YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
They’ve reached such an economic power that now they just want to be as profitable as possible, crushing any kind of competition of popular pro-user participation while profiting over our data and content
WE, the users, made them able to do so, giving them economic and sometime even geopolitical power. But WE still determine whether they can exist or not man, we still have the power to bring them down. It’s time to take back what’s ours!
Most of the aspects have already been covered but I would want to add one:
This was always the plan, it just wasn’t as highly prioritised as growth.
I work as a developer at a big tech company. We (the company) had our roadmap and it was mostly about getting more users. The more users you have the day the economy turns - the better off you are (… If you manage to turn an profit).
So when the economy went to shit and we (and other tech companies) no longer can loan money for free to cover our running expenses - the priorities shift. Working towards attracting more users is only going to increase your costs at the point and you don’t want to run out of money. So all roadmaps changed and cost saving efforts became the highest prio all of the sudden.
This was always the plan, to put a world in your hand…
And then squeeeeze it until the last drop of blood dripps out of it.
Gain a monopoly, get users addicted and reliant, then change the rules of the game and hope they stick with you. It’s happening now because of the economy for sure, but it’s not like it’s surprising.
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Enshitifacation. Twitter onlyy turned a profit once, YouTube is about 20% of global bandwidth and has turned a profit. companies don’t just want money they want the amount of money to always increase. So they turn to ever more exploitation to try to get it.
Thanks for the link. That was a really good read. Even better on Doctorow’s own site, I think, because of all the extra links he provides.
All of a sudden?
My dear, sweet summer child.
english is not my first language, maybe I should’ve used a different phrase but my context is recent events
You used the phrase correctly, and your English is great!
The above commenter was rudely stating that your observation is not correct as it’s has always been this way.
Ads pay basically nothing now and VC funding has dried up. Most of these tech companies operated at a loss and are now being pressured into becoming profitable since investors don’t want to throw money at them anymore.
Data privacy laws have also gotten better, cutting off another revenue stream that was typically used.
Short answer : Enshittification.
Long and brilliant explanation here : https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Jesus. It’s articles like this that make me both be thankful for Doctorow and his ability to put tech shit in terms is non-techies can understand.
I find it fitting that an article on enshitification is so hard to read because of enshitification on the site.
Original on Cory Doctorow’s own site here
This concept is also why I’m so hopeful for federated software. The federated model means that there’s no single instance that holds all the power. Many of these instances are run by admins of their own kindness and initiative. And at worst, if any instance were to start being “enshittified,” people could easily move to another instance and continue participating in the greater network.
Between all of what we’ve seen unfold in the last few months, and even weeks, on Twitter and Reddit, it’s safe to say that “enshittification” could be reaching critical mass. That’s why I came here, after all, and I’m looking forward to seeing this community simply persist here on the web.
My fear is that even if you’re correct, as the internet monoliths that have been built on the past decade fall to federated software, we will lose forever an immeasurable amount of arts and culture that has been stockpiled in these corporate spaces. Think of all the great educational YouTubers whose videos won’t be able to be passed on to whatever the next thing is if YouTube collapses.
Those folks will re-upload old content onto the new platforms.
Not all of them. What about the ones who are no longer active on the platform? The ones people forgot about? The ones who have died? You think there will be 100% coverage? In the case of YouTube, many channel operators don’t actually keep a local copy of all their videos, since the files would be too big. So the only copy is the one on YouTube.
What about the ones who are no longer active on the platform? The ones people forgot about? The ones who have died? You think there will be 100% coverage?
Maybe that’s not that much of a bad thing. The day had the same length before YouTube was a thing, and people spent 100% of their time. Differently. Some things might have been pushed out of sight by YouTube, and a dying giant can create room for new things to grow.
The Library of Alexandria burning down wasn’t a good thing. Any time human knowledge that has been collected gets scattered it’s bad
I get your point, but the comparison barely holds. The Library of Alexandria had many unique works of cultural and scientific importance. YouTube is full of mundane content, mostly entertainment. Especially the scientific parts are merely re-tellings of other works which do not live on the same platform. Nobody stores their scientific findings on YouTube alone. Many creators do not upload to YouTube alone.
