Like many people I’m here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I’ve been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?
The high times are over and money ain’t cheap anymore. We’ve lived in a fantasy land of low interest rates for over a decade now. These companies, and more importantly their VC backers, want to see the same returns on their investments but now they have to actually make that money. That means squeezing customers for more with less.
Unchecked corporate greed and no regards for users or communities that were built on these platforms. Hopefully the centralized ones will die from too many ads and user abandonment and the decentralized ones will rise and thrive.
Exactly this. The money tap has dried up post pandemic and they are seeking new revenue streams while also slashing costs. The hunger for perpetual growth to sate the investor class and their matyroshka nesting yachts is driving these decisions.
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Im glad decentralized social media is picking up steam. No more of these major communication platform rug poolings for everyone. Now at worst individual instances can implode and everyone just has to move to a different instance or self-host, and still access communities on every other instance.
I think it’s orchestrated. I think it’s intentional. I think the internet is under attack in the capacity that we know it as. I know it makes me sound conspiratorial but ever since Musk overtook Twitter every big social CEO has praised is approach. Musk fucked the internet up as we know it and Rupert Murdock showed media moguls that they can push trash and make heaps of money. There’s no incentive to run quality content online and Musk started the downturn of that realization. I think we’re in for some troubling times.
Musk didn’t start shit. FB is far more to blame for the current web, than a few months of Elon running Twitter into the dirt.
