Because they all saw that Elon repeatedly shat all over Twitter and users praised him for it instead of running away. Now all of them are firing half their staff and putting all pretense of caring overboard.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
421 points (99.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35904 readers
1182 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Because user freedom and experience is diametrically opposed to corporate control and ad driven profit seeking.
These companies have continued to function on round after round of VC fundraising, diversifying their corporate holdings to the point that theyre basically wall street funds, and providing little innovation past initial product launch. When the stock market takes a downturn they become insolvent and they have to squeeze profit which means squeezing users. They have no choice, most of these business models weren't viable to begin with.
Many tech companies were overvalued for a long time. Everyone was happy to invest and pump money into those companies because "those platforms are going to be the future and I want to be part of it when they are starting to make a ton of money". It didn't matter that many of those companies were not profitable because they always promised to make up for that in the future.
This classic idea is starting to break down a bit. Many Tech companies have become profitable in the meantime, but many of them also have various troubles like moderation.
So why are so many media companies making "shitty decisions"? Well, because from a business perspective, they aren't necessarily "shitty decisions", they are kinda smart decisions. Reddit makes money by gathering data and by showing ads. They cannot show ads on apps they don't control. So they have to handle a lot of traffic for which they get nothing back. That's why they are trying to push as many people to use their app as possible. They know that the hardcore oldschool community won't like that, but they are probably pretty sure that enough will switch to the app to make it worthwhile for them.
Meta is fighting to stay relevant as well. Facebook was the foundation of social media for a long time, but in the digital space, this can change very quickly, so they constantly have to try new things.
And if we look at games like the Sims, the game who really escalated the whole DLC thing, it's a similar story. From a consumer perspective, what they are doing is bad. From a business perspective, it's smart. And that's what it ultimately comes down to.
Companies' main goal isn't to satisfy their customers, it's making money. If fucking over customers makes them more money, they do it in a heartbeat.
load more comments
(3 replies)
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.
Higher interest rates means they have more pressure to start being profitable is my guess.
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.
It's odd that all of this is happening at once, but if I had to bet on a cause it is complacency.
The internet used to be fast in trading the hands of "power". Social medias/major forums would fall just as quickly as they rose. This began to change in 2008-2010 when we sort of developed the Status Quo of websites we see nowadays.
I think these corporations forgot that social medias are not indefinite, and assumed that they could safely get away with much more now than they actually can.
Glad to see new platforms such as Lemmy rising to the task. Change the status quo.
Greed.
Because of capitalism, no seriously these decisions are based on money and growth. But both of these things are relatively finite. You can't keep have exponential growth year after year. Eventually you will plateau but there isnt a mechanism in capitalism to accept that. So companies start forcing monetary gain.
load more comments
(1 replies)
its the eshitification of the internet....it's inevitable
Because they are all beholden to shareholders, not users (or prepping for IPO)
Low effort guess, VC's cashing out before society collapses.
A lot of them go into business with venture capital, a great idea with future potential, but no idea how to monetize any of it.
Eventually the capital is starting to dry up and the owners will want return on their investments - so the company is forced to start turning profit. Enshittification of service at all costs follows. And then perhaps public IPO and the founders cashing out and buying yachts.
That's the lifecycle of a tech-startup
load more comments
(2 replies)
Running out of VC dollars, now they gotta actually make a profit.