The more people value a specific video, the higher the chance it got copied elsewhere. So for the important parts, we probably have decent coverage.
Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to happen. Video files are huge (tens or hundreds of gigabytes) and many creators delete old videos once they are uploaded to Youtube so that they don’t run out of space or keep having to buy more and more drive space. Even tech YouTubers like MKBHD pull clips from their old videos directly off YouTube because they no longer have the originals (he did a podcast talking about this)
That is stupid. I get that smaller creators it maybe lesss feasible to backup. Because they don’t make enough money. But a video file, certainly if you put same compression as yt, isn’t that big. Say one gb per vid, that is 30 gb a month (say times 3 for redundency) you have less than 1tb a month, of lees than 60 bucks of storage drives a month. Small price pay for someone that has a million dollar studio to not be trusting on yt for your videos. But thay also disn’t talk about the risk of putting your 2fa in the cloud, so i am not that surprised
I think I can understand your point. Large ‘“media” companies will horde the content and refuse to let it see the light of day because they believe they own it. I don’t think that’s how it would go down. Anything I’ve ever produced to be put on the web still exists somewhere on a hard drive that I control. I doubt the big name educational YouTubers are deleting the source material as soon as it goes up to YouTube.
Besides, a lot of the good ones have already moved to Nebula as well. If thought like educational YouTube you should check it out.
Educational YouTube was just an example. But there is a real danger of culturally important media being lost. See cases like the Operation Soda Steal video
Absolutely. I was a big part of the non professional music production side of YouTube a decade ago. Imagine getting 100+ new songs every week, from talented artists putting everything they had into their work. It was incredible! This year I got into data hoarding and looked into downloading my old favorite songs… Turns out most of them deleted their old work from YouTube when they went pro or simply closed out their channel for personal reasons. Not even the compilation channels were still around. Hundreds of thousands of songs are just gone, along with the records of that community’s culture.
As discussed here:
Honestly they do it so consistently that i’m starting to wonder if they have a choice.
A common way to do things for tech startups is that they get venture capital funds, use them to run the business at a loss hoping to acquire market dominance, and then use market dominance to turn a profit. I think a lot of tech startups that we know are currently in phase 2, meaning they’ve thrown money out the window for years and are now trying to recoup their investments.
Also, Reddit wants to go public and Twitter already is. This is relevant because investors are animals, all they see is short-term profit, and they use their voting power to make the company behave that way.
There’s a common thread between both my theories: it’s shareholder capitalism. I say this as a lifelong shareholder myself, shareholders ruin everything.
If interest rates are high, I’m sure they’re hard up for capital. The free money they’ve grown to depend on is drying up and they need to make money themselves asap.
Yup, tech bro culture is wasting someone’s else money to play with computers. No money, no game time for baby. Silicon Valley is in a panic because the infinite spout of money suddenly stopped, and there’s a line of pissed people asking for their money back. They promised the world, now it’s time to deliver and turns out they have nothing of value.
What I find interesting is that I’m starting to hear this same story (in different words) from very different sources.
Lefty bloggers are saying, *“The hype economy is over, and vaporware companies used to never delivering are suddenly gasping for air in an economy that requires them to actually provide value.” *And at the same time, mainstream financial podcasts are reporting that “Outlooks for 2023 anticipate a hostile market environment for disruptive innovators as they attempt to leverage their brands to monetize large user bases with low profitability. Meanwhile, the market is being buoyed by legacy firms with reliable cashflow from existing sales and services.”
It shocked me when I noticed how different people are seeing the same thing, and it seems overdue.
I was in the Tech game back in the late 1990s and in the Tech Startup game recently and this time around it’s not techies that are Startup Founders, it’s people from Sales, Marketing and Finance.
The whole “making something cool” ethos of Tech has been replaced by “Find a market niche that you can grow in until you have an exit strategy (IPO or sale to a larger company)” or in other words, make a company that looks like an infinite growth venture and sell it to some suckers for a ton of money.
As it so happens I was in Investment Banking in between those two periods in the Tech industry and immediatelly recognized the same spirit as in Investment Banking when I went into Startups in the late 2010.
At least the previous generation was driven by the “play with computers” drive. This one is all about borderline fraud (often outright fraud - just think Theranos or all the “coin” “tech startups”) in the pursuit of personal upside maximization.
