Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

[+] Lenins2ndCat 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, for most technology startups there are exactly two ways to pay salaries to the developers: getting investors (which lead to the exact cycle that I explained earlier) or paywalling the site up the wazoo (which leads to the community being necessarily smaller than it could have been otherwise).

[–] Lenins2ndCat 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Use a hybrid system. Market up until a service reaches a certain size then have government step in as the nationalising buyer to hand over ownership to the company's workers. A lot these services should be treated as utilities anyway, image hosting has gone through this cycle so many times I've lost count and imgur is on its way out too now. It's a fucking image host, it hosts images. That kind of shit should be a simple public service. It's a utility of the digital age. Don't get me started on Amazon reaching a very obvious inevitable saturation point that is based on the size of any given population and the average consumer goods range of a country.

Of course I know this can't work under capitalism, because the ideology of the capitalists will result in them intentionally fucking this up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And even with no capitalism involved in the equation, how do we convince the government to get taxpayers to foot the bill for something as mundane as an image hosting service? Especially in an environment where even art and education are being severely restricted in cash flow due to them being "non-essential services"?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If ad companies would be paid according to customer conversion rate instead of how many ads they spam everywhere, it would collapse within a financial quarter.

Thinking that people support a brand or product that constantly annoys them is next-level stupid, but it's their main strategy. Google's conversion rate is less than 4% and instead of realizing that spamming trillions of ads on every site is causing that abysmal rate, they double down and get off to bigger "reach".

Also, Google lied to customers of their TrueView ads and just presented people muted autoplay ads instead. Here's an analysis about that.

https://adalytics.io/blog/invalid-google-video-partner-trueview-ads

tl;dr the only one benefitting from ads is Google.