Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
from Cory Doctorow’s article on ‘enshittification’, which has become mandatory reading.
Just to add, the concept of a bait and switch, where you lure a party in with something and then swap it out once they are committed, is not a new idea in the slightest. This is just a modernized, refined tech version.
Uber and Lyft are good examples. Drive out most of the competition with an aggressive early phase where you spend most of your capital to shore up a massively negative balance sheet. You are baiting the customers to you with very low prices.
Then once the competition is eliminated, you raise your prices on the captive consumers that rely on the service to recoup your costs and start making money.
If you, in a video game, have ever lured something in with ranged attacks and then switched to melee to kill it, by plan, you executed this same strategy.
Every single discounted trial period for a subscription is employing a riff on the same concept, where they hope you’re too lazy to cancel.
Fools been falling for the bait and switch since … oh dawn of civilization maybe? Awareness of it defeats it, people don’t take bait when they know it’s bait. It is not complicated though, and does not require complex understanding to grasp.
IIRC, it’s in the article, but what makes enshitification so prevalent in tech is that it mostly involves networks, wherein part of the value of using the application comes from the presence and concentration of other users and providers on it (network effect). Even Amazon, Netflix, and Uber, are subject to that effect because they capture providers, not just users you will interact with. It’s a somewhat uniq trait that really exacerbates the problem. This trend will probably continue untill interoperability is legislated.
Right before the pandemic I was trying to not use Amazon anymore (I said f it during the pandemic because it was so hard to get ANYTHING for the first six months, but I need to go back to it). There was some random thing I wanted to buy, so I hunted down the manufacturer’s website and ordered it from them directly.
The thing still arrived in an Amazon envelope from an Amazon fulfillment center in an Amazon delivery van, because the small manufacturer was using fulfilled-by-Amazon for all their logistics, even for stuff sold on their own website. So apparently I can’t even stop using Amazon if I want to!
Your metaphor reminded me of killing vampires in Skyrim and it made me smile as I also feel a deep sorrow from the fact all major companies now are racing to the bottom while leaving their skidmarks on everything I used to love.
If you, in a video game, have ever lured something in with ranged attacks and then switched to melee to kill it, by plan, you executed this same strategy.
What is the real world equivalent of standing on a rock to abuse the NPC’s pathfinding and cheese them to death?
Probably something along the lines of a castle of some sort. Maybe with a little of the “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you…” thing to a younger sibling.
That was a good read, the thing is that it seems that all of a sudden a lot of tech companies are getting more and more anti-consumer. I mean it’s not only the whole Reddit and Twitter thing, now Youtube is getting more aggressive with adblocking, Stackoverflow and their mod protest, Google dropping support for the open source diaper and messaging apps on Android…
Many companies are getting more aggressive against their customers, and in the end it feels like the internet as it used to be is really dying, and we might end up with the whole “dead internet theory” becoming reality. I don’t know it just feels very depressing.
If you haven’t already, I suggest reading Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media, a blog post by Catherynne M. Valent. (It’s actually referenced in the article above.)
It’s long, funny, and angry and damn, did it strike a chord with me. It was written in December, '22 so pre-Reddit meltdown but still very relevant to it.
Some highlights include:
Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters… It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.
Over and over again … I’ve joined online communities, found so much to love there, made friends and created unique spaces that truly felt special, felt like places worth protecting. And they’ve all, eventually, died. For the same reasons and through the same means, though machinations came from a parade of different bad actors. It never really mattered who exactly killed and ate these little worlds. The details. It’s all the same cycle, the same beasts, the same dark hungers.
All … gone. Dismantled for parts and sold off with zero understanding that the only thing of any value the site ever offered was the community, its content, its connection, its possibilities, its knowledge. And that can’t be sold with the office space and the codebase. These sites exist because of what we do there. But at any moment they can be sold out from under us, to no benefit or profit to the workers—yes, workers, goddammit—who built it into something other than a dot com address and a dusty login screen, yet to the great benefit and profit of those who, more often than not, use the money to make it more difficult for people to connect to and accept each other positively in the future.
It does end on a hopeful note, though.
