I mean there’s Reddit ofc, as well as Twitter in its entirety, Discord is implementing some dumb updates, there are issues with Tumblr as well as everything to do with Meta, and I’m sure there are plenty more (and I haven’t even touched other digital media, for example the Sims). Why is it all happening in the span of about a couple months?

  • Furbag@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    All these companies have done about as much growing as they can. I remember listening to the radio on my drive to work a year or two ago, and they were talking about how Facebook had done internal research and concluded that they had captured something like 95% of the possible user demographics, meaning that they were unlikely to be able to reach new customers because either you have Facebook and you use it, or you’ve already heard of it and you don’t want it/don’t use it anymore.

    It was interesting, because Facebook/Meta, like Twitter, Reddit, Discord and Tumblr are all for-profit companies that exist to make money, and yet, the expectation of infinite growth from the market never ceases. There will never be a time when the company has grown “enough”. Enter the short-term smash-and-grab strategies. The idea is that they know that their business model has peaked in terms of growth and profit and they now need to extract value from the company before the market catches up to that fact. Social media is inherently unprofitable. Nobody wants to actually pay for it, and they do not produce a product, so eventually once the ad revenue has reached critical mass, the users become the product and are essentially ransomed off. Reddit just tried to pass the buck onto the 3rd party app developers rather than the users, but since the API restrictions affects regular users as much as it does developers, it had the same effect.

    Suffice to say, unless you are a member of a social media platform that is a non profit, this is going to keep happening. Even if you land on a site that prides themselves on being excellent stewards of their company and never prioritize profits and growth over stability and customer satisfaction, eventually they will be forced to make a decision - lose a lot of money or lose some customers. The answer, sadly, is all too obvious to them by now.

    • merpthebirb
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      2 years ago

      Yep. Once capitalism completes the growth phase of the latest boom-bust cycle, companies start focusing on increasing revenue. Turns out when the economy starts declining people aren’t willing to spend money on random shit. People didn’t want to spend money on it during the boom, they’re even less likely to do so as their expenses go up and wages stay stagnate. A truly idiotic economic system.

      • dragontamer@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Good news.

        Computers are much cheaper and text is very low bandwidth. A $100/month server will be able to host a large chunk of us, and donations will likely be able to cover these meager costs.

        Without a need to grow exponentially, we can mostly sit happy on single physical server and $100/month (or so) independent instances.

        No need to build $million+ data centers like the big boys. We can take advantage of our small size instead.

        • JunkMuffler@lemmy.one
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          2 years ago

          That being said… I think that we as users should monetarily support our instances. I do support the instance I use for Mastodon. I will do the same for Lemmy once I settle on one.

      • flakeshake@feddit.de
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        2 years ago

        Lemmys developers mostly fund themselves by a grant of the Dutch NLNet Foundation, they have talked about it in the past.

    • _number8_@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Social media is inherently unprofitable. Nobody wants to actually pay for it, and they do not produce a product

      i miss when people were just excited to be able to chat with others online

      • Furbag@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Oh, I agree. Sometimes I yearn for the halcyon days of “Web 1.0”, before the corporations muscled their way in and took what regular people built from the ground up and perverted it into a mechanism of capitalism and corporate greed. It was like the wild west and every session was an adventure.

        Maybe I just have rose tinted glasses on, but it seemed to me like the internet was a more pleasant place when things were more decentralized.