I heard the same about the movie industry: it used to be run by movie people, now it’s run by finance people. The greedy producers of old came from the industry and understood the business; today’s greedy producers don’t understand anything about movies, so if you’re pitching them a project, you need to speak their language: here’s a market niche, here’s similar projects that have been profitable, here’s the return on investment we can expect.
I wish i knew how true that is, but it does seem to explain a lot of what we see from Hollywood these days.
Tech bro is a derogatory term for a reason. It’s still just a bro. Generally a cis genedered heteronormative affluent white male. With all the worse parts of MBA culture. Certainly they’re sales, marketing and finance types. But they want to be tech adjacent to disrupt the market. They like to portray themselves as techies but are actually about get rich quick schemes. Their one and only interest on NFTs, crypto, AI and all tech in general is how can it enable them to exploit others into making them billionaires.
They’ve got you - you’re addicted and/or locked in and the hastle of moving to alternatives is too great. The short answer is : ‘They no longer need to be favorable, they have you, your data, and your friends and it’s too much effort to go somewhere else’
removed by mod
Oh yes.
True Foss, became radicalized crazies.
Crypto was for criminals and terrorists.
Truly open forums shut down because racism or pedophilia.
If lemmy will be attacked on all these fronts, being a lemmy user will be equivalent of your boss asking you serious questions.
Get those vpns in place. Full speed ahead.
Yeah because all “truly open forum” means is no moderation and what that invites is indeed literal pedophiles and bigots of all types
the frog was boilng for some time now
Interestingly, the frogs are actually smarter than humans. Research has shown that they will start attempting to escape as soon as it gets too warm, no matter how slow you boil them.
Also if you drop a frog in boiling water it won’t jump out; it will die. That is not a survivable environment for a frog, not even long enough for it to jump.
Also if you put a frog in cold water and you don’t immediately shut the lid, it will jump out. They don’t sit still for you.
It’s amazing how thoroughly wrong that metaphor is. Like it’s just got it perfectly backwards.
Yeah, it’s an extremely common false metaphor.
AI training and data mining. The value of data has surpassed the value of oil long ago. The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil.
Oil companies have assets and cash in the trillions it’s not even funny. Even openAI who has the most state of the art AI systems on the planet right now is worth at best a billion, and is getting heavily subsidized by Microsoft. AI companies will probably get larger in the future, but the modern world depends on oil for literally everything including the making and the shipments of parts used to run AI shit. You seem to be grossly overestimating how much data is worth and grossly underestimating the power and money oil cartels wield.
There’s a reason big tech companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars yet most of their users have not paid a dime. So yes, data is valuable.
Data is very valuable. Google shows advertisements like they’re listening to people’s conversations, except they aren’t. Their data profiles and predictions are so good they know what you want to buy before you even know you want to buy it.
Search the Cambridge Analytica scandal… I am not grossly over estimating anything.
When billionaire fascists start being held to account, they lash out.
I see this dumb shit made it over from reddit.
The biggest problem is that average people are used to the tech big companies provide, and lazy so that they won’t move to overall better alternatives. This means the companies don’t care about consequences of their actions, because there is NONE. Looking at it from the company’s perspective, why not make more money from people that won’t leave the site anyways?
Which is bad for society, but necessarily bad from a community stand point. Reddit has only gotten worse the more popular it had gotten. Starting over again in the next platform, maybe it could be better (without the monetization aspect). But someone has to cough up the dough for the servers. Non profit funding is happening; we’ll have to wait and see if that is enough.
Part of it is the standard crisis of capitalism, the profit you get from doing the same thing always declines, so over time you have to push up revenue (increasing prices, forcing people to pay, showing more ads, gathering more data, etc) & push down costs (fire engineers, run on less hardware, etc)
Part of it is capitalisms natural tendency to create monopolies, and the lack of competition in a given field causing the company to then lose sight of what it’s good at to compete in a bigger field.
Part is that interest rates mean loans are no longer cheap, so taking on debt to get customer, to at some point down the line make money, is a less viable plan. Twitter is a special case where the bad loans are because that was the original deal not interested rate related, and Musk is trying to pull all of the enshitification levers at the same time.
