Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?
YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
1979
Comments462
I think it's a consequence of higher interest rates drying up VC money, meaning that tech companies now have to actually be profitable, rather than just grow.
If the plan was grow now, profit later, then later has come
Nailed it, investors are demanding profit increases, it's not just interest rates (though they're the main reason) but also the corporate tax cuts in 2018 basically dumped a ton of profit onto corporations because they repatriated all their offshore cash they'd been hoarding.
That bump lasted 2 years, but the expectation of higher revenue is still there, it doesn't matter if you got lucky at slots last month, if you make your normal salary this month investors will be absolutely pissed.
This sounds too stupid to be real but I was working for one of the largest corporations in the world during this period and we were congratulated on 20% growth even though we did nothing. Of course we didn’t get an extra bonus or anything but they acted like we had an incredible year when we really just had an average year with a massive tax cut.
Then the next year, our goal was to grow at 20% again and when we missed it by 17%, no one got a bonus or raise.
This timeline is the stupid one.
This is what irritates me. You still made money just not as much as you wanted or hoped so your company punishes you. You can't have infinite growth
Every publicly-traded company: "Hold my beer"
Capitalism: "Numbers go brrrrr"
Most companies really are that retarded because everyone wants to look good and take credit for every great thing happening. People like that should not be in charge of anything.
This is also a great example of why higher interest rates aren't automatically a terrible thing. In general, it's probably a good sign for the economy that companies are expected to be profitable. Means resources are being used well. The limitless VC money kinda meant any dumb idea regardless of merit got funding.
I wish we lived in a society where not everything needed to be profitable. People deserve treats and sucks to have things that made our lives better go awake because shareholders demand money
There are a number of ways things can function that way. Unfortunately, they don't scale well.
This is part of my hope of federalisation, it lets a group of small entities act as a single large entity. It also lets non-profit and profit making work together. The for-profit provide the brute force, the non-profits keep them from going off the rails too far. It might be the workaround we need.
Also, be the change you want. For-profit businesses often win due to the far better returns. More people are willing to pour the effort into a business that could make them rich than a charity that never will.
I think we'd see loads of improvements if the philosophy went from "be as profitable as possible" to "just be profitable". You're 15% lower than last year, but still profiting? That's just a smaller bonus for all employees and a smaller dividend for the investors, after putting a healthy amount of it into savings.
There's no concept of "enough". That's the big problem. It goes for both economics and career advancement. There doesn't always have to be a "higher". It's okay to say "it isn't worth it to go further".
Whether we like the ongoing enshittification of Reddit or not, I think it's fair that shareholders expect a return on their investment and they have the right to pressure spez to seek aggressive monetization of the platform.
That problem wouldn't have existed if Reddit was a non-profit though, like the Wikimedia Foundation.
Whilst I agree that investors have everybright to expect a return on investment I think this could have been resolved and a number of ways which didn't include alienating a large proportion of the user base.
Exactly I’m tired of all these capitalism apologists. The aim is to innovate, there must be a more decent way to monetise or profit. If pursuing such hardline tactics means profitable at the expense of your customers and enshitification of your platform, I’d urge you to reconsider your business setup.
The capitalism apologist is going to tell you that this is necessary for innovation as Venture Capital firms fund 100 start-ups of which 99 fail to turn a profit, and thus the 1 that does has to make up for the other 99 by making extreme profits.
But that that is just as flawed logic as thinking that there can be a "decent" capitalism that doesn't destroy everything in its path in its pursuit of profit. If you are trying to be "decent" you will be out-competed by someone else under the current economic setup.
The modern Neoliberal capitalist philosophy of shareholders being the only priority, isn't the only capitalist philosophy.
The Embedded liberalism after the new deal, worked quite well. Since the employees are making the products, and management is making the decisions, while the shareholders don't directly make anything for the company; People understood that the shareholders were the last priority, in getting profits. It's why worker wages scaled with productivity until the 80s.
That's when the Neoliberal capitalist philosophy took hold and gained power. First the Republicans with Regan, then Democrats with Clinton, then the global economy, since so much of it is driven by the US.
I think in part there's an essential misunderstanding of current events at the core of Reddit's behaviour (not yours, I mean - spez/investors/etc).
Historically the rule was supposed to be 'if it's free, you're the product', which is to say that our attention (and profiles and demographics) were on sale to advertisers. The big recent development is someone figuring out, or thinking they've figured out, how to monetise us a different way - specifically, by using the things we create as training data for AI. A sensible organisation would continue to balance these two possible cash flows and, since both really require user retention to remain profitable in the long run, seek a middle ground. But the perception is that there's more money in the training data than there is in the user attention, so they focus on maximising that and spit on the users. The obvious consequence is that they lose users and their source of training data dries up.
You're conflating investors, who lent Reddit the money and want a return on it, and spez, who actually runs the business and made those bad decisions. The investors weren't the ones who told spez how to create the return on investment, they merely pressured him to find a way to do so. Do you think Warren Buffett tells Apple how to run things? I'd be surprised if an old fart like him had any say in how iPhones should be designed or how the Apple Store should operate.
I don't think the problem is earning a profit, the problem is the need to earn even more profit than last year. Investors aren't content to buy into a company like Reddit just to let it continue in a steady state. They want to double their money in a few years and then cash out. They don't care if they destroy a valuable service that many people enjoy.
I don't think investors are the ones who told spez how to run things. They likely simply pressured him to make changes as quick as possible to make Reddit profitable. Investors don't usually specify how to generate that profit though, otherwise they'd run their own companies.
Twitter has been around for so long, it takes some time to kill. The latest move to allow access only to verified users together with meta may actually kill it though.
I don't think the problem is so much profitability as it is the demand/expectation for endless growth. It becomes a positive feedback loop and is completely unsustainable after a certain point.
You know what else is endless growth? Cancer.
Yeah this is critical. These promises for money later mean that all sorts of stupid ideas were being funded, and therefore people hired, etc, but now that's coming to a close. Companies and investors will be more likely to scrutinize spending (as they should) and see how to rightsize with reality and line of sight to profit. For significantly more complex reasons, it's similar to an individual borrowing themselves into crazy debt, and banks eventually determining that they need more than credit/promises to keep seeding you cash.
Time to pay back some promises.
That's still the case and high interest rates haven't really fixed that because they are still not high enough. Just look at how any company mentioning "AI" in their earnings call gets extra billions in market cap overnight without having a real product yet.
This seems like a non sequitur: what is good about only profitable ventures getting funding? These unprofitable ventures were creating good jobs and providing enjoyable and sometimes useful products to consumers for low prices. So why is it good that funding is drying up?
It doesn’t seem completely crazy to me that it would be better for money to go to successful projects than just be sprayed like a fire hose in hope that you land a Facebook or Google sized moonshot.
Of course it sucks for the people that lose their job, but presumably that money should go towards sustainably growing things where they could work.
That rather assumes that it actually matters that VC money is being wasted.
After all it keeps the money in circulation and keeps people employed. They then get paid and will then buy useful things from companies that do make profit, so in the end it all works out. It's only bad for the investors, but that's always been the thing about investment, it's always been a risk, and it's never been guaranteed.
If the goal is simply to keep money circulating and people employed, there are more efficient ways to do that.
Reddit, as a whole only has about 2000 employees.
"only 2000 employees" Reddit should have maybe 200 employees. 2000 is an insane number of people for a single relatively simple piece of software.
Especially since they have free content moderation. What are all those people even doing? They couldn't even keep Victoria for AMA's.
No. I don't mean to be rude but most of that message is wrong.