Don’t ever stop talking to each other. It’s what the internet is really and truly for. Talk to each other and listen to each other. But don’t ever stop connecting. Be a prodigy of the new world. Stand up for the truth no matter how often they take our voices away and try to replace the idea of reality with fucking insane Lovecraftian shit. Don’t give up, don’t let them have this world.
Don’t get cynical. Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in. Us doesn’t have a web address. We are wherever we gather. Mastodon, Substack, Patreon, Dreamwidth, AO3, Tumblr, Discord, even the ruins of Twitter, even Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok, god help us all. Even Diaryland.
It doesn’t matter. They’re just names. It doesn’t matter who owns them. Because we own ourselves and our words and the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis. We make our place when we’re together. We make our magic when we connect, typing hands to typing hands.
Hello, world. Come in from the cold. This will be a good place. For awhile. And then we’ll make another one.
Stop buying things and start talking to each other. They’ve always known that was how they lose.
OMG those quotes mention so many of my early internet memories. Dreamwidth. And before that, Livejournal before it sucked. And Diaryland. And Diary-X. And egroups. I miss those days so much. Twitter and Reddit weren’t the first to jump the shark, by a long shot.
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I cannot read that and feel how short-sighted it is. The death of online communities due to money sucks. But how about the actual death of physical people and their physical communities due to literally the exact same thing? It seems douchey to complain about capitalism killing message boards and not connect the idea at all to how it has been killing everything on earth since humans became a thing.
Here it is: good ol’ “Whataboutism”, I almost had hope that one discussion could survive without someone going “wait, what about this other thing that people know and probably care about, but is completely irrevelant to the current conversation at hand?” but ah well, today just wasn’t the day, I guess.
Seriously tho, to borrow your first sentence: I can’t help but read something like “But how about the actual death of physical people and their physical communities” and think…are people just incapable of caring about two seperate issues of different scales at the same time? I don’t know, maybe I’m weird because I don’t suddenly think of the all starving people around the world and bring them up when the topic of the closing of the food joint a couple of blocks down gets brought up by the regulars…
I output what I feel. I feel that text is blind to itself, it talks about a shitty issue with too much grandiosity. It could be written with some more self-awareness to its place in the general discussion about freedoms. It is nothing, or at least not very much, but presents itself as everything.
I was too harsh in my original comment, I apologize, honestly. I’ve seen Whatabout-ism so much recently and it’s just draining to basically hear people constantly try and change the subject or bring up something completely outta left field instead of contributing to what’s in front of them, I’ll be real with you.
I get what you’re saying, but, well, the issue is that important to the author to be writing about it in such a grand way. Or they’re flexing thier writing skills, who really knows. That isn’t to say they don’t give a shit about the death of people and thier communities or other injustices to people and freedoms…they’re just not relevant to this particular problem they wanna focus on at the moment. They know there’s worse shit out there that also needs attention, most people with half a brain know it too. But that’s a whole different beast to what’s being talked about here.
“Yes, I understand the problem, but have you considered there are larger problems?” is a pretty uninteresting take. You can care about more than one thing at once.
You can also take a step back and see that you’re exaggerating certain problems because you’re being swept away by your emotions. I think that that text lacks perspective and feels narcissistic and blind to itself at best.
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What point are you even trying to make? That has nothing to do with this topic.
I disagree. The way you discuss a subject is important to understand why you are discussing a subject. The melodrama in that text overshadows its message and makese me cringe and disconnects me from its valid point.
Interest rates. Money isn’t free anymore. It’s still not super expensive but it’s 5x more expensive than what it used to be since 2008.
This is the answer. The age of free money is over and now we are seeing the effect; rampant inflation and high interest rates. The chickens come home to roost, always.
As a result, the burn rate and runway is starting to be factors in all businesses that aren’t making a profit.
Yep, VCs are unwilling to just fund any old thing hoping they’ll hit the lottery right now when money is “expensive”.
Many companies are getting more aggressive against their customers, and in the end it feels like the internet as it used to be is really dying, and we might end up with the whole “dead internet theory” becoming reality. I don’t know it just feels very depressing.
With all the distributed social networks getting popular only among tech-literate people it feels like we’re getting a reverse- Eternal September as well.
