Are lots of websites really going downhill and/or closing or does it just seem like it to me?
Like many people I'm here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I've been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?
Mistifying / Mistification works if you like Anglo-German puns. Emmerdification for an Anglo-French equivalent.
If you're against anything to do with faeces at all, I'm not sure there's as short and easy a neologism that as fully captures the meaning and, importantly, disdain without being a mouthful.
You need an en- of some sort because it's clear that something is changing and then the action is the attempt to squeeze as much profit out of an enterprise with the expectation that nothing much will, er, change. This inevitably ruins or destroys the nature of the enterprise from the users' point of view.
Then the CEO immediately has cognitive dissonance between their own ego and self-belief of infallibility versus the fact the enterprise isn't working or has changed far more than their expectations. Their ego, and desire for profit, inevitably wins.
Much like badly managed corporate take-overs, all the smart people leave as soon as they can assuming they haven't already been fired and replaced by an inferior of some sort.
Thus, the whole thing turns to... well. Is there a better word?
Meta has already expressed interest in the fediverse. It's going to be up to everyone who likes it to defederate from every corporate instance.
There are no good corporate actors
I don’t know it off the top of my head, but I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere that over on Mastodon, a large number of instances have banded together to collectively block all Meta owned instances, and publish a list of them and so on.
I think convenient-to-add, publicly viewable blocklists will be a thing on here sooner rather than later.
The likes of Spez were just not that intelligent enough to figure out how to make Reddit pay before the VCs called in the investments. Not that it's an easy problem to solve, but if you're going to take on money like Reddit did you sure as hell needed a better plan then leaving it up to later to figure out. Amazon had a plan clearly, Reddit did not.
Also, what Reddit is now doing mimics a little of what Facebook did too, the enshitification of your feeds (just look at the app). They're just hoping Reddit is as addictive as Facebook is and you'll stick around regardless. I wonder if they recent;y hired some new advisers that told them to make these recent changes too?
Here's the play, charge a reasonable amount for API calls and people will either pay with money or with data, some will even do both.
Instead you and I are having this conversation on kbin.
After the way shithead acted and talked, well I waste less time on the internet, and yeah, it's a little harder to find results on google, but that is just making me realize how much I relied on Reddit.
I need to find another search engine too, I rely too much on too few providers.
A better option might be to require third party developers to use a Reddit based advertising API with the benefit of free API usage and revenue sharing. Everyone's happy. Third party developers would get paid for ads, they can show more ads and use other ad providers along side Reddit if they want to, the API gets paid for by advertising revenue for all of the third party apps, Reddit gets to track it's users by requiring API Ad calls to send a user id, etc., etc..
Im glad decentralized social media is picking up steam. No more of these major communication platform rug poolings for everyone. Now at worst individual instances can implode and everyone just has to move to a different instance or self-host, and still access communities on every other instance.
So first thing, Twitter is different than the rest. Elmo purchased it and he is doing some things to it that looks crazy.
Reddit CEO admitted that his API changes are inspired by Elmo's Twitter changes, he likely wouldn't double down if that didn't happen to Twitter as well.
Anyway, to show inflation the government increased interest rates. Which made investors thinking, "why should I put my money in this risky business that doesn't even generate money, when I could purchase government bonds and add long as government doesn't default I will get 5%?
This actually put pressure on trash startups that don't generate profits.
Ironically it is more like how much interest have been historically. It's just that after we had recession it was lowered to not turn it into depression. Then it was kept at nearly 0% until now.
Side note: if your bank still offers still nearly 0% interest rate in your savings account, they are making killing on your money and they are counting you won't notice, because people got used to those low interest rates.
For sure... Non-decentralized social media has value created by the immense number of connections and content created.
It also has the risk of abusing those connections and making the network less valuable by a centralized decision to clog it with paid content... Which alienates users and makes the experience less efficient.
Facebook did it, reddit is doing it, Twitter is trying to do it. The move is almost inevitable.
Decentralize it and it takes almost all potential greed out of the equation so the network stays most valuable to users.
This makes me wonder whether decentralized social media is actually immune to enshittification, or will it just take a different form we can't even imagine at this moment in time.