VC Money is very much not drying up. 2023 has seen record rounds in most markets. What is drying up is "VC Money for early stage startups with no revenue, no traction, and barely a functional idea", but even that is not new it has been going on since at least 2018. Remember that guy who raised 1.5M$ with an app that just let you say "Yo" to your contacts ? That was 10 years ago. Those times are dead and buried.
Then the link between VC markets health and interest rates is... contentious to say the least. VCs don't borrow money - they raise funds from family offices and individual investors, every 2 or 3 years. So every change to the financial landscape will have a progressive effect over 3 years, not a brutal one after a few months. Also you have to bear in mind that the people who bankroll VCs are looking for performance of at least 2X over 10 years. Interests would have to go up to 7% to even be in competition with VC investment. Of course there's a psychological aspect to investment so the effet is not ZERO but it's not as automatic as saying "interest go up => vc dry up".
Finally, the companies we are talking about are in vastly different situations and not necessarily looking for VC money. There is no explaining their behaviour with a single cause, what we're seeing is probably a cluster effect, because executives are like fish they always follow the movement of the other fish in their field.
What's left unsaid here (but I'm sure you realize) is that these same users whose monetization is so low also provide most of the content and moderation on the site. When you spread out the value of that among the (human) userbase, the total value returned to Reddit by each human is higher.
Steve thought he was targeting the AI with this move, but in reality he has been charging his most engaged users. If he's upset that Apollo has turned a profit, the correct move was to acknowledge that one guy has done a better job than Reddit's team, not tell all the users that Apollo helped bring to Reddit that they were no longer welcome
I think they're operating under the assumption that there is no shortage of people willing to work for clout on a leading social media. They think the users they lose are replaceable and you know what it's not an unreasonable expectation. It sucks but that's just the way it is, there will always be people willing to post memes and delete nazi comments.
Only time will tell, but it's not uncommon to kick out power users when they get uppity and think they run your platform. Way easier/cheaper to fire unpaid volunteers than tech-bros with Silicon Valley salaries.
I'm not so sure about Google nowadays. What started out as an everyday product killing, ended up as the first of many. They killed Stadia from one day to the other, and then started to basically sell and kill everything that is not massively profitable to the point they sold their domain distribution as well to Squarespace. That does not seem like something a massive monopoly with no regards to investor opinion does.
Well i don't know about that. They still generate 15B$ in profit every quarter. Sure they're losing some growth, but even amid a historic advertising budget bust they are still beating expectations.
When i mentioned their monopolistic position i was talking more specifically about Youtube, but anyway buying and killing off products is standard operating procedure for a company this size on a market this mature. There's nothing alarming about Google's health.
99% of their profit comes from their search engine ad revenue though. Google has only ever had one truly profitable product and the advent of chatgpt, driven by their only true rival in Microsoft, has them scared shitless. They are way behind in the AI department and it's the only thing out their that fundamentally threatens Googles goose with the golden eggs: their search engine.
I mean when you're at that level of profit you're not "scared shitless" of much. Sure they have some risk around AI but i think a global ad market collapse is higher in their list of stuff to be worried about.
Coming back around to the original subject, they are publicly traded anyway so the VC market is not their problem.
Couldn't it be argued that it's a mistake from reddit to think of themselves as being comparable to platforms that make more money per user?
For example reddit and youtube are completely different in terms of the nature of the platform. Could attempting to monetize an average reddit user to the level of those using youtube might be a mistake? Keep in mind that reddit has much lower overhead for keeping the service running.
The mental image I'm going after is a country that exports mainly wheat arguing that its' exports should be valued the same as a country that produces complex electronics. The products are at a different realm of complexity. Commodities should be valued for what they are and not be confused with higly refined products.
You're right it could very much be argued. I mean isn't that the whole underlying question ? I would imagine that anybody who invests in reddit has the assumption that yes, you can monetize comparably to other platforms. Or even cut the pear in half and sit comfortably at 10$/user which would already be a fucking money printer at >400M MAU.
Now whether they are right or wrong in their thesis is anybody's guess. Even after the recent debacle reddit is still in a very good position, but social media is such a clown world that you can never really tell.
Yeah I think with a net income of $60 billion annually Google is a wee bit past needing VC money lol.
Google in panic mode cause they don't know if they'll be able to close their 10M$ round from local VCs 😱
maybe inflation.
just because U don't see a price tag doesnt mean its not there.
if you cant see the product, then you are the product!
the state of wellbeing had never really been that great to start.
Short answer : Enshittification.
Long and brilliant explanation here : https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
This concept is also why I’m so hopeful for federated software. The federated model means that there’s no single instance that holds all the power. Many of these instances are run by admins of their own kindness and initiative. And at worst, if any instance were to start being “enshittified,” people could easily move to another instance and continue participating in the greater network.
Between all of what we’ve seen unfold in the last few months, and even weeks, on Twitter and Reddit, it’s safe to say that “enshittification” could be reaching critical mass. That’s why I came here, after all, and I’m looking forward to seeing this community simply persist here on the web.
My fear is that even if you're correct, as the internet monoliths that have been built on the past decade fall to federated software, we will lose forever an immeasurable amount of arts and culture that has been stockpiled in these corporate spaces. Think of all the great educational YouTubers whose videos won't be able to be passed on to whatever the next thing is if YouTube collapses.
I think I can understand your point. Large ‘“media” companies will horde the content and refuse to let it see the light of day because they believe they own it. I don’t think that’s how it would go down. Anything I’ve ever produced to be put on the web still exists somewhere on a hard drive that I control. I doubt the big name educational YouTubers are deleting the source material as soon as it goes up to YouTube.
Besides, a lot of the good ones have already moved to Nebula as well. If thought like educational YouTube you should check it out.
Educational YouTube was just an example. But there is a real danger of culturally important media being lost. See cases like the Operation Soda Steal video
Absolutely. I was a big part of the non professional music production side of YouTube a decade ago. Imagine getting 100+ new songs every week, from talented artists putting everything they had into their work. It was incredible! This year I got into data hoarding and looked into downloading my old favorite songs... Turns out most of them deleted their old work from YouTube when they went pro or simply closed out their channel for personal reasons. Not even the compilation channels were still around. Hundreds of thousands of songs are just gone, along with the records of that community's culture.
Not an amateur producer at all, but a few years ago I was listening to a lot of YouTube mixes while working. Lofi stuff might be cookie cutter elevator music to you, but I loved some mixes over others. I got attached to some of them, and discovered a ton of artists that way. These were single, long videos with many tracks each.
My heart sank when I started finding some of them turn into broken links. I figured out YouTube-DL and got to archiving. I found some reuploads of playlists I liked such as the wonderful Morning Coffee by the amazing SoulSearchAndDestroy (the lead song, damn fine coffee by mtbrd, is one of my favorite lofi tracks ever). Other playlists have been lost to time.
Sometimes I skim through my archived playlists to find a song I can remember in my head, and sometimes I don’t find the song, and it’s possible that I will never find it again. Again, silly for this to happen with lofi of all things (one of the most dispassionate and almost disposable genres of music).
I still think YouTube is unmatched for music discovery. Yes, you’re clicking on songs for “bad” reasons such as the thumbnail or recognizing the curator’s channel, but it worked pretty damn well for me.
7 years ago I got introduced to this really small local artist by a friend who had just a handful of songs on his YouTube channel, but they were all incredible. I could listen to music while I worked but it wasn't super practical to have my phone out for it, so I always converted songs from YouTube to mp3 and downloaded them to put on my mp3-player. I did that with this artists songs as well. A few years later, I wanted to show another friend this music, and the whole channel was deleted. Sometimes I wonder if I and the artist itself are the only people who have a recording of his songs in the world.
Thanks for the link. That was an entertaining watch! Still, the narrator states that he is sure the original exists on a hard drive somewhere. He also gives a solution towards the end of the video. If you really like something download it.
