No Stupid Questions

I think the main problem with these companies and the startup/tech bro culture (mostly in the US) is that they are growing for the sake of just growth itself, because they want to get their own. The original idea is to grow as big as they can, IPO, then sell it off. They weren't designing things to be profitable from the start. So eventually they all reach a stage where they are hemorrhaging money too much, and that is where all the enshittification happens (investors come in, they try to make it a real business now, but it wasn't really feasible to be a business to begin with).

Turns out infinite growth without covering your costs doesn't work out

Because they are all beholden to shareholders, not users (or prepping for IPO)

its the eshitification of the internet....it's inevitable

Honestly? I don't care. I don't use corporate "social" media and I'm very happy with the Fediverse. If you do something for profit, profit will always come first. Even before I became a Fedizen, I knew public discourse cannot reliably be provided by greedy corporations. I'm just surprised it didn't happen earlier and that the people are surprised about what's happening now.

The venture capitalists that have funded these programs at a loss for years have decided they want to see a return.

We see that Twitter was been purposely twisted to be a comfortable space for neo-Nazis. We know spez's politics. It doesn't take much of a leap to conclude that he's killing off the moderator class to make Reddit more friendly for the neo-Nazis. Most likely though that's just a convenient side-effect of unbridled greed, though.

https://medium.com/@mikegrindle/reddit-and-the-enshittification-of-social-media-659d41b5ab73

$

Cory Doctorow has some very interesting blogposts on the topic. He call it enshittification. It's more or less the business model of plattform Capitalism.

It's nothing new. It's becoming more spectacular as the people doing it are richer and richer. Geocities sold to Yahoo, who promptly murdered it. LiveJournal sold itself to a Russian banker, which caused most non-Russian users to abandon it. Tom sold MySpace to Rupert Murdoch for like 500 million and bowed out, and MySpace was driven into the ground. The buyers are getting bigger an bigger but the results of trying to squelch users has always been the same - the platform is abandoned.

My theory? It's Musk.

He's going around saying he only lost bots and scammers, that he's made Twitter profitable, and that advertisers are back and happier than ever

He isn't showing his numbers and there's no way his claims are true, but he's saying what they all want to hear. "Don't worry guys, you can squeeze your users for cash hard as you want, and they might grumble about it but they'll soon come crawling back"

There's also increased pressure to become profitable ASAP, much of it is likely due to the economy, but Musk lying through his teeth is probably getting to the other billionaires. It's worth mentioning, if you're a billionaire the only reason to still care about money is for bragging rights

Twitter is sui generis because they were acquired impulsively by a maniac. But for the others, I think it’s just that interest rates were super low for a long time and now they’ve gone back up to a more historically normal level.

Capitalism. Companies go public (or already were public) and then they can no longer be happy with what they had and need to acheive infinite profit growth. That's partially why companies like Valve, that are still luckily entirely private, can make seemingly consumer-focused decisions and not just chase infinite profits. That's how they've been able to invest so heavily in Linux with such little short term gains. Valve still makes shitty decisions sometimes but it would be 10x worse if they decided to go public.

What were the bad decisions discord is making? Im out of the loop