Asklemmy

Greed and monopoly, they have the power to do whatever they want since there is not many competition in their business field.

Because they want people to be aware of open source alternatives but they don't want to say it directly. Poor companies 😕

I have a theory that the advancement of AI as demonstrated by the likes of chatGPT is gradually assimilating the data corpuses of big social media companies and using it to train bigger and better models. The social media sites are being eaten alive.

So it is only natural that Reddit would want to ban API access or make it incredibly expensive. This defense prevents outsiders from extracting their valuable data.

But there is a bigger issue that makes this problem existential not only for the likes of twitter and reddit etc. Eventually, there will be no clear distinction between a human user and an AI agent, it is already possible to instruct an agent to browse the internet and carry out actions on behalf of a user. If this process is scaled up then it becomes a de facto programmable interface to the application.

When this happens the remaining users will be forced to pay for continued access because they will have no way to verify that they are human and no way to prove that the text they are reading is not going to be used to train large language models. The business model that fueled Reddit for so many years (unpaid content creators and moderators) will fade away and the site will autocannibalise.

When a company goes public it becomes something that needs to “appeal to the public”. It’s like when a movie wants to appeal to everyone. By doing so it ends up appealing to no one in particular and it’s a successful meh movie.

Going public then you have a committee of board members making decisions. And who’s going to be on a board? Bunch of rich people who only care about making it the best company for the public. Effectively ditching everything that makes a company risky or unique.

Going public can also be good cos you’ll have public money to invest in new and better tech or systems or acquisitions. So the future they have in mind seem to not include a lot of us. It’s a direction that’ll strip anything unique about reddit and become a successful meh platform

Interest rates had been historically low for a long time. Loans were cheap and venture capital was flowing freely. Tech companies could focus more on growing their market share with lots and lots of runway before they needed to become profitable.

Then during the pandemic, Congress gave a massive bailout to businesses. Inflation went skyrocketing, and the Fed had to raise interest rates to limit the damage.

Now money isn't flowing nearly as freely for tech companies. Loans are more expensive, and investors are more content to leave their money in high-yield bonds instead. Tech companies are pivoting to stop chasing market share and instead start taking their profits from their current market share, even if it means their market share stops growing.

Ultimately a for-profit social platform can only make money via advertising. If you are depending on advertisers to be profitable you become beholden to those advertisers. Advertisers do not care about "community," "sustainability," or what made the platform attractive to users in the first place. But they do care about "public perception," and "number of users," and most importantly number of impressions per user, per hour. The advertisers customers care about things that hurt their branch, so they dont' want NSFW content, they don't want violent content, they don't want controversial content, they don't want anti-capitalist content, they want "quality" impressions.

So if you are twitter or reddit, or facebook, or whatever, if your advertisers make a demand that will piss off your users and make it worse for them you will always do it and you will continue to do it until the platform dies.

Both Reddit and Twitter are losing a lot money. They want to squeeze their users for profit.

Have you heard of the story of the Geese that laid Golden Eggs? Yes, it's the same story here.

Greed.

enshittification

Check out Cory Doctorow's post on a term he coined called enshittification. Good primer to some of the same patterns we are seeing.

I believe there is another comment that breaks down a supposition for Reddit's enshittificationw, too, in this thread.

Regarding Twitter, Elon seems to like trial and error, right? That's how SpaceX developed their rockets - by trying new things and testing them frequently, to see if they work.

So with Twitter I think he's just trying to see what he can get away with. And if he can't get away with something then he'll just roll it back.

As for Reddit, I guess they saw Twitter trying to squeeze more money from their platform and thought "let's try that too".

Inflation , and late stage capitalism.

Easy. They were built on the idea of "get as many users as possible, and worry about making the profits later" and spent over a decade staying alive off of VC funding.

The other issue to consider is MBAs. Or at least the MBA way of thinking, that "caring about customers" actually means "leaving money on the table." The relentless search for "business efficiency," evaluated in pure accounting terms, can easily lead to destroying the core business due to a lack of understanding of how the core business shows up on a P&L statement.

Cash money

its profitable? if only the minority quits the platform, it's a net gain.

Tbh, not sure many of us would behave differently in the same situation. Imagine you can get a billion dollars, and in exchange you need to destroy your product. Would you take the deal?

Imagine I make a new place that's free to hang out at. Everyone loves to hang out there but the bank that lent me the money for the mortgage is worried and say,"How will we make any money? Everything is free." I'll say don't worry there's plenty of money eventually. We'll figure it out. Look how many people there are.

I'm going to sell this place long before the money actually has to start rolling in like promised. It will probably get sold several times before someone is finally the chump who has to figure out how this super expensive place ever turns a profit.

That chump ruins the earth, but really we all helped

You can provide quality services only for so long. Eventually quality will get in the way of profits.