Those folks will re-upload old content onto the new platforms. I know people don't like to talk about money, especially in relation to the fediverse, but it's important. If you want someone to dedicate a large portion of their energy into making high-quality content, it's not unreasonable for them to want to make money doing it. How can we get money into the hands of content creators without allowing centralized control of the content?
Those folks will re-upload old content onto the new platforms.
Unfortunately, this isn't likely to happen. Video files are huge (tens or hundreds of gigabytes) and many creators delete old videos once they are uploaded to Youtube so that they don't run out of space or keep having to buy more and more drive space. Even tech YouTubers like MKBHD pull clips from their old videos directly off YouTube because they no longer have the originals (he did a podcast talking about this)
That is stupid. I get that smaller creators it maybe lesss feasible to backup. Because they don't make enough money. But a video file, certainly if you put same compression as yt, isn't that big. Say one gb per vid, that is 30 gb a month (say times 3 for redundency) you have less than 1tb a month, of lees than 60 bucks of storage drives a month. Small price pay for someone that has a million dollar studio to not be trusting on yt for your videos. But thay also disn't talk about the risk of putting your 2fa in the cloud, so i am not that surprised
Many do not have million dollar studios though.
I get that. Thats why i included that it is a bit different for smaller creators. So yes, we cant assume there are a lot of backups for if youtube decide to go more evil. But I think of you make your money with youtube, you should invest in storing your own backups. If only for if your channel get hacked and they delete al your videos and youtube cant/wont help to restore them. And that is why i get a bit sad if a big channel says something like this, because in my eyes its very bad practice to relay on yt for your backups. ( Assuming they dont do a seperate backup amd only just rip from yt because of ease of access).
Not all of them. What about the ones who are no longer active on the platform? The ones people forgot about? The ones who have died? You think there will be 100% coverage? In the case of YouTube, many channel operators don't actually keep a local copy of all their videos, since the files would be too big. So the only copy is the one on YouTube.
Maybe that's not that much of a bad thing. The day had the same length before YouTube was a thing, and people spent 100% of their time. Differently. Some things might have been pushed out of sight by YouTube, and a dying giant can create room for new things to grow.
The Library of Alexandria burning down wasn't a good thing. Any time human knowledge that has been collected gets scattered it's bad
I get your point, but the comparison barely holds. The Library of Alexandria had many unique works of cultural and scientific importance. YouTube is full of mundane content, mostly entertainment. Especially the scientific parts are merely re-tellings of other works which do not live on the same platform. Nobody stores their scientific findings on YouTube alone. Many creators do not upload to YouTube alone.
The more people value a specific video, the higher the chance it got copied elsewhere. So for the important parts, we probably have decent coverage.
What about all the old art and other stuff that hasn’t been kept around? They probably weren’t worth preserving through the ages, if it’s good enough we’ll see it again
Patreon?
Love this take
Original on Cory Doctorow's own site here
Thanks dirty looking the original article, that was a great read!
Jesus. It's articles like this that make me both be thankful for Doctorow and his ability to put tech shit in terms is non-techies can understand.
I find it fitting that an article on enshitification is so hard to read because of enshitification on the site.
Seeing boing boing articles in my Twitter feed was one of the reasons I started using it years ago. When junk started filtering in, that’s when I stopped using it. When musk started messing with politics and using Twitter to push his views, that’s when I nuked it.
That is one of the best summaries of the Internet I've ever read. Maybe the best. That is quite the article, thanks for sharing.
That was an excellent article. Thanks for sharing!
That was fantastic- sums up the stages pretty well
Good read. Thanks.
Venture capital has shifted very quickly from companies HOSTING content to companies SCRAPING content (LLM’s). This means renting compute is now very expensive and moving into the hands of ‘AI’ companies. It’s like trying to fly a plane while monkeys are tearing the wings of.
That plus interest rates are going up. For twenty years VC's has near limitless cheap loans, now they've got to be marginally more careful than before and the companies which grew large but only ever broke even (if that) now need to pivot to profitability to justify all the debt they took on. Would not be surprised if Uber and Lyft start really hiking rates soon.
I think most taxi companies have adapted, so they are pretty competitive now.
I'd say because it's in the air. Obviously companies watch each other. Like the layoffs in January. The initial wave was the companies that needed to do it and had been planning it for awhile. Then when there was blood in the water everyone was doing it because then they aren't big mean company, they are just another company doing layoffs right now. Lost in the crowd. It's already come out some companies did it purely because big companies like Twitter and Google did it.
But we are seeing a big increase in anti-consumer moves because there seems to be no backlash. Like there's the vocal minority, but it seems by and large a huge amount of the customers for these tech companies are unwilling to move away.
Every time Twitter does something some move off Twitter, and they get such growth! But then eventually stuff like Mastadon's activity has a noticeable decline over time and Twitter carries on. Some people go back, some quit Twitter entirely. But these are fractions of a percentage probably. They still have the biggest celebrities and a crap ton of users.
Netflix just cracked down on password sharing, in a move that people were calling foolish. The outcry was everywhere and anytime Netflix was mentioned was 20 comments saying they cancelled that day. But subscriptions are up, Netflix won.
YouTube has been pushing more and more ads on users, there isn't as big as a direct backlash. Like there was more outcry on removing the dislike button. Which...no one cares now lol. But YouTube pushing's more ads, and they don't seem to be loosing money for it. I'm sure they are trying to find the 'breaking point' for customers. But either people really are willing to put up with 2 30second unskippable ads every 5 minutes or premuim subscriptions are skyrocketing as they ruin the free experience.
WB killed a ton of shows outright, basically burned a bunch of media and shuttered a ton of HBO Max's staff. People upset... Twitter all a buzz. Now it's back to HBO is the best streaming service (Which it is lol)
Like it just keeps going. I think it's just a combination of companies making terrible blunders steal the spotlight from each other and society as a whole has a 3 day memory. The Reddit protests are already cold news because Twitter just DDOS'd itself. People who saw all this with Reddit and call it disgusting moves by the company and the unspoken bond is broken, always end their diatribe with something like "Well I'll just use old.Reddit with an ad blocker" like they are winning when they still provide Reddit with their usage.
People like us who walk away and move to spots like this are the minority of a minority. It's up in the air how many will stay and how many will slowly forget their outrage at Reddit and go back.
People! What a bunch of bastards!
Thanks for putting this into words, so frustrating but true. People just can't be assed to care if it means a mild inconvenience for themselves.
If I wasn't already that truth would make me depressed.
Agreed. These companies learned that internet outrage is generally indicative of nothing actionable.
As discussed here:
If interest rates are high, I'm sure they're hard up for capital. The free money they've grown to depend on is drying up and they need to make money themselves asap.
Yup, tech bro culture is wasting someone's else money to play with computers. No money, no game time for baby. Silicon Valley is in a panic because the infinite spout of money suddenly stopped, and there's a line of pissed people asking for their money back. They promised the world, now it's time to deliver and turns out they have nothing of value.
I was in the Tech game back in the late 1990s and in the Tech Startup game recently and this time around it's not techies that are Startup Founders, it's people from Sales, Marketing and Finance.
The whole "making something cool" ethos of Tech has been replaced by "Find a market niche that you can grow in until you have an exit strategy (IPO or sale to a larger company)" or in other words, make a company that looks like an infinite growth venture and sell it to some suckers for a ton of money.
As it so happens I was in Investment Banking in between those two periods in the Tech industry and immediatelly recognized the same spirit as in Investment Banking when I went into Startups in the late 2010.
At least the previous generation was driven by the "play with computers" drive. This one is all about borderline fraud (often outright fraud - just think Theranos or all the "coin" "tech startups") in the pursuit of personal upside maximization.