A few companies open the floodgates and takes a lot of the blame, flak, and focus (see: Netflix, Twitter). Other companies can seize the moment and ride the wave to potentially increase profits with less blowback than they might otherwise receive.
2022-'23 really has been the year of enshitification
But I think it all started with Tumblr
I think you mean dialer.
Many companies are realizing they can screw their users over and turn a profit for their actual bosses, the shareholders. Whether that’s true only time will tell.
Many companies are getting more aggressive against their customers
Oh no, they are getting more friendly to their customers. The thing is, you’re not the customer, the ad companies are the customers. You’re the product they’re selling. And they want to improve the product by controlling it more.
This can’t be true, Reddit said they cared about community /s
They do care about 1 very specific, very niche community. Their shareholders.
I had just copied the link to post this.
Read this for an actual answer.
This, just this
That was an excellent read and something I’ve observed many times but failed to describe so well. I really like the analogy of the big teddy bear.
Is it possible for Lemmy to become enshittified? If so, how? Given that it has federation at it’s core and it’s not owned by any one entity, wouldn’t the greater community just abandon the bad instance and self heal, like a lizard loses it’s tail?
I understand how federation could die, like what Google Talk did to XMPP, but not how Cory’s described process would affect Lemmy.
I think the exception is companies “too big to die.” They serve as the archangels of tech so ALL other goals lead to being bought by FAANG or dying.
Apparently neither Twitter nor Reddit was too big to fail.
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The growth of online advertising revenue slowed in 2022 for the first time since 2009.It still grew, just slower.
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Interest rates went up.
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With the collapse of crypto and Silicon Valley Bank (which was overleveraged in crypto), VC money isn’t as free flowing. There really wasn’t that much institutional money in crypto, but it’s still a destablizing force and has had a ripple effect.
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AI is making more people aware of bots. This is related to point #1. A huge, unknown percentage of of FAANG revenue is selling online ads to bots instead of real eyeballs and once the word gets out, ad revenue will slow even more for any service depending on online ads (eg reddit).
One correction, SVB was not over-leveraged in crypto, they had too many government bonds when the interest rates went up, devaluing them.
That makes a lot more sense. Thank you.
Yeah, this makes sense. No use spending money on suggesting a product to a robot right?
I love number 1. The economy didn’t die, the money hasn’t dried up, these companies aren’t circling the drain.
they just haven’t made much more money than last year
And for some reason our gambling addict stock market economy says that’s a horrid thing. To only make a fraction more than last year’s record profits.
Note that a lot of tech companies, particularly startups, operate at a massive loss while they increase their market share and outcompete established competitors. The idea is that once they’re entrenched they can start raising prices and cutting back on expenses to start making massive profits-- see how great it was to use Uber 10 years ago and Amazon 15 years ago versus now. This heel turn was always coming for a lot of these companies. Interest rates rising and investors being less willing to hand over cash after high-profile failures like crypto just hastened the shift.
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Capitalism. Monetise everything no matter the cost to the users
To expand on this, it’s not just capitalism - it’s greed.
Potato potato
Well,greed causes capitalism
And capitalism causes greed!
I though it’s the other way around. Maybe it’s both and it’s closed circle
To expand on this, it’s not just capitalism - it’s greed.
No it’s just capitalism lol. Every company has to continue reaping in profits for capitalists or else it dies. This is just Reddit’s way of doing that.
Just saying, but they’re doing it wrong: they’re following in Twitter’s steps to the abyss.
I don’t think “greed” is quite the right word. “Greed” would be the right word if they were trying to make themselves more profitable. But they’re not: they’re trying to make themselves profitable at all. That’s not about greed, but about surviving. You can’t survive unless you stop hemorrhaging money at some point.
Maybe the question is “Why do investors invest so many hundred of billions of dollars into companies that cannot be profitable without becoming super-shitty? And why do users join them knowing that they’re going to become super-shitty one day?”
I don’t think “greed” is quite the right word. “Greed” would be the right word if they were trying to make themselves more profitable.
I mean regardless of whether it’s greed or not it’s happening because they need to generate a profit period lol.
“Why do investors invest so many hundred of billions of dollars into companies that cannot be profitable without becoming super-shitty? And why do users join them knowing that they’re going to become super-shitty one day?”
