Damn we really are just doing a "kill everything web2.0" speedrun any%
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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All that venture capital money must be drying up and bills coming due.
Yep. Web/tech companies generally had an easier time than most dealing with the pandemic, and capitalism, in all its reactionary, short-sighted wisdom, smelled profit and massively over-invested, so companies grew faster than they knew how to handle.
Cut to ~6 months ago and most of them had nothing to show for all of that money (Reddit being a great example - in the time between their massive expansion and now, they only thing they actually added were wildly unpopular NFT avatars). But capitalism demands that profits increase at an increasing rate, so they have to squeeze money from somewhere, which is how we got the massive tech layoffs at the start of the year.
Now they need to find even more ways to increase profits, but many of them are at the point where finding ways to monetize is actually really difficult, so they're tying to squeeze money out of everything they can find - Reddit's API changes, Twitter trying to push people towards blue with arbitrary limits, wholesale shuttering of things like Gfycat. Now obviously that's going to cause a bunch of problems with user trust and retention but who cares about that? That's a tomorrow problem, and we need profit now!
Capitalism working as intended.
Great analysis. I'd add that, as that famous article states, platforms are in a unique position for enshittification as they stand to bleed value from both users and advertisers/creators. Whereas a traditional business like a hardware store needs to keep a certain level of customer satisfaction (low as it is) and cannot pretend to survive by selling nonfunctional hardware.
At least we still have one bastion of the old Internet left - Craigslist.
The great irony of Web 2.0 is the pandemic forcing massive shifts to work from home, coupled with the Republicans taping down the button on the Federal Reserve money printer, meaning Silicon Valley tech companies have never had it easier, since the world ran on their digital infrastructure for like....2 solid years, and then after bills came due they realized they'd overinvested in both physical property and personnel (things that Silicon Valley companies had famously tried to either disrupt or make obsolete since at least the 70s), so they've tried to kill work from home as a way of instituting "quiet layoffs" and leverage their tangible assets as collateral like a broke dad who owes back child support trying to pawn his baseball card collection. Fucking California Ideology. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of assholes.
It is not only the pandemic. Even before, during the last decade or so, they got the VC investments. Now with rising interest rates and the shift to AI capital is drying up for the web2.0 bubble.
Yeah, painting this as a downstream effect of the pandemic is just wrong. This has been coming for a long time and would have happened no matter what caused interest rates to rise.
Now all the things must be selfhot+fedi or die.. welocm to web 3.1.. 😆 (web 3 has been claimed by crypto scammer... sad.. 😅)
Yeah that sucks. I really liked using them for quick clips of videos I took. Booooooo
Like the sticker says: there's no cloud, there's just someone else's computer. When the someone decides to use their computer for something else, this sort of thing happens.
It is making my somewhat impulsive need to actually download copies of things make sense again. Obviously have had some kind of "b" folder for random memes for years alongside my movies/tv shows/music/etc. Initially it was because streaming and shit was not as big a thing, and even when they got popular there are always random times where internet is down. Which that last point is a very very clear sign of the massive digital divide between urban, suburban, and rural areas. Even between different urban areas you see a huge difference. All these services are made in major tech centres where it is like network access is about as plentiful as air. But are a constant issue for everywhere else.
I even like to respond to folks that don't understand the point of actually saving pr0n with all the modern options, by saying you never know when a basic outage might be something big. And so long as the drives and computers are working, it is basically its own currency for trade.
Given how all the streaming services tend to just lose lots of major things all the time. It is good to know that I can just keep enjoying stuff. Cloud stuff is cool so long as it can be used however the users want/need. But all the companies are trying to turn the net (and even basic programs) into being 100% controlled by everyone but the users. Can't play single player games without being online, but isn't an issue if pirated. Try to be "legit" and pay for a movie/show/album, but not be able to use it with a player you like or just have a local copy. AND they still scoop-up all kinds of data on us and everyone we might know. Pay for a steaming service doesn't even remove ads anymore unless you can justify the higher tier (digital caste system). But then they just make all the options cost more even if ads are present.
Now we are seeing it get harder and harder to even have basic internet culture that is user generated. We are seeing costs that promise more ability to get these things go higher and higher without then being able to do any of said things. We need to get more things onto decentralized and P2P networks while there is time to figure them out. I2P and Fediverse are great starting points, but need to be easy enough for actual normies to use. And they really only work at an acceptable rate if lots of people keep things like laptops and desktops running as often as possible to keep data moving. Which will make them immediate targets for all the same companies that came after them before the current services were considered "approved."
The enshittification of the Internet continues. I loved gfycat for short videos that didn't need sound. It's high time to stop using proprietary, corporate controlled Internet because it seems like this model is guaranteed to die eventually. We need a fedi gfycat alternative. Does pixelfed convert your phone videos into gif-like "images"? I know they were technically videos but gfycat made them work like old-school gifs perfectly.
It’s a tough spot to be in, and one that I’m not convinced the fediverse will solve. Stuff has to get hosted somewhere, and video hosting is expensive. Taking away control from giant companies is great, but I don’t see what’s in it for people to take on hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in hosting cost for their instances without making any money from it.
Right now I think fediverse users are power users who are much more likely to contribute, but if lemmy or mammoth ever got as big as Reddit or Twitter, the vast majority of users won’t be willing to pay, and I don’t see how that works
I know nothing technical about how the fediverse works, but I can potentially see a bittorrent-like future for the fediverse, with people contributing spare compute power or bandwidth to the network when they're online.
torrents worked on a massive scale is because
- it's a "run and forget" kind of technology
- not real-time
- very less resources per user is required
- a sizable portion (not a lot) of users participated equally
You can't expect this from a fedi-powered gyfcat instance
I hate this trend of big tech buying up smaller services and then shuttering them a few years later. I’m still salty about Gamespy getting cannibalised by whatever that shitty mobile casino game company was, killing all the classic FPS titles’ master server in the process
Can anti trust regulators please wake up!
Will the real ~~Slim Shady~~ FTC please stand up?
What do you mean? This is all working as intended.
Why would you buy a platform, and hen disband it like that?
To take their assets and include them in your platform.
They bought it before interest rates went up and now they're looking for return on investment in other places and nobody wants to buy it from them
Snapchat is a name I have not heard in a while. I feel like TikTok completely took over that market
I kinda stopped using snapchat once I realised it was Instagram stories but worse
Which is funny/ironic, because as far as I remember, Snapchat predates Instagram's stories.
it does, but snapchat never took hold among my social circles like instagram did
I would love to self-host a fediverse version of gfycat
Good luck with storage lol