Tech bro is a derogatory term for a reason. It's still just a bro. Generally a cis genedered heteronormative affluent white male. With all the worse parts of MBA culture. Certainly they're sales, marketing and finance types. But they want to be tech adjacent to disrupt the market. They like to portray themselves as techies but are actually about get rich quick schemes. Their one and only interest on NFTs, crypto, AI and all tech in general is how can it enable them to exploit others into making them billionaires.
I heard the same about the movie industry: it used to be run by movie people, now it's run by finance people. The greedy producers of old came from the industry and understood the business; today's greedy producers don't understand anything about movies, so if you're pitching them a project, you need to speak their language: here's a market niche, here's similar projects that have been profitable, here's the return on investment we can expect.
I wish i knew how true that is, but it does seem to explain a lot of what we see from Hollywood these days.
What I find interesting is that I'm starting to hear this same story (in different words) from very different sources.
Lefty bloggers are saying, *"The hype economy is over, and vaporware companies used to never delivering are suddenly gasping for air in an economy that requires them to actually provide value." *And at the same time, mainstream financial podcasts are reporting that "Outlooks for 2023 anticipate a hostile market environment for disruptive innovators as they attempt to leverage their brands to monetize large user bases with low profitability. Meanwhile, the market is being buoyed by legacy firms with reliable cashflow from existing sales and services."
It shocked me when I noticed how different people are seeing the same thing, and it seems overdue.
Great point that shareholders ruin everything. I invest but I’ll avoid certain companies or industries that don’t align with my values, even if those stocks have the most potential profitability. But this seems to be a very uncommon habit in the investing world.
Most of the aspects have already been covered but I would want to add one:
This was always the plan, it just wasn't as highly prioritised as growth.
I work as a developer at a big tech company. We (the company) had our roadmap and it was mostly about getting more users. The more users you have the day the economy turns - the better off you are (... If you manage to turn an profit).
So when the economy went to shit and we (and other tech companies) no longer can loan money for free to cover our running expenses - the priorities shift. Working towards attracting more users is only going to increase your costs at the point and you don't want to run out of money. So all roadmaps changed and cost saving efforts became the highest prio all of the sudden.
It's the end of cheap credit.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=16J5X
That graph shows the Federal Funds Effective Rate. Until recently, VCs could borrow money while effectively paying zero interest. That meant their investments weren't under any pressure to become profitable any time soon. Now, borrowing is expensive. VCs don't want to loan any more money, and want their investments to pay off. Reddit and other pre-IPO companies are scrambling to become profitable.
I assume the big companies like YouTube / Google going against people blocking ads are just taking advantage of the chaos.
As for Twitter: Elon Musk is an idiot.
You forgot one thing. Fuck /u/spez
I respect you took the time to link this
This meme is repeated everywhere ad nauseam and is blatantly wrong. VCs do not borrow money from the banks. The argument goes the other way around, and implies that the people who bankroll VCs would rather lend their money through banks than invest it - but even that is bullshit, you'd need interest rates in the double digits to even begin to be in competition with your average VC performance.
Also not 100% of VC money is american so Fed rates are not as relevant as you think. Please stop spreading that nonsense.
It's not just the american federal reserve that's increasing it's rates. We live in a globally connected economy and almost all countries are impacted by the american economy as well as some of the reasons causing inflation in the US (the pandemic and the war). Most countries are affected by the inflation and most countries are combating it by hiking interest rates.
Of course everything is connected but it's not always 1 to 1, nor are the effects always immediate. Some economies absorb different impacts in different ways.
The point being made is that it's more expensive to borrow, do you dispute this?
Of course i don't. I dispute the fact that interest rates are a significant factor in the VC market.
Tech companies were only favorable to their users during the corporate Web 2.0 genesis when these companies had to lure educated users in with extremely convenient free services, but they always did and continue to do so under terms of service that are intentionally made as hard to read walls of legalese bullshit, so they always click accept and hand them power by moving there.
These companies usually are either publicly traded or aspire to be publicly traded, and are backed by venture capital loaned to them by banks and investors.
Then during the late 2000s and early 2010s these corporations gobbled up web traffic by having all the valuable information and communities behind their walls. This drove their operating costs up a lot but it was no problem, since the zero interest rate policy was in effect so these now-megacorps had basically interest-free loans to get infinite money to finance the platform. However they realized around the mid 2010s that they controlled the vast majority of the web so they realized they could be as greedy as they wanted since no one is going to ever step up to them (YouTube is a shining example of this) and ever since the mid-late 2010s they started nerfing and crippling the user experience in order to please their investors and ad networks. This process was extremely slow initially to minimize the backlash. They applied the boiling frog strategy and it worked.
By the early 2020s this was in full effect: websites do not respect your privacy and try to shove trackers and ads whenever and wherever they legally can, search engines are manipulated to put sponsored and SEO spam links first rather than useful answers, sites are implementing login walls to make sure the valuable content they hold hostage can only be accessed once they have the data of users, discourse is being controlled and micromanaged by corporations with automated censorship, mystery echo chamber algorithms, shadowbans and wordlists, news sites have article limits and paywalls now. It got so bad that it's already harming society as a whole because it's causing polarization and these platforms now have enough power to theoretically manipulate elections in some really bad cases.
This is a process known as enshittification: start great then become shit and die. Now that the zero interest rate policy is over, and interest rates started climbing up it means silicon valley free money is over so they can no longer afford to be boiling frogs, they are turning up the heat to 11 and just roasting the frog alive. In other words, the enshittification cycle is becoming exponentially faster and it's only going to get worse for the corporate web and its users. The only solution is returning to decentralized technologies like Web 1.0 used to be, but it's extremely hard since free as in you pay with your data services are addictive like crack cocaine.
Ads pay basically nothing now and VC funding has dried up. Most of these tech companies operated at a loss and are now being pressured into becoming profitable since investors don’t want to throw money at them anymore.
Data privacy laws have also gotten better, cutting off another revenue stream that was typically used.
Interest rates def have a factor in this also
But when did VC money get flushed in? I doubt that it just somehow stops out of nowhere. I mean all these companies weren't exactly founded at the same time.
During the pandemic VC slowed to a crawl and the stock market went to shit. While the market eventually rebounded VC is doing so MUCH more slowly. VC scum doesn't care about innovation, it cares about making money. If there's some level of risk it shrinks like balls in a January pool and it takes forever to coax the little guys out.
Capitalism.
Capitalism is like cutting off your wings because you believe the reduced weight will make you fly higher.
Part of it is the standard crisis of capitalism, the profit you get from doing the same thing always declines, so over time you have to push up revenue (increasing prices, forcing people to pay, showing more ads, gathering more data, etc) & push down costs (fire engineers, run on less hardware, etc)
Part of it is capitalisms natural tendency to create monopolies, and the lack of competition in a given field causing the company to then lose sight of what it's good at to compete in a bigger field.
Part is that interest rates mean loans are no longer cheap, so taking on debt to get customer, to at some point down the line make money, is a less viable plan. Twitter is a special case where the bad loans are because that was the original deal not interested rate related, and Musk is trying to pull all of the enshitification levers at the same time.
Part is that CEOs generally don't have a fucking clue about their products or what they are doing (it's a circuit job about who you know/blow, not what you know), so once one CEO starts firing/enshitifying, the rest just copy them so as to not be left out.
They need money for their greedy venture capitalists.
It's so common there's even a term for it now, "enshittification"
To quote the article that describes it:
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ The source is about TikTok but the author has gone on to describe how this applies to basically every modern tech company in various interviews.
What's their alternative?
Be satisfied with just making a profit instead of wanting infinite growth.
