this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
469 points (97.4% liked)
Technology
57435 readers
3585 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yea ... all around, it's looking more and more likely that big social may become something rather embarrassing and dystopian.
The best reason I can think of for why big social is going to die is that it was born out of a particular economic environment that either inaccurately assessed the technological-financial situation or just doesn't exist anymore. Namely, that having a bunch of users on your platform and the data that follows will always magically just produce a profitable business model such that blindly investing in such a business is an obvious move.
I'm guessing that big social just isn't that profitable, or is only profitable at the sort of mega monopoly level that facebook and google operate at, but even then risks fading over time due to how social spaces are generational. And that the belief that big social was super profitable was born out of a vague big data web2.0, that convinced itself it had found the new oil.
Beyond that, throwing VC cash at big-data businesses may just not be something anyone believes in any more, partly because of the above, and partly, I'm wondering, because the power of actually creating new technology and new types of platforms has always been a bigger business prospect and AI and chatGPT has basically forced the tech world to remember that.
If I'm on to something, the awkward thing for Twitter and Reddit is that their finances and corporate structures are probably bound up in the older presumptions and have no choice but to do their best to return on the promised profits, however dumb they look, while the rest of us can easily and happily move on, because that's what the internet is fundamentally about.
Facebook/IG have certainly made a ton of money. Twitter and reddit haven’t I believe because they’ve been less aggressive about monetizing their data, and having a site with content attractive to advertisers. This also attracted users who were on Twitter or reddit because they weren’t doing what FB does, which I guess makes it difficult to increase monetization.