Part is that CEOs generally don’t have a fucking clue about their products or what they are doing (it’s a circuit job about who you know/blow, not what you know), so once one CEO starts firing/enshitifying, the rest just copy them so as to not be left out.
“Enshitify” is my new favorite word, right after “Polymascotfoamalate”.
I wouldn’t blame them being pure greed on capitalism honestly.
It’s not pure greed though, if companies do not push down costs & push up revenues enough, they get replaced by those that do.
It is capitalism doing what it does “best”, here’s a clip from I’m A Virgo that explains it better than me: https://youtu.be/lpagmvYZKRc?t=84
There are niches where companies can hide out for a while, especially if they provide a service that needs local implementation, but social media isn’t one of those niches, if you get outcompeted, your toast, no matter how big you peak, MySpace, Tumbler, Digg, Slashdot, etc, this is the monopolization effect of markets.
Capitalism is a system built on greed as a foundation to function. In a capitalist system, you must always continue to grow, expand, engulf, absorb, and acquire. This is why it is such a toxic and destructive system. Capitalism will always incentivize companies to get the most people possible to spend as much as possible on as little as possible, that’s literally the core principle of maximizing profitability.
It’s why enshittification keeps happening, the system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly how it’s supposed to.
Wouldn’t capitalism be relatively fine without the function of the Stock Exchange? I feel like the stock Exchange is what causes the issue with the need for continual growth. I feel like capitalism without the overarching need to continuously grow due to the demands of the stock exchange system, could work perfectly fine as you wouldn’t need to continuously grow but to maintain a profit and adjust for inflation where needed.
Capitalism codifies the acquisition and control of capital by an owning class separate from the workers (employees). The owners always want to see their profits grow, because in a system that is zero sum, where competition is glorified as the primary mechanism for fair pricing and business success, if you aren’t growing, then other competitors will eventually extinguish you.
Capitalism mimics evolution in that way, where all organisms compete against each other in a winner-takes-all setting. Talk to any hardcore Capitalist and they will talk about Capitalism being the “natural order”, “human nature” etc. I know, I used to be a hardcore free market capitalist.
A system that places profit and private ownership of capital above all else will always result in the kinds of oppressive systems and company practices we see today.
It’s like how fundamentalist religious institutions are having abuse scandals over and over for literal centuries. They are built in such a way that makes abuse easy to get away with. Even if it starts out perfectly clean, safe, and incorrupt, eventually the very structure of the organization itself will cause abusers to join or allow already abusive people to commit those acts without significant consequences. It is a negative feedback loop that perpetuates itself until it collapses totally or is extinguished by an outside force.
Just wait till you have to pay per email. You’re not still using Gmail are you?
Imagine being a tech company and using a stat like the number of emails received daily to justify pushing human users away from the product…
That’s what I see with all these companies.
They see a huge user base by numbers but can’t recognize that it’s 99% boots and spam, thinking that the 1% real users are going to pay to interact with bot spam
Why switch now if I could switch later (if they would really monetize it with fees, which I doubt)? It would be a pain in any case.
It’s free because you’re the product. All that content is scanned
Paranoid much?
Google Mail does not scan the content of your emails for the purpose of showing you ads. However, Google Mail does use some information about your emails, such as your email address and the sender and recipient addresses, to improve its spam and phishing filters.
You can control how much information Google Mail collects about your emails by adjusting your privacy settings. For example, you can choose to have Gmail not scan your email attachments for viruses.
Just read their general terms.
I work in cybersecurity, yes I’m paranoid, because companies do abuse your data.
Could it be related to the silicon valley bank going under maybe?
Kinda? The bank going under is indicative of financial instability in the wake of COVID, and it’s that same financial uncertainty coupled with rising inflation that has put an end to the bottomless well of venture capital that tech companies used to take advantage of.
SVB was killed because their customers did a run on the bank (withdrew large amounts of money in fear of a collapse) and they didn’t have enough in assets to cover it all, which led to the inevitable collapse. A bit like how early in the COVID days, there was fear that stores would run out of supplies, so people bought up everything they could in bulk and then the stores ran out of supplies. Panic about a potential outcome which then causes that outcome to happen.