Oh my God are you ever speaking my language here.
I dunno, maybe 439 million dollars of revenue reported by reddit in 2021 is, I dunno, lots?
If they don't have a sustainable business model, they don't have to operate at a loss for years either. Maybe it's better to let reddit die and transfer to a model that makes more sense. I think that smaller instances with users and moderators voluntarily paying server costs like in the fediverse seems like a much better solution than companies trying to gain a monopolistic position so that they can then ruin their product in order to make money off of it.
Business models that are built to be sustainable from the start probably will not take off. Many good companies that add value to people's lives wouldn't have made it past early stages of startup if they didn't seek out VC or be comfortable operating at a loss
Many of those platforms weren't making a profit or only were once they started the enshittification process
Fail and let the internet no longer be for profit.
It's simple, despite what big tech companies are telling themselves, current algorithm for personalized online ads doesn't actually work, because you can't force people to be interested something just by shoving media in front of them.
Instead of realizing that people want genuine human engagement to tell them HOW your product can help solve their problems, we are at the phase where tech companies double down on their incorrect assumption and thinks to make people want things, they just need to shove more things people don't want to see in front of them.
Algo ads could be good, if they weren't primarily advertising stuff to me after I already bought it.
I look up a specific type of product that isn't consumable, buy it, then get ads for it for weeks.
How many mattresses or tires can one person need?
That's the problem with personalized algorithms, because they don't understand what people actually needs.
(What people actually need is tickets to "Barbie")
The advertising companies, Google & Facebook, absolutely do understand this and are happy to mistreat small companies.
The worst part of using Google Search without uBlock is that if I'm just trying to get to a specific website without typing out the full html address, I have to scroll passed the top result which is an advert for the website I already typed.
Google charges companies for customers they already had.
It's even worse than that. The ad is often a fake version of the website you are looking for. Ublock protects you from phishing and malware.
It's even worse than that, Facebook and Google have been selling "impressions" that are actually bots for decades at this point.
Very often do I have to bypass the wrong links as well for competitor services I wasn't looking for, because I explicitly wrote the service I had chosen.
Surely the fact that you bought a toilet recently means that you're now a toilet enthusiast and will happily click on ads to add to your toilet collection!
We hear you like toilets
Long ago I was searching for a new printer then the printer ads started following me to different places on the Internet. Places that should not have known I was searching for a printer. I decided I wasn't going to have any of that and installed an ad blocker.
Not sure how effective that will be in future. Pretty sure ads as content written by AI is going to be the hot new thing. And by hot new thing I mean thing that can die in a fire.
I’d say synchronous targeted ads work very well. I.e. showing me ads when I am searching for something explicitly on Google or Amazon. Asynchronous targeted ads - yeah, less so.
free money has dried up, now they need to monetise your habits.
i hope that the internet becomes sort of how it used to be, made by the people for the people and ran by the people instead of made by a few huge corporations that sell our data and constantly try and squeeze profit out of their platforms. i love the sense of community in decentralised social media and there seems to be next to no arguments most places. im really enjoying everything so far after joining
They've reached such an economic power that now they just want to be as profitable as possible, crushing any kind of competition of popular pro-user participation while profiting over our data and content
WE, the users, made them able to do so, giving them economic and sometime even geopolitical power. But WE still determine whether they can exist or not man, we still have the power to bring them down. It's time to take back what's ours!
Interest rates go up > VCs can't barrow free money and demand a return on investment > companies try to demonstrate profitability > enshitification
Others have basically captured it, but my read is a massive change in the overall risk profile held by venture capital firms. The time of reckoning has come, and it’s time for everyone’s (or at least VCs’) favourite three letters: ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).
The last twenty years, we’ve seen this sort of spray-and-pray model, where 99 bad investments could be offset by 1 “unicorn”. The risk appetite seems to have shifted largely because 1.) there’s a higher volume of early stage concepts (so there’s more bad ideas), and 2.) there’s either fewer unicorns, or the unicorns that mature are ultimately less valuable.
Crunchbase put out a good analysis of the current trend of global venture dollar flow:
The Party’s Still Over: The VC Downturn In 6 Charts
You can read news from various outlets - some say it’s a post-pandemic correction. Some say it’s because labour is too expensive. But the bottom line is that VCs aren’t willing to spend money on “users-in-lieu-of-revenue” like they once were, and I honestly don’t blame them. There were a lot of really, egregiously stupid ideas coming out of SV, and their wax wings melted. sad_trombone.mp4
Adam Kotsko summed this entire phenomena up nicely:
I think you really hit the nail on the head.
Crudely it can be summarised as a change from investors throwing money at tech in the hope of buying a share of future profits to wanting to see those profits. That means business models have to now actually deliver and a lot of then just don't - twitter, reddit, Gfycat - they're all part of the same phenomenon. Big revenues is meaningless without profit. While they may have value to the users, it seems the advertising funded models and data harvesting models just don't deliver profit for these kinds of services.
So they desperately try to adjust the models to maximise income and reduce cost. Enshittification ensues.
Great explanation. The days of the "web 2.0" fantasy dream are officially over, investors needed their money back at a certain point and that point is now.
It's a process known as Enshittification.
The rest of the read is quite good.
A lot of the 2010's tech was fueled by venture capitalists looking for the next big thing. They saw things that were extremely popular, like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, etc, and figured "well we've got a ton of users, surely we can find a way to make money off of this."
Some investors are starting to realize they aren't actually making much money or costs are blowing up without revenue following. People are starting to back out of this bubble without clear goals towards profitability.
Yeah it's mostly investment people that have a lot of money and are basically the ones pulling the strings. Because if they don't like you then the value of your company goes down and poof you were deeply s***
Not really "all of a sudden", this has been a long process. The often repeated enshittification thing is fully valid. The short version is:
Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter are the more obvious culprits, but every big tech company does something similar, one way or another, even hardware companies like Intel or Nvidia
That doesn't fix YouTube's core issues with the ads that they run, impacting every free user without an ad blocker: 1) Not 100% safe 2) Unscrupulous advertisers, sometimes running scam ads 3) Poor user experience re: ads (far too many in general, and multiple mid-roll ads per video make for a horrendous time).
I'm not going to reward them for these misbehaviors toward their user base by buying their "Premium" service. Same for any other site that does this and offers a "Premium service" to fix the problem that they, themselves, created. There are ways to have safe ads, and fair user experience even with them in play.
EDIT: This was supposed to be a reply in a post chain below, and it got stuck as a new comment. Lemmy growing pains, lol (looks like we've added about 4k or so users on .world today alone... welcome new folks!)
Yeah, Youtube seriously needs to improve ad quality. I personally totally get that it's an expensive site to run and have no problems with the fact that it needs to turn a profit (not every site can get by on donations alone and that's okay). But the ads can get really bad sometimes. The majority are fine, but the number of scams and NSFW ads are still too high.
TBH, I just paid the extra $2 to go from Youtube Music to Youtube Premium because I really didn't want to see those ads and didn't wanna deal with figuring out ad blocking for a Chromecast. But Youtube Premium isn't worth it if you're not already using Youtube Music (I would not have paid $12 for it) plus you have to use Youtube a certain amount for it to be worth it. Plus, of course, it shouldn't be necessary to pay them not to see ads just to avoid seeing the bad ads.
And all this does nothing about Youtube recommending videos (not ads) that are unethical. They don't do a good job at curating videos. Heck, there's been times where they age restrict LGBT videos for simply having any LGBT references but they'll leave up crypto scams and hate speech filled alt right videos.
For me personally, its not even the principle with the bad ads. The reasons I won't pay for preemium are:
The bottom line is that I decide what content is received, interpreted, and rendered by my hardware. Youtube can kick and scream all they want, the nature of the internet is not in their favor. I prefer to directly support creators I follow, when and where I can.
