Technology

The reddit exodus is comparatively very small. Tens of thousands of users, many of which will not stick around. Reddit has millions of users (hundreds of millions?). They barely notice.

They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.

...jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called "Tiktok's enshittification". It's a four-steps process:

1. The platform is good for its users.
2. The platform abuses the users, to be good for its business customers.
3. The platform abuses the business customers, to claw back all value for itself.
4. The platform dies.

In my opinion it's also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.

This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.

I've always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn't invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I'm probably on here too much though!

It's not just tech companies like Reddit and Twitter, it seems like it's most companies. Ever since the COVID lockdowns prices have been going through the roof, you get less for what you pay for, they're laying off workers, and all while raking in record profits while also crying about how no one wants to work and how they can't afford anything because of the economy. I've never been more cynical about companies than I have been the last year.

From Cory Doctorow:

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.

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Some of it is because we had a decade of cheap borrowing which has come to an end and many of these platforms were never profitable.

what happened with twitch?

I don't think all that many redditors are moving to Lemmy. Judging by the stats on join-lemmy, there are only several thousand monthly Lemmy users, which is nothing compared to reddit which had tens of millions daily users

Social media sites that have been in the red, growing primarily through fostering good will in their customers, are finally trying to turn a profit, and there isn't much available to profit off of without intentionally kneecapping some aspect of your product. Taking stuff away is the fastest way to pissing someone off.

The time of free money is over

All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.

The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet's history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the "next best thing".

Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It's only just getting started, you watch.

big money ruins everything

We've reached the end of the VC-funded golden age where they are all now demanding a return on their investment, hence why the screws are now all getting tightened.

Let them self destruct.

I'm just glad to have found this place. 😂

Some people have come up with the word "enshittification" to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.

The cycle consists of three parts:

1. You make the service that attracts new users by providing what they want. Often you do that at a loss, because your goal is to gain a big enough userbase for steps 2 and 3.
2. Once there's enough users, you shift to attracting commercial interests instead -- vendors if you're running a store, advertisers or celebrities or other "big clients" if you're a social network, etc.
3. Once both users and commercial interests are hooked, you can start tightening all the rules and switching completely to profiting yourself and your shareholders.

The timeline split after harambe. This is known

Late Stage Capitalism.

The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company.

Dying? Twitter is very well "alive" despite everything that has happened. I don't know what will happen to Reddit and Twitch but I doubt these platforms will "die". They aren't dying really. Just becoming worse over time. People will continue using these platforms up to a certain degree.

What's going on with Twitch ?

they are realizing that if they want to maximize profits they don't actually need to maximize users.

@notExactlyI20 Also, in the centralized model it only takes a few decisions to tank things. See: Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover and his following decisions and Reddit’s new pricing scheme.