That's a nice way to think of it, I've felt I must be on the bad alternate timeline for a while now. Maybe this is a healing branch!
Technology
Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it's technological news, it probably belongs here.
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Shareholders and public companies :(
Specifically infinite/increasing-growth capitalism.
They need to grow profits/value. These social media tech companies have about saturated potential user base. People are foreseeing a slow-down in ad budgets, and user-data is becoming a commodity. These realities, plus the need to drive up profits, leaves these companies with "no choice" but to seek more and more user-hostile features and rent-seeking behavior to satisfy investors. This was probably a long time coming, and was sorta delayed by valuation gains via an overpriced market. Now the investor love affair with tech has cooled a bit, and they're asking more for hard-profit on the balance sheets.
The other thing that is ripping through social media platforms is a kind of 'outrage' or FOMO among leadership that LLM builders like OpenAI are eating lunch at their table by consuming their user content for training. This feeds into the previous point because they think that their users content can be a product of its own beyond attracting more users or being leveraged by ads. I am not so sure about this because these companies have already gotten their 'lunch' if they wanted it, and I am dubious about the value of a model built on data as provided by Reddit's finest minds, and these platforms have patently failed to stop disinformation bots (which will get worse from these LLMs). But who knows.
The services are getting worse (more ads, no free API, removing feautures etc.), because of lacking competition they could do it without much consequences. Social media is a natural monopoly, why would anyone want to use a service where no user generated content is? In recent years the services became so bad that many users decided to actually use alternatives instead of sticking with the established platforms. If Lemmy can get a big enough user base it will thrive, otherwise it will be forgotten in a few months.
Great read.
Let them self destruct.
I'm just glad to have found this place. 😂