Intel is about to disagree with their DRM bullshit baked right into your CPUs silicon. Welcome to the "You will own nothing" future
I'm pretty sure if they actually do that it has far reaching consequences and will get killed within a year by financial institutions. That is a massive security issue. Also AMD would rub their hands because it will flush a lot of money into their pockets to develop alternatives. They are already winning with CPUs.
It does not cause security issues (that banks are concerned about). It is a DRM content decryption that is part of their TPM. So it is even considered a security feature that can more generally be used to ensure data can only be decrypted using the proper application the data was intended for. Netflix is already using it for 4k streaming. Read more here.
Because they don't have too be. Most people are so dependent on social media that they'll keep using a service even though they hate it. Like a drug addict who keeps using even though it's killing them.
No tech burst.
It's just a cold recession. No one is admitting it, including consumers who keep spending away savings.
But companies are aware of it enough they are tightening purses preparing for harder times ahead.
Of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If everyone makes their products worse chasing this quarter's dollar, and people leave, those companies are going to have a harder time.
Especially as it becomes easier and easier to compete against them at scale.
Just wait until new feature requests and bug reports for something like Lemmy can be handled within moments by AI at dirt cheap pricing.
A very interesting future awaits around the bend.
All of a sudden?
My dear, sweet summer child.
The 'trust thermocline' occurs when an organization repeatedly takes their customers for granted, and they reach a critical point of 'no trust return' and just leave. Essentially, if you gradually provide less quality while charging more money, you erode trust- and if you lose trust, you don't actually ever get it back. See: Twitter. And possibly now Reddit. Great term, I love it even, but I hate that the lesson these people are learning isn't 'hey maybe we should stop pissing people off without good reason' and is instead is "this is acceptable risk and we should continue playing chicken with dissatisfied users to make our shareholders happy."
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Enshitifacation. Twitter onlyy turned a profit once, YouTube is about 20% of global bandwidth and has turned a profit. companies don't just want money they want the amount of money to always increase. So they turn to ever more exploitation to try to get it.
I find it the ad bubble is bursting so companies are increasing costs for api access and divert people into using their own apps (so they can't block ads and such)
Because investors are tired of the model where they dump a shit load of cash into something that has no good path for monetization. So they’re forcing them all to make money which hurts users.
Well, I hope the Fediverse works out. Otherwise I think were gonna have to go back to hand printing zines.
You are the product and right now the product is falling in value. I have known a few people who raise exotic animals and they treated them as nicely as a parent treats their own child. Now compare this to people who raise chickens.
The easy money is drying up. Hence you, the product, are worth less money. I personally don't really care all that much. The market was due for a correction well over a decade ago. The average person is worth about a dollar to Alphabet and when you think about how much you are getting the numbers never made sense. This dead weight mismatch has been skewing our entire economy. Engineers and project managers that would have gone into tangible items and paid for services instead were recruited to keep you on social media all day.
There are only a finite amount of techies and no one is going to care if slack integrated with Google maps if we are drowning in human sewage.
Cheap/free money has dried up.
We have reached the stage where the snakes have grown large enough that they must prey on their own tails, for there is nothing left to eat.
Interest rates went from almost zero to real rates. If you're sitting on a pile of money you can invest it in internet companies with crazy valuations and no profit or near zero-risk Treasury Bills and interest-bearing certificates.
Many investors know they are betting on the greater fool instead of any real value in these internet companies. There are now fewer greater fools.
If your business model was to give out free stuff paid for by piles of investor money, you suddenly had to find cash to keep the lights on.
Elon has to pay $1B in interest every year for Twitter. That's still a lot of money.
Elon being a cartoon villian gave other people cover to do the same. You're less likely to be singled out by the media.Your taking candy from a baby is just part of the trend or the run of bad luck falling on those poor billionaires.
Helps if you own that media, too.
Who knew that online spaces based in capitalism would be a bad idea??
Weird thing to say when VC investing outperforms the market by 2.5x (even with the current rates) on average but 🤷
Yes high returns. Average of 25‰ over 25 years.
But also, much higher risk with 75% of startups never shipping and 40% of those liquidating so VC investors lose all of their money.
So if you have 25 years, don't need the cash, and have a high tolerance for risk then VCs are for you.
But if you think you're going to need to cash out sooner than 25 years or need steady income then interest bearing instruments look a lot more attractive.
I don't know it must depend on the market, in Europe you'll generally get your money back in 7 to 10 years. And the very point of investing in a VC and not a singular company is that you flatten the risk and get your money back from the few companies who succeed. VCs are designed to bleed money looking for a moonshot but there's not that many that fail ALL their investments and can't show a 5% yearly for it.
I've worked in the tech sector for a LONG time and have met and worked with some of the most shockingly brilliant and insightful people in my life….and many that are far less so.
As with any population.
Bad decisions, lack of strategy or plain old monetization motivated by greed or a desire to cash out before the cash runs out are sadly commonplace. The method taken says everything about the quality (or lack thereof) of leadership.
Some real stinkers lately.
enshittification
Give it a Google.
Interestingly, the frogs are actually smarter than humans. Research has shown that they will start attempting to escape as soon as it gets too warm, no matter how slow you boil them.
Also if you drop a frog in boiling water it won't jump out; it will die. That is not a survivable environment for a frog, not even long enough for it to jump.
Also if you put a frog in cold water and you don't immediately shut the lid, it will jump out. They don't sit still for you.
It's amazing how thoroughly wrong that metaphor is. Like it's just got it perfectly backwards.
Yeah, it's an extremely common false metaphor.
buen nombre
Oh yes.
True Foss, became radicalized crazies.
Crypto was for criminals and terrorists.
Truly open forums shut down because racism or pedophilia.
If lemmy will be attacked on all these fronts, being a lemmy user will be equivalent of your boss asking you serious questions.
Get those vpns in place. Full speed ahead.
Yeah because all "truly open forum" means is no moderation and what that invites is indeed literal pedophiles and bigots of all types
Companies expect infinite profit growth
Because the days of just shoveling money into various silicon valley projects in the hope that maybe they'll turn a profit eventually is over. Big investment firms now want an actual return from their investment, and because of that, tech companies are desperately trying whatever they can to turn a profit from these massive services that are also very expensive to run. That usually comes in the form of changes that makes things harder for the users, but is significantly more profitable for the companies that run them.
It's more like you now notice this because it have visible effects, but it's been going on for years. Restricting content, abusive rules and stupid changes have been the norm, all toward a centrally controlled experience geared toward generating internal profits on the back of users and content creators.
It's also why some prominent content creator started their own platforms, too.
It's just that now it reaches "intolerable" level for most end-users.
They were like this before also, but you're right: now they're much more overt and like they're pushed or hurried by something... And that something is the prospect of recession. They're not publicly announcing it, but their liquid assets are running low and they hit the ceiling for growth. YouTube is trying to maximize their exposure and revenue for ads by cracking down on adblockers; Twitter and Musk doing the dumbest decision just for money, the last one for the rate limitation being connected with not paying the bills to Google Cloud; Reddit introducing 3rd party API usage fees for, maybe, the same reason... They ran out of "smart" and covert solutions to milk their product, partners and clients of money and they would rather go down in greed. And they won't even be directly responsible due to those golden parachutes
When billionaire fascists start being held to account, they lash out.
Oh you thought the end goal was to make a good website. Hahaha.
While these changes will eventually happen, as all of these companies are meant to make a profit from the start. The reason they're all happening now is because of the coming recession, or at least the believe that it will come.
Everyone wants a piece of the AI pie
Maybe Spez and Elon can use AI to write all the posts on their platforms to keep the advertisers interested.