The costs of the servers will crush a lot of instances. I can't imagine the hosting costs the main kbin and lemmy instances have right now, and it'll only go up as people join in. I think we'll see server managers start asking for donations to cover the costs sooner and frequently. And when people don't donate, they'll have to resort to ads. And if an instance is really popular but barely afloat, some big fish comes along and offers to buy it from them for a decent price. Classic strategy.
Meta may say it wants to start its own instance, but just wait until they see how most instances have refused to federate with them and they'll be sniffing around one of the popular instances trying to buy or offering a nice package to federate. By then, users will be established and not leave immediately.
Decentralized social media needs the users to understand the importance of keeping it free from corporate interests.
This fediverse is a version of the commons, and it's up to each of us to acknowledge this in order to keep it that way.
I think it's orchestrated. I think it's intentional. I think the internet is under attack in the capacity that we know it as. I know it makes me sound conspiratorial but ever since Musk overtook Twitter every big social CEO has praised is approach. Musk fucked the internet up as we know it and Rupert Murdock showed media moguls that they can push trash and make heaps of money. There's no incentive to run quality content online and Musk started the downturn of that realization. I think we're in for some troubling times.
Unchecked corporate greed and no regards for users or communities that were built on these platforms. Hopefully the centralized ones will die from too many ads and user abandonment and the decentralized ones will rise and thrive.
Exactly this. The money tap has dried up post pandemic and they are seeking new revenue streams while also slashing costs. The hunger for perpetual growth to sate the investor class and their matyroshka nesting yachts is driving these decisions.
Yeah, someone else said that the other day on another discussion - we're seeing the bubble bursting for social media. The VC money is drying up, so these websites with massive bloat and overhead suddenly need to come up with new ways to generate cash. So they turn to what they "think" works - charge the visitors for the privilege to use their website without ever considering that maybe people will simply migrate and go elsewhere, as they always have.
Just like when most people left Myspace, then left digg, then left twitter, and left facebook, and left reddit. There's always stragglers that will keep the sites afloat. But they are a shell of the sites they once were.
Look at Facebook - back in 2005 it was an amazing site where all your friends were socially active and engaged. Now it's a ghost town - out of hundreds of friends and family, I only see a few posts from friends/family and a ton of ads and posts from groups I follow.
This is the corporate ethos now. The company I currently work for requires a minimum of 10% growth annually or we are failing. 9% and we are facing layoffs. Doesn’t help that we have a fixed customer base and new installations are a year long affair with RFPs and million dollar bids. I believe perpetual growth is a myth that will eventually catch up to all these corporations, but what do I know since I don’t have an MBA or a three letter title starting with C.
I personally can't wait to see it all burn. This last year especially has shown me how many people are just getting fucking sick and tired of centralized, corporate bullshit, even if they aren't consciously aware of why (things like issues listing items on Marketplace due to false auto-removals, no way to contact a human being for help with a business issue, spam, bots, unintentional bans/excessive moderation, etc.) At the end of the day, when the average person starts to complain about shitty UI and too many ads, you know a platform has peaked - and it's happening everywhere. Social media has had its time in the sun. I want it to fucking crumble now.
Automation in the realm of customer service drives so much of the enshitified experiences. If I'm not talking to a robot/chat engine, I'm talking to a human with such overbearing rules/scripts they might as well be a robot. And I know they hate it as much as I do.
The otherside of this, is that when I encounter a kind human who has actually been empowered to solve problems I tend to leave glowing feedback and share the experience.
Office Space got it right 24 years ago. "I'm a goddamn people person." First people they cut, and it just got harder for the customers.
It's so sad how awful the end user support has gotten. Even when you're paying Big Money to big hardware makers who make you pay for support packages, you're talking to Malaysia or India or a few in South America. Pinching pennies into dust when they're making money hand over fist for the support contracts. When most end user engineers are only opening tickets when it's dire problems due to how awful the experience is.
The tech bubble is starting to show signs of bursting. SVB alongside other large investent firms going down has shown companies that just being on the internet is not a sign of making money. Essentially the internet bubble is popping...again, as interest rates skyrocket and realized gains become smaller, internet-based companies seem to be scrambling to outpace the likes of Machine Learning and the new technological curve coming. Reddit going IPO, the Twitter shenanigans, etc.... Essentially they've all realized that their sites and business models are being made obsolete by the "new wave" of businesses/startups relying on newer technologies and novel revenue models.
