Asklemmy

Interest rates had been historically low for a long time. Loans were cheap and venture capital was flowing freely. Tech companies could focus more on growing their market share with lots and lots of runway before they needed to become profitable.

Then during the pandemic, Congress gave a massive bailout to businesses. Inflation went skyrocketing, and the Fed had to raise interest rates to limit the damage.

Now money isn't flowing nearly as freely for tech companies. Loans are more expensive, and investors are more content to leave their money in high-yield bonds instead. Tech companies are pivoting to stop chasing market share and instead start taking their profits from their current market share, even if it means their market share stops growing.

The other issue to consider is MBAs. Or at least the MBA way of thinking, that "caring about customers" actually means "leaving money on the table." The relentless search for "business efficiency," evaluated in pure accounting terms, can easily lead to destroying the core business due to a lack of understanding of how the core business shows up on a P&L statement.

Have you heard of the story of the Geese that laid Golden Eggs? Yes, it's the same story here.

You can provide quality services only for so long. Eventually quality will get in the way of profits.

I feel like they all see the inevitability that AI will drastically change the money model very soon. And it will not be to their profit, so best make every penny they can right now is their mentality.

I'm wondering if it's a domino effect. Now that one major company made an announcement that fucks over their users, they're all doing it. We even now have YouTube cracking down on Adblockers. The Golden Era is coming to an end imo

Cory Doctorow termed it "Enshittification", and wrote about the process here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Check out Cory Doctorow's post on a term he coined called enshittification.

Interest rates go up. Quantitative Easing go down.

They might have to play with real money lol

capitalism — they want more money

Deleted.

Rabbits

Money. It really is that simple.

Reddit wanted to kill third party apps because they have ad blocking features and don't show unwarranted sponsored posts. Reddit wants to serve users as much ads and sponsored content as possible, which was not really able to happen with third party apps.

Rabbits

Dr. Capitalism, or How I listened to stop worrying and love the dollar.

"Enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism."

Stupidity and greed, a great combination!

Billionaires are circlejerking all push backs against wealth redistribution mechanisms. They want to use the fallout of any apparent mechanism shutdown as swag within billionaire soundbite circles. The ultimate tool is a flamethrower, or something similar. It's all a flex!

Sycophants, cronies, and useful idiots will be doing shout outs on handouts, commies, vox populi, failures, freaks, basket cases, lay offs, recessions, leftists, parasites, leaners, blah, blah, blah -- weird ass rich people lickboot enshittifications.

Ultimately a for-profit social platform can only make money via advertising. If you are depending on advertisers to be profitable you become beholden to those advertisers. Advertisers do not care about "community," "sustainability," or what made the platform attractive to users in the first place. But they do care about "public perception," and "number of users," and most importantly number of impressions per user, per hour. The advertisers customers care about things that hurt their branch, so they dont' want NSFW content, they don't want violent content, they don't want controversial content, they don't want anti-capitalist content, they want "quality" impressions.

So if you are twitter or reddit, or facebook, or whatever, if your advertisers make a demand that will piss off your users and make it worse for them you will always do it and you will continue to do it until the platform dies.