So, no changes?
Yeah, very likely. Platforms/Investors see a way to make money besides the usual Ad- and Subscription-Based monetization models
Combination of VC money drying up and fear of LLM sucking up their future revenue streams. I think the former is the the logical driver and the latter is the secret fear.
There are a lot of reasons for this general trend, but let me add my two cents to make a case for the sudden influx of user-opposed changes:
I don't have a source for this, but I remember that Linus spoke about this on the LTT WAN-Show. Basically, abunch of big silicon valley investors are pulling out of all of the big platforms, therefore leaving them with a huge hole in their profitability. This means, that right now a lot of them are scrambling to scrape together more money over time, so all of those platforms are sustainable.
Obviously this has to observed in conjunction with all of those are trends that are already mentioned by other comments, but this gives more basis as to why now, and why to this extent.
If someone else knows what I'm talking about please add quotes and sources because I don't like the good old 'dude trust me' guarantee one bit.
YouTube can try lol. But they've never cared about users. They're just all at about the same point where they have to stop pretending in order to feed that capitalism machine (or try to at least). It looks like hostility, but it's just them finally being honest.
It's the Romulans, they're holding back human progress.
Unlike the Vulcans, who helped human progress!
Who?
Like the downfall of everything in our society, greed.
The BS idea of infinite growth that our financial system revolves around. The stock market and investments all demand endless growth, and that pressure on company quarterly reports drives everything from unbundling, to suppressing wages and benefits, to squeezing users for more money in any way possible- and for us that’s ad revenue to be extracted from our browsers and apps.
Money is tighter since the inflation affects VC and stupid money flowing in. Stock prices are not going up, people have no money to play with (see the death of NFTs at the same time, the definition of a stupid investment).
Because users are not the customer but the product for others. And with network effects meaning there's less competition (ie no place to go to), then they no longer have to attempt to appease the product and can focus on appeasing customers.
Wouldnt even be surprised if Musk wanted to convince huffman to do this to split the outrage.
LIke how all the tech companies did layoffs at the same time this year
And before anyone says this sounds like a baseless conspiracy theory, remember that the big tech companies got fined a few years ago for having an agreement not poach each other's employees to keep wages down. They do talk to each other, and for things that matter.
Spez already admitted he talked to musk and got inspiration from him.
yeah I just mean I think musk might've manipulated him a bit, or they had both wanted to do things to piss of their communities respecitvely and agreed to do it 'together'
Because usually the greed, money and power corrupts, no matter how good you are in the beginning.
I'm not sure YouTube ever wanted you using adblockers.
Google needs to understand, that is not a choice that they have.
So much of the internet is covered by sites that don't take the time the vet their advertisers and the ads that are being placed on their platform.
Advertisers who, in turn, advertise on legit sites spreading scams and malware wherever they go, and Google and YouTube are no exception to this. These companies really brought The Age of the AdBlocker on themselves, by not making sure that the ads they are allowing on their platforms are safe for users.
So now, me and about a bajillion other people are in a position where we don't go out onto the internet anymore without protection. Ad blockers for everyone.
So, YouTube's actual choice is this: do they want me to continue to visit their site and drive their traffic metrics?
Because that's all they are getting from me, and if they find a way to disable all ad blockers, than they are clearly saying that they don't want me and others like me to boost their visitor numbers. Simple as that.
I've been using the internet since the 90s. Originally I was very pro ad, since it meant that we wouldn't end up with paying subscriptions for every site on top of internet utility bills. But around 2010 or so I got malware from an ad I didn't even click on - all it had to do was load on the page. The site issued an open apology but it's not like they were going to pay repair costs for everyone's computers. After that I knew neither websites nor ad suppliers were vetting what they display to users. Companies only get more complacent as time goes on, and once the option was out there bad actors would only get more creative. I've used ad blockers ever since.
I'm against them doing that they are doing but you talk like you don't have the choice to add YouTube as an exception to your adblocker of choice. Yeah having an adblocker is crucial but nothing is impeding you to do that and see the adds on YouTube.
I don't think you understood what I was saying.
I try to take no ads, from anyone, because it's a digital safety issue. YouTube included.
That’s fair but while visitor metrics are important, there is also ad engagement that makes them a desirable platform for those advertisers. Your visits add nothing to their business. Not that I agree with their stance, but I understand it.
Then buy YouTube Premium and the ads go away.
YouTube is not a charity and needs to pay for servers hosting the content people view. That money comes from ads/YouTube Premium
I'm going to quote @[email protected] from elsewhere in this thread:
Even the FBI says you should use an ad blocker.
You can also pay for YT premium and have no ads. Plus… what’s unsafe about YT ads? You’ll definitely get some fucked up ads on small websites that just plug in a stack of 3rd party ad networks but everything on YT is native first party ads they sold and implemented themselves. Viewing them is about as unsafe as viewing YT videos in the first place.
Yeah, I really enjoy the ads showing how I too can earn hundreds of dollars a day at home doing _____-
Those ads are shit. All ads are shit. But unsafe means it’s installing Russian malware on your computer, etc. I don’t think much of that is happening via YT.
Unsafe to me includes the naive (and dumb) losing all their money to a scammer. But I see your point.
I can definitely see your definition, too. But it departs a little from the ad blocker conversation. I don’t need an ad blocker so I’m not fooled by a pyramid scam. I do need one to keep malicious code away. The kind of person who falls for this sort of scam doesn’t know how to install an ad blocker, probably.
But then again, there’s the “I install the ad blocker on my mom’s computer to keep her from falling for scams” argument, which is definitely valid. Yeesh the last time I visited my elderly father he had all kinds of XXX push notifications popping up from calendar spam he’d fallen prey to. He was in a state of desperation, always afraid someone was going to see his phone do something embarrassing.
They didn't, but they're going on the offensive way more so than before. People think it's related to MV3 crippling a lot of ad blocker functionality.
They forget the users are their base, not their employees, or are bought by idiot billionaires who think they can turn the platform I to another money printer (or tax write-off)
Spez in particular saw Twitter and thought that would be a great idea.
I don't think he understands he's about to be CEO of Tumblr 2.0
It's like an abusive relationship, they know they can do things against their customers but most will come back willing to pay to make it work. This trend will not stop until enough people leave.
It’s called Enshittifiction
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
Their cash overlords want returns on their investments.
It's not anything new and nothing "all of a sudden", unfortunately. Facebook, Tumbler, Google - all done stuff like that before. Even for Reddit this is not the first protest blackout and not the first time they treat users and mods like garbage.
It simply is now happening to the apps and services you (and I) use daily, so it hits closer home.
All modern stairs are built on the same terrible foundation: Attract users, no matter how much money you lose. Once you feel strong, introduce fees, ads, hike the prices and try to regulate years of financial loss.
Happened like clockwork, and companies going public are a clear sign it's just around the corner. (Kind of like any free mobile app will ask you for a 5 star review, just before introducing monetization schemes)
Just wait till you have to pay per email. You're not still using Gmail are you?
$.
They haven't yet realized that a platform dependent on user created content and user run moderation, is infinitely replaceable. See Fark and Digg.
Reddit and Twitter and just the latest to learn the lesson. Without your users, you may as well be MySpace.
The answer is AI. Amongst other things. Reddit is about to go public and wants everyone on their main app for advertising and tracking. Twitter is dealing with hosting issues with Google.
Plus AI companies are extracting content from Twitter and Reddit to train their AI models like chatGPT which is a huge money maker, and these platforms aren't getting any money from it so they're trying to make it more difficult to get access to it. They want companies like OpenAI and Stability and Microsoft and Google to pay large sums of money for access to their content to train AI on.