David Harvey has been ringing the bell on this for at least a decade lol. Effectively capitalism runs out of profitable investments when you need continued YoY growth. Like finding trillions of new investment opportunities a year is just not realistic. So capitalists fund bullshit projects and flow their money into markets where the perceived value is significantly greater than any of the actual socially necessary value. And that distance grows greater over time, until people realize ‘what the fuck are we funding’ (like what happened with crypto, or the metaverse), and then that gap immediately shrinks and the unlucky capitalists lose their money. And that will continue happening.
They don’t have to set up their companies this way, they have just chosen to. It’s all just greed in the end.
@Nollij @breadsmasher
one in the same
money, power, greed - all part of capitalism
But first be not as terrible to the users to attract them, then hope they’re lazy enough to not go anywhere when you treat them terribly later while they squeeze value from them
do you think this move will be good for their business?
You ask on Lemmy…
Exactly – this is almost certainly bad for Reddit’s business at this point. The problem here isn’t necessarily capitalism so much as it is a egocentric CEO gone mad with power.
I don’t even think it’s a bad business decision.
Most people didn’t use 3rd party apps to begin with. I’d guess about 75% of the vocal minority who protested, will continue to use Reddit.
And a very small % of people will quit Reddit in favor of Lemmy.
I’d argue it is, because of the damage they’re doing to their brand.
I’ve said it in a couple other threads, but Reddit has other ways they can monetize their 3rd party app users, such as requiring subscriptions to use third party apps, or even by simply giving third party app devs a longer lead time to change to a paid model. Instead of doing either of those things, the CEO had a tantrum and alienated a bunch of people.
Again, I’m almost certain that the % of people who really care are very small.
I’m not trying to defend Reddit, I used Apollo and am part of that small % of people leaving.
I mean, if you were right, ad spend would be up and their valuation wouldn’t have been cut for a second time
Cheers for being the very small %
Doesn’t have to be Lemmy, they just have to stop using Reddit. If the power users (posters, content creators, mods, etc) really do leave, then the regular users will likely lose interest and leave as well. It doesn’t matter if they go to Lemmy, TikTok, or start spending time with their loved ones again.
There are rumors that Reddit will start using (more) bots and AI to generate content, which is certainly not beneath them at this point. The tech equivalent of a lava lamp.
I suspect that power users, like mods, are more interested in the “power” they have on Reddit than standing up for anything.
I’d love to be wrong though. Reddit can’t die fast enough.
Some definitely are. They’re the ones that folded as soon as Reddit threatened them. Others are holding strong, knowing they will be removed. Others, like the ones posting John Oliver memes, are really just trying to feel like they’re in power. They won’t do anything to actually get in trouble
Yea, I am not a capitalism enjoyer, but it’s comical watching people insert their favorite pet politics as the sole reason for everything that’s happening.
In the short term? Maybe. Long term? Probably not.
What’s good for making more money is not always or even often good for what we would think of as customer-friendly business. If you can wring more money out of a few whales at the expense of pissing off customers who don’t create as much revenue, then in our current system that’s what shareholders apparently want.
Reddit wants more users in their official app where they can target them for ads, sell NFTs, and whatever other bullshit they want to sell. It doesn’t matter if the experience is worse, and it probably doesn’t really matter if a couple thousand 3PA users split for good. As long as they can tell investors that the official app use is growing and that they can target a greater percentage of users with ads and data, they feel like they won.
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Capitalism. The incentive for any large, profit-motivated firm will always be to get the most people to pay as much as possible for as little as possible.
- Startup releases nice product
- Product is cheap or free
- Startup gains huge customer base while burning through money
- Investors are interested
- When initial money runs out, startup either asks for VC money or goes public
- Now investors want more growth
- Product goes through enshitification to extract more money out of customers
- Product loses customers as it loses its original charm
A tale as old as time
In the tech world I’ve heard it called enshitification. Basically what you layed out but with a little nuanced difference.
In short: money.
Long story is that a lot of these tech companies started as startups funded by VCs.
