No Stupid Questions

Capitalism slowly shits up everything. Even the things it helps create.

I mean this in the most general way possible. Not just platforms. Even if reddit was profitable it would still continue. It's just part of the cycle of seeking not just profits but ever rising profits.

It's just more obvious lately on digital platforms because it has been kind of compressed into smaller amounts of time.

That which is free must find a way to cost.

That that makes money must find a way to make more.

And slowly but surely its takes on a fine shine. A glean seen from a distance. But when you get close you realize. "oh, its fucking shit all over it."

A lot of technological flux going on right now, what with an entire generation partially trained to do WFH and job mobility that brings, the retirement of the tech-phobic boomers, the extremely tight labor market, Russian money going to "more important endevors" (which might also be why bit coin is down), and AI threatening to automate 80% of the workforce. Tech company owners are frightened and making random dumb or scared decisions because of it.

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.

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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

Higher interest rates, less vc money, have to actually start being profitable

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.

I reckon there are two factors at work here, the profit imperative and enshitification. The profit imperative relates to how corporations have to make exponential profits every single year (and as we all should know you can't have exponential growth in a finite system.)

And enshitification is a result of the profit imperative, with all the corporations trying vainly to keep the profits rolling in they have to cut quality, be it through replacing ingrediants with inferior ones or pumping in the sugar so it's harder to taste the wood chips, killing third party alternatives for viewing your site to keep all the ad revenue to yourself, putting out unfinished products and charging top dollar while treating your users as unpaid testers.

Or any other of the million shitty practices corporations can think up to keep the economic perpetual motion going, it's all going the same way in the end though because you can't get blood from a stone and as a great man once said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

Centralization, money, power, money, stocks, money. These are just a few reasons. Did I mention money? Oh, and also, money. They're sucking up to investors, and finding ways to get through the up-coming(or on-going) recession without major losses. The only losses are ours.

It all happening in a span of months I think is sheer dumb luck from an entertainment point of view, but deep down the cause seems to me to be the expectation of continuous growth of profits on the part of a product free business model.

It's corporate greed. They're just trying to get (more) money out of their users pockets. They're starting not to design their products in a way that the most people use it, but in a way that they get the most money, time and useful, valuable data from their users. That's less people but more profit.

Netflix is showing similar behaviour at the moment.

It' simple: Greed is the reason.

Actually I once applied for a job at Reddit, there were like 5 or 6 interviews spread over 2 days basically. And almost everyone I talked to did something related to Ads. (The position I was considered for would have been about some service to deal with problematic posts, hate etc.) So it's just a huge ad machine.

This reminds me also about this Facebook documentary from 2 years ago, how ML algorithms implicitly shape how we interact. Maybe such efforts were better put into good moderation (oof), and a well-working UI...

That said, I wouldn't mind paying a little and already even did so to give awards and also for an App. (Can't be that much they earn with ads anyway?) I hope Lemmy is there to stay though, I'd be happy to donate/contribute every once in a while.

@VoidCrow Everywhere you look you see overpaid executives and CEO’s who think they are actually brilliant enough to deserve their astronomical wages/compensation, and thus think they can do no wrong. Their ideas are always brilliant, and when the shit hits the fan, they blame their staff for a bad implementation and fire them first.

I think it has something to do with fear of an upcoming recession, platforms need to prove to their shareholders that they can still maintain profitability even in the face of economic downturn. Keep in mind the US hasn't experienced a real recession since the tech boom, which may explain why all this money grubbing is so severe and sudden.

Because easy money from a decade of low interest rates is disappearing.