The biggest problem is that average people are used to the tech big companies provide, and lazy so that they won't move to overall better alternatives. This means the companies don't care about consequences of their actions, because there is NONE. Looking at it from the company's perspective, why not make more money from people that won't leave the site anyways?
It's all about the money, money
Hey, the furries have mostly migrated to lemmy!
It's going to be a gradual process. We power users, mods & activists make the leap first.
Later, when the collective IQ on Reddit drops another 30 points, more casual users will watch fun & useful content disappear, watch assholes take over, and get pissed enough to jump ship.
My bet is that the fascist troll problems on Reddit will escalate, since many mods left, and moderator tools got nerfed. It very well could escalate until more casual users jump ship.
The tech companies tend to follow the leader on unpopular actions. The first-mover bears the brunt of the backlash, allowing the copycats to implement the same policies without the same flak. Witness Twitter introducing fees and then Facebook following suit. Witness Twitter banning third party apps and Reddit... you know the rest.
I don't think it's all of a sudden. They always do this but this time it's all lined up.
All VC backed tech companies have been operating on the assumption that they can focus on growth and then make a profit later. That hasn't happened for most of these companies and VCs are starting to demand returns. It was always going to happen, I'm surprised it took this long.
More importantly, the IPO market collapsed a couple of years ago. That is the VC's payday. Now that we're not in an IPO buying frenzy, investors are wanting to see positive cashflow before they buy.
Rates needed to rise before it was going to come to pass.
They have grown to the point where they are now focusing on being more profitable. And apparently they are not scared of losing users.
YouTube is blocking adblockers? News to me
You are used to a time where money was essentially free for companies. Whenever they needed money, they could loan money almost for free.
As interest rates are up, that's no longer the case and priorities have changed from growth to plugging holes.
It’s all about money
AI training and data mining. The value of data has surpassed the value of oil long ago. The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil.
the problem is businesses r built on the concept of infinite growth, profit isn't the thing that determines success, it's the constant increase in profit, now things r quickly hitting the limit and they're desperate to find any way to keep the number going up
Why are companies not favorable to people?
Unchecked profit motive.
I think part of it has been watching Twitter just completely abandon any attempts at treating users and developers well, and seeing that people are still active there. Reddit sees Twitter completely fuck over third party devs, and realizes they can do the same and weather the storm, and have it all work out well enough for them.
It always boils down to corporate greed unfortunately
Because the users are their product.
When interest rates are low the difference between a dollar now and a dollar later (discount factor) is negligible. In this environment the math favours businesses that can grow revenue really fast.
Now that rates have risen, the discount factor has become more expensive and so firms want their dollars today. A lot of companies need to come up with a path to profitability quickly to shore up their stock prices and have a sustainable business.
We are the most disposable asset they have. They need to turn a profit so we are being squeezed.
We're not people to them, just part of a product. Why do anything more than absolutely necessary to keep the money flowing in? Save a fraction of a penny on bandwidth, earn another fraction by selling more complete data and ad views. Multiply that by the number of users and if enough will tolerate it, somebody at the top can buy a shiny new yacht.
Everyone's rushing to implement/improve AI. AI needs a ton of data, Reddit/Twitter are good available sources. Reddit/Twitter would prefer to sell this data as opposed to having it gathered from under them by bots, for free.
I think that's why Twitter and Reddit are rushing to restrict access (directly or through the API).
Youtube are just aggressively serving you ads, and limiting ways for you to circumvent ads. I think that's just what they do as they have the market sewn up
Yep and we have a right to not use their shit services and start a new one while the investors get pissed
You forgot discord and the username changes, which happened a few weeks ago
Like several of the other comments that highlight the interest rates, for those of us who saw the late 90's/early 2000's tech bubble burst it's the same thing all over again.
Another step in the enshittification cycle just happened to affect three companies that you noticed at the same time.
Another day, another big website taking steps to make their user experience actively worse.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
very good observation! I guess it's to no small part caused by a change in the economic and investment climate, and as a result new measures by man's companies; and they chose the first day of the new business quarter as a start date for many of them.
I'm pretty sure that most of the companies do this type of crap because they know that we need their product.
All of the sudden? This has been happening, maybe slowly at first, since every one of those platforms started, imo.
Could it be related to the silicon valley bank going under maybe?
I'm not sure YouTube ever wanted you using adblockers.
Could it have something to do with inflation?
Time for a open-source youtube alternative, I haven't yet been convinced that Odysee, Rumble, Nebula are it.
When did YouTube disable adblockers? In the last 24 hours?
It's because the 2024 election is coming up.
Chatgpt is using up all their resources and inflating viewership by logging into these sites millions of times. And ad companies are mad that they can't catch eyeballs anymore so they are pressuring social media giants to search for alternative income
Just my headcannon
I doubt it. There's no way one company is inflating the views of a website by a million times. And the users are not going around browsing the internet with Chat GPT in mass. Web scraping is definitely an excuse for them to make these moves, not a reason
Turns out hiring thousands of people and hosting tons of data gets expensive, especially as your customers (advertisers) stop spending as much on your product. After a decade of cheap money being thrown at them by investors to grow grow grow, interest rates has made new debt far more expensive and the need to turn a profit is here. On top of this, their primary source of revenue has shrunk as most companies cut back on their advertising budgets, again because money has gotten tighter now very quickly.
Money.
i saw a comment on hackernews about how chatgpt and LLMs really caused reddit's recent changes and conflicts. and that made sense to a degree. the regular user is perpetually online and i guess big tech is all about grabbing users' limited attention at this point.
i e read this mostly because of AI…
Simple: being favorable to users isn't profitable, and the US economy (in which Silicon Valley) is in the toilet at the moment
It's just happening to a few companies at the same time right now.
Enshittification has been around for ages now.
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Online fascism.
My guess is their calculations are that they're not necessarily being unfavourable to their more casual users. Which are probably the majority. People who have digested the idea of ads, don't create content and casually scroll around for a laugh or for some biased news and surface level discussions probably don't feel that much has changed.
It couldn't be collusion, could it?
Kind of? It's certainly companies actively moving towards shittier services at the same time as others, but I don't think it's as much of explicit and intentional collusion as it is high school clique prom politics and VC money drying up post rate hikes. There's more of a focus by investors on generating profit over growth at this point because money is no longer free. The safest play for a lot of these boardrooms is to not stand out as a company not realigning priorities to reflect this.
Quite simple. Greed got to their heads and people became tired of dealing with their bullshit.
SOXL - an EFT for US semicondutor companies is doing well.
They've got you - you're addicted and/or locked in and the hastle of moving to alternatives is too great. The short answer is : 'They no longer need to be favorable, they have you, your data, and your friends and it's too much effort to go somewhere else'
I'm not sure YouTube ever wanted you using adblockers.
I'm ok with the YouTube one. Twitter dumb. Reddit not that bad but should have just charged people.
ESG
I'm ok with the YouTube one. Twitter dumb. Reddit not that bad but should have just charged people.
For the same reason you need to get a job.
Because you can't have an open api while serving legit user and bot. The bot will eat your future snack of exploiting the data they're amassing. So you end up having some limitation to block the bots to some extend.
The only thing you can't do with an open API is exploit every dollar of value that passes through your service.
The main difference between a Silicon Valley API and a FOSS API, is the SV API is trying to get tons of people rich as fuck by exploiting you. The FOSS API can live long and prosper by simply asking for donations every once in a while, or engaging in very light-handed monetization.
There are like a million little nuances to this whole issue, and the lack of nuance is what Silicon Valley relies on to convince people that they must pillage their users, but that's the gist.
My post was being more ironic and sarcastic. You explain and nuanced it well in your post. I think people can't read between the lines sometimes.