Borrowing money was cheap so they got dumped buckets of money onto them to burn in an effort to try to get a foothold and/or kill off competition by undercutting them.Now that they’ve gained a foothold and in some cases have a near monopoly or duopoly and now that borrowing money isn’t cheap anymore, they need to start cutting cost if not outright turn a profit.
And so the enshittification begins.
Specifically for Twitter, Musk needs to cut cost because he bought Twitter at a severe premium and has made it less valuable by the minute ever since he took over. This to the point that he is leaving bills unpaid.
Specifically for Reddit, they’ve burned through all that VC money and have been eying a juicy exit in the form of an IPO. An IPO would be a payday for everyone who initially invested into Reddit because now they can sell their shares for more than what they invested (or at least that’s their hope). In order to get a good price once they go public they want to cut cost and increase revenue to seem as valuable as possible.
Specifically for YouTube, the ad game has been generating less and less revenue over time and advertisers have been burned in the past by having their ads placed next to objectionable content.
So the knee-jerk reaction is to severely tighten the rules for content, lest they be demonetized.
This however made creators realize that their livelihood in the form of the pittance that’s called AdSense payout is very fragile, so they started moving to doing sponsorships, soliciting Patreon donations and partnering with Nebula.Now YouTube is missing out on those revenue streams and often ad revenue as well as creators often turn off ads on their video when they have sponsor deals etc. So what does YouTube do? They started monetizing videos of creators who are not eligible for their partner program (i.e. place ads on videos and not share it with creators) and not give those creators the option to turn off ads, they started severely increasing the amount of ads on videos that do run ads, they started severely pushing YouTube Premium and now they’re cracking down on adblockers.
Yeah man, it sucks. We won’t miss Twitter because there are alternatives, i think the fediverse has the potential to be less predatory and more stable over time while facing its own issues; but for YouTube, i got nothing. Video hosting is expensive, there’s no way around it, whether it’s for centralized servers or enthusiasts running their own instance.
There is PeerTube, which is kind of the Fediverse’s answer to YouTube.
It doesn’t really fit to YouTube the same way Mastodon fits Twitter and Lemmy fits Reddit, but it’s relatively well used outside of the West, due to local governments blocking YouTube etc.
Still there’s no way around the fact that hosting videos is expensive and someone has to pay for it. It seems like PeerTube mostly contains small private instances where people host their own content. If you find an instance that allows you to upload videos, then it’s up to the administrator to decide what content is allowed. I feel like I can still trust YouTube more that my videos won’t disappear some day. You can of course create your own instance. I don’t know if that would be the way to go then.
Still there’s no way around the fact that hosting videos is expensive and someone has to pay for it. It seems like PeerTube mostly contains small private instances where people host their own content. If you find an instance that allows you to upload videos, then it’s up to the administrator to decide what content is allowed. I feel like I can still trust YouTube more that my videos won’t disappear some day. You can of course create your own instance. I don’t know if that would be the way to go then.
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Elon is a dufus. But Twitter burned about half a billion per year before being aquired. Those silicon valley companies are unprofitable zombies for decades without it’s users even realizing that the service won’t be free forever. They continue eating through borrowed venture capital and investment rounds (expecting returns). Having to charge a price for your service is ok, but it’s harder after it was free & doing it without an explanation. It’s a given that reddit is still very much unprofitable but their PR would be in a much better position if they were more transparent instead of just dictating changes & terms to their volunteers.
People overstate how bad Twitter’s financial situation was prior to Elons takeover. They lost 500 million but had 5 billion in revenue. While not great with strategic cost cuts and a little investment in improving the ad platform they probably could have become profitable. Probably not enough to satisfy their investors but profitable.
Elon saddled them with so much debt and has become hostile to advertisers I doubt that they will ever be profitable now.
Both platforms are essentially run by narcissistic assholes who double down on stupid shit just to “stick it to the users.”
The user bubble has popped now that investors started questioning why the fuck they’ve been investing huge amounts of money into companies that make no money just because they have lots of users. With that investment money drying up, these tech companies are desperate to start making a profit so they can survive and grow their value still.
TLDR: investment in unprofitable tech companies is drying up and companies that aren’t profitable are scrambling to make money.
