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Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Agreed with your closing thoughts. It's never been more obvious that we can't rely on commercial entities.
The fruits of years of organic growth within subs squandered in the name of corporate profits should be the wake-up call the average person needs.
Often when things like this happen (see:dig, twitter) the question gets asked "what can be done?" Well, let me tell you about FOSS..
I am sure that most people here adopt the principles of FOSS. I wouldn't miss at all the various "mainstream" subs with poor content but some of the best subs could be encouraged to migrate to the fediverse. I have really high hopes for this project.
Reddit isn't just trying to balance the budget - they are specifically scrambling to make things work (or at least, look like they will work) for an IPO, which is a beast in and of itself.
Guessing that the whole "data scraping AI" thing also kick-started a bit of a panic with them
Possibly. I'm not entirely sure how to interpret that part.
One plausible scenario is that they brought in a consultant, who said their data would be worth $XXXX on the open market. A common element of MBA thinking is that any potential profits are something you are entitled to, regardless of the consequences. It's also pretty clear they don't have a mature management team, or a viable path to realize those profits. But they had to stop someone else from getting it, so there was a rushed decision. I don't quite know how it coincided with killing 3rd party apps, though, unless it was just more really incompetent management.
It does feel like there's been a shift, especially in organisations that use the work of others for their own benefit (e.g. open source, community produced content, etc). It seems like there's been a real move to have their cake and eat it.
Oracle has just made an aggressive move with regards to Java licensing too, they're now charging as much as $15/month/employee to use their Java runtime on the desktop/server. Their FAQ even points you to OpenJDK if you don't want to pay, which is strange - it makes me think the relationship between Oracle and the OpenJDK will be ending sometime in the not-so-distant future. There are several Java projects I've done where that would just become non-viable as it was a project for a single department in a large company.
Software developers are one of the most altruistic groups of people - it's amazing just how much time and effort they put into things that they get no financial return on, only the love of actually doing it. And people that dedicate their time and effort to online communities, education, and so on are equally amazing.
But I think it's time to stop being so naive and realise that many large corporate entities are abusing this relationship for their own gain.
I’m sure there has been no shortage of enshitification before 2023, but for some reason now I’m seeing a lot of it. Some historian should document all of this.
It's the interest rate hikes. Tech companies relied on limitless free money from VCs before, without the pressure to turn a profit. That tap's been turned off now, so here we are.
What? It's maximizing profit. Businesses are always finding new ways to cut costs while increasing revenue.