You can provide quality services only for so long. Eventually quality will get in the way of profits.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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They are trying to squeeze as much money out of their platforms as possible, regardless of the fact that it's at the expense of users and will downgrade users experiences.
Because they realize they can get away with pretty much anything.
My idea is that they didn't/don't have a choice but to try something.
They are probably running out of money and no one is giving it to them in this econimical climate.
Maybe profitability, or at least drastic measures, is the request by investors (similary how IMF is "blackmailing" countries when they give them loan).
It might also be an experiment, planned or accidental to male profit of social networks after 20 years of investing.
It is a gamble, but cut has to be made at some point.
capitalism โ they want more money
Cory Doctorow termed it "Enshittification", and wrote about the process here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
I'm glad I read through the whole thing.
Bummed that I won't be winning a testicle ๐ฐ
I'm glad I read through the whole thing.
Bummed that I won't be winning a testicle ๐ฐ
I'm glad I read through the whole thing.
Bummed that I won't be winning a testicle ๐ฐ
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.
Deleted.
Dr. Capitalism, or How I listened to stop worrying and love the dollar.
Interest rates go up. Quantitative Easing go down.
They might have to play with real money lol
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
This basically. Companies see that others can do it without consequences and so they do too. The age of acting like your "friend" is over and they are gonna squeeze ever last cent they can from users. Twitter, Reddit , YouTube, discord. I expect to see smaller players doing the same soon.
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.
Any company with a MBA at the helm always seem to make poor choices. Look at the all the companies that have started switching back to engineers for leadership they've started making comebacks.
Stupidity and greed, a great combination!
It's not necessarily greed. The infrastructure to keep Reddit alive can't be cheap. How do you pay for that? VC money has dried up so these services that have been free to users are all quickly scrambling to make money. I definitely think they did it wrong. They should have planned the API fee changes out for years instead of trying to force it in a month.
They make money by serving adds to the people providing their site content.
And no, that is not what happened. They were trying to increase their valuation for future share holders.
Edit: adding it is the only greed, that is the reason.
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.