scrambling to be profitable. But that's just an assumption based on twitch and Reddit right now.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
30 points (100.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
42289 readers
574 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Cory Doctorow has some very interesting blogposts on the topic. He call it enshittification. It's more or less the business model of plattform Capitalism.
Public companies are legally required to always do their best to grow year over year. Eventually these companies get so large they can't realistically get more market share so they have to figure out how to make more money from their users. This leads to them squeezing users for cash in the hunt for short term gains because they've already realistically capped out on how much money they can make per year. It's a dumb system that can't work in the long term.
Start making alternatives, open source alternatives.
Economy is going bad, interest rate are up, and all Silicon Valley's company are built upon VC loans and expansion goals. Scale economy is bound to fail, and it's happening now.
This is the answer. There was a lot of free money and now there isn't. Companies gotta cough up profits or go bust.
A lot of these companies have never been profitable and have been running on VC money on speculation alone until they reach critical mass and can turn on the monetization streams.
Digital Sharecropping:
"What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy."
As a phenomenon you'll see a lot of people call it "enshittification." The term seems to originate with Cory Doctorow who writes, "Here 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."
The whole article on his blog is worth a read here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys. His Mastodon handle is @pluralistic if you'd like to follow his work there (woohoo federation!).
Reductivist, boring, and accurate. I’m impressed
load more comments
(3 replies)
Because most services we are using aren't sustainable. They all bleed money.
That's by design, isn't it? Dominate the market while operating at a loss then monetize once you have attained monopoly. Like Uber's strategy. This is an awful way of conducting a business IMHO, it falsifies the economy. I honestly believe they should put severe regulations on this.
Ish.
It is a strategy that works when interest rates are 0%, and the 2008 recession was so bad that the IS Fed kept interest rates low until 2021.
Redo the math at 5% interest rates today and 13 years of $1 Billion investment needs to make $1.8 billion just to break even. Money losing strategies are nerfed in this new meta.
ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are the reasons. I’m starting to see commercials that are using highest tier video tech. Just keep pushing.
That’s one community that’s worth supporting.
load more comments
(2 replies)
These companies are overvalued. Currently we're operating in supply side economics where the wealthy have all the money and companies do everything they can to attract those big investment dollars.
But the truth is social media companies (despite being household names) don't really make the revenue that warrants their high valuation by investors. Investors are starting to figure this out, and now they're desperately throwing shit at the wall to try to keep from losing those big supply side dollars.
Social media companies can break even and employ a lot of people while doing so. They could have a good user experience, and it would be all fine. But they wouldn't have sky rocketing share prices doing that. The leadership wouldn't get fat bonuses. So they implement all these crazy schemes so they can make projections about future revenue.
It doesn't matter if these schemes actually will make money or not. They just need to show X number of users multiplied by Y additional revenue per user and that's enough to attract investment. And it doesn't matter if it destroys the company either, the people at the top will get their bonuses.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Reddit, Twitter, etc, have been running at a loss for ages, burning through vulture capitalist money to build up a solid userbase. Now they need to start turning a reliable profit, which means enshittification of the user experience to make more money per user.
And the worst bit it even happens to non free platforms.
Like Spotify pushing a TikTok style interface, and ramming my home screen full of things I don't care about. Like, you've known me for a decade you should know I'm not into drake and podcasts by conservative men.
Over-centralisation.
This kind of slow degredation of services is quite normal, however, this time around the wider use of these degrading platforms is hitting harder. Even 5 years ago, most communities had an IRC rather than a discord, and most ran a forum, or a community forum, with other info being on a wiki.
These days a lot of content that used to sit on a forum now sits on twitter, or on reddit. Discord is the new IRC, and so on. These separate services were a lot less convenient, but more resilient.
Odds are, we might see similar smaller communities pop up again as things get worse in the larger ones. Folks are pinched for cash at the moment, and so free services like neocities might see a boom as fandoms abandon larger sites (again).