Tldr; this is the cycle, new tech comes out, old tech dies. It happens all the time, just that this time it's not happening in our physical world but rather the virtual.
I think another major factor is that this is really the first time since 2008 that companies have had to deal with interest rates on their loans.
For 15 years, corporate money was functionally free from the government banks. It allowed a lot of things to happen that could not have otherwise happened.
Now that its not free anymore, the bar of profitability is suddenly a lot higher than it was last fall.
This is really the biggest part. There isn't room for the future right now, gains need to be realized to pay other investments and if not portfolios leaned out.
Not just you. I don't know if anyone's made it official yet, but I call what's currently happening the "social media collapse." Corporations have been sinking their teeth into popular social networks, only to realize that they've never been profitable and that the people who use them don't want to live with advertising or restrictions. The annoying paradox of social networks is that by the time they're popular enough to be worth using, they're already too popular, and are doomed by the whims of a meddling executive.
Exactly, the venture capital is finally drying up and the services can't figure out how to sell anything to enough people to recoup their investments. Why reddit has to pull out third party apps and shove ads and reddit gold down our throat, why Elon has to shill Twitter blue and cap our view counts. Facebook and Google services exist because their business model is selling ads foundationally and not selling services. It doesn't matter that their socials are losing money because it's always been a branch of their advertising business and not the other way around.
The web sucks honestly. everyone is either buying, selling, or being sold. The foundations of the web, open information sharing and interconnected servers, is collapsing behind paywalls and corporate greed. You can't even have a homepage or hobby site any more as the biggest indexer is drowning in a trash ocean of generated seo-honed content.
There are some beacons of hope to be found still, but mostly I'm disgusted to see how the larger ecosystem has evolved.
Ngl i think we’re finally seeing a lot of the social media bubble burst. Companies which have spent years in the red, now are being asked to make a profit, however they never had to before and never planned for it. If that sounds like they’ve spent the last 15 years thinking about growth over profits, it 100% is. Growth is important but growing a Losing venture is inherently unsustainable. They should’ve planned for this but most CEO’s have no idea how to plan for the future.
Just my 2¢
There are larger macroeconomic issues at play here which are a big contributor to it. High inflation and an uncertain US economic situation has caused tech companies (as well as others) to lay off people and is making it harder for startups and smaller companies to raise capital to keep the lights on. So yes, there is something bigger going on that is indirectly causing all of this.
It's not even social media alone. The magazine National Geographic had the last of its staff fired last month. Now all of their articles are written by freelancers and there's no longer a physical copy being sold.
Having a highly educated populace tends to be bad for business. Workers need to be educated just enough to work and not ask any questions. A desire to read publications that might expand one’s knowledge or communicate new and different ideas correlates to education. Just work hard and buy these distractions. That’s why there is a war on education in red states. Of course no one is buying National Geographic anymore. They’ve spent the past 30 years dumbing down the US on purpose.
Actually it went from Fox to Disney. Fox sank the magazine, really... they were still publishing it, but it was an embarrassment, the kind of vapid trifle that you'd find on a supermarket checkout aisle next to People and the National Enquirer. Remember when David Hasselhoff had a drinking problem and his daughter filmed him eating a hamburger off the ground? It was the magazine version of that. The absolute rock bottom for a cherished institution.
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Things come and go in cycles. There was a time when Fark, Digg, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. were all a big thing and then they slowly went away or declined as something new arose in its place. I think a lot of the more tech-savvy users of Reddit will migrate to various fediverse instances and that you'll see other microblogging platforms arise to fill the void of Twitter, a la Bluesky. You'll still have somewhere to go, it just may not be the place you were used to going to.
As other people have said, we may very well be watching a bubble burst.
Many social media companies rely on VC money to get themselves started, to handle large initial costs, but the problem is many of them (Reddit included) have been suckling on that VC money for too long, and have been too lax on figuring out their monetisation.
The reason that is a problem now is because we're not just feeling the effects of the pandemic monetarily, but there's all sorts of things pulling at the global economy right now including the Ukrainian war...
It's made VC money harder to come by, so these companies are having to figure out their monetisation strategy now or die, hence the sudden death and enshitification of many social media (and related) sites.
Though if anything, it gives us a chance to exist, so that's cool. Only problem is even on a small scale, I can't imagine these Admins have an easy time monetising either, so I suspect this won't last in it's current iteration either.
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