I also think that the money Elon spent on Twitter has them licking their lips too. Also, Reddit itself probably finally sees it’s big payday with the AI hype and wanting to IPO soon, but they ain’t getting that bag of cash if they give away all their data for free.
The interest rate hike in the USA by the federal government caused this. The companies can’t borrow money for nearly free any more. All the entities who would have been offering these loans are now able to buy government bonds with a much more guaranteed return on investment. This means the corporations must squeeze more profit out of their products to pay back loans. There are an enormous amount of large money transactions like this used to run a large business. They do not operate on cash reserves all the time. They have assets and are always evolving to stay relevant. Most businesses have enormous asset holdings but limited liquidity.
This best answers the OPs question. We know why it happens in general, but this is why everything is doing it in overdrive right now.
I also think Spez is trying to rush into an IPO before the bottom truly drops out and the company folds.
There is a significant change in investment climate since the beginning of the year.
Before you could basically get another round of investments very easily even without being profitable as central banks were lending money for free more or less. This meant that the current VC investors could usually find a bigger fool to offload their investment to.
However now the few remaining new investors actually want to make a return of investment from the company itself and not just artificially pump it up further to find another buyer for their exit. So the current investors are putting a lot of pressure on these companies to appear profitable no matter what so that they can exit their investment.
That makes me wonder if someone else would pick it up in an asset sale and keep it running (from the users’ point of view). That doesn’t necessarily solve the revenue problem, but it does shed debt that would have to be serviced, which would reduce costs, which would increase the bottom line.
There’s also a clampdown on venture capital happening now. Investors are getting tired of waiting indefinitely for returns on over-valued media companies. For any running in the red, things are going to get tight. That means layoffs that result in lower quality service and more burden on users for revenue. Social media has never been a profitable and sustainable corporate enterprise.
As always, $$$
Probably enshitification!
Look it up.
I hate that word. Crapification or Shitification would have done fine
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Dr. Capitalism, or How I learned to stop worrying and love the dollar.
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.
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.
Twitter ist public? I thought it’s Elon’s private property now, no public trading any more.
I think Elon just bought majority, like 51% of shares or something. I don’t really remember it’s been a while
No.
Musk, who posted a tweet saying “the bird is freed” in reference to his ownership of the micro-blogging site, owns all the shares in the site once payments to shareholders was finalized. Trading in the shares on the New York Stock Exchange has been suspended, meaning no new purchases of the stock can be made.
He bought ALL the shares?? Why?
Are those kinds of numbers publically available? Im guessing no but they would be interesting to see.
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.
Exactly. They make anti-user decisions because users aren’t the customer, they’re the product.
I wonder if restricting API access might be related to the explosion of GPT where ML companies need training data and they’ve been sucking it up from everywhere they can. Reddit and Twitter realized that they could charge these companies for access instead and hence all of a sudden API access costs money.
🤯 This is totally it. No way it’s just a coincidence 2 big social platforms “close” their APIs
Want your mind blown further?
Both platforms started out with fake users posting a dozen or so comments on top posts to feign activity on top posts and incentive others to join in.
Why didn’t many other platforms do the same? They did. But it takes labor, and labor costs money. So who cares, right?
Except that’s not true anymoee. Now, in a post-ChatGTP, the labor cost is gone. And screw “dozens”. If someone has access to enough training data, they can design a machine that does HUNDREDS of typical-user.
Reddit right now is the picture perfect of the conservatives they love to hate on so much on WhitePeopleTwitter. They went in through a door, got theirs, and now are afraid and trying to keep it closed from the other side.
That has been the reasoning from Reddit. I believe it’s one of those business conveniences where yes, he’s not wrong, and gives them an excuse to kill something they think is extracting revenue from them (3rd party apps). Convenient excuse, but no one believes it.
I mean the purpose of a commercial platform is to create profit for the owners of the platform. I find it kind of funny that people are all outraged that these platform are pursuing their business interests. The mistake people made was to rely on these platforms to build their communities thinking that made them stakeholders.
I’m pretty that is the main reason why there was changes to the API. Also, gaining an new potential revenue stream (highly unlikely with the rate they “charged”) for a company that doesn’t turn a profit would have been great.
Enshittification and the raising of interest rates.
