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!

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.

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.

Doctorow’s Enshittification describes it pretty much dead-on. It’s basically the cancerous form of late-stage capitalism that we’re living under now.

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.

The timeline split after harambe. This is known

The line has to go up.

The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don’t demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don’t sell and bail.

Now, with Twitter there’s a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn’t the place for it.

Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it’s money.

Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it’s Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they’re making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.

Facebook: I don’t even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it’s just ads.

Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn’t feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they’re a bad thing, just using an example)

Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.

I have a sinking feeling that these moves are not about money, but more about power and manipulation. If you squeeze these user bases such that the savviest users are forced out, those more likely to ask “Why?” about damn near anything, you will own access to a group of people that can be influenced to think/do/buy whatever the top management and/or majority shareholders want. If you lose a few million users, what does it matter if they were dissidents to your goals?

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.

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

Everybody just wants money now. Some of that is reasonable, these companies tend to work if not with a loss, then with quite unpredictable margins.

Now that tech investors have found a new bubble - AI - they are no longer willing to sponsor old-fashion internet stuff and wait if it ever turns a profit.

Especially since many got used to becoming all that richer during the pandemic, and are looking to keep those numbers rising.

But there’s also some sudden hatred of porn, and I don’t know where that is coming from. Tumblr, Imgur have limited it completely, OF wanted to, Reddit probably will, coedcherry shut down. The owner of coedcherry said it was really a sudden 180° turn of the banks to no longer wanting to do anything with porn, and nobody knows why.

It’s especially bizzare considering how these platforms keep assuring us that we’ll still be able to post and see blown off heads and all kinds of other nasty stuff, it’s just the titties that are being banned! Eh?

Their death is waaaay overdue. We literally jumped one cycle because the 2008 financial crisis and 0% interest rate.

Now there is no free money, and they need to extract value to seem a good investment, so they canibalize themselves and turn into shit.

Most of Elon stuff is doomed once reality catches on. Same with Uber. Same with streaming platforms. Same with Meta.

Also there is a new/old boy in the bubble and burst town, Microsoft and their AI push. It’s going to destroy them pushing them into overspending to keep up.

Facebook dies due to privacy concerns and misinformation. Twitter under threat because Elon. Imgur just deleted their NSFW content. Reddit with its API pricing. Twitch executives also getting greedy. Youtube has been going down for years.

It feels like we’re seeing the natural life-cycle of social media companies in real time.

From everything I have observed, businesses are hunkering down for a recession in the next fiscal year. It explains the lay offs, the penny pinching, and puzzling decisions that look like business suicide.

For services that are free for users, advertising revenue and investment fund raisers are the only thing keeping them afloat. With banks like SVB getting seized by the FDIC, it’s starting to scare investors. Advertisers are seeing the writing on the wall that people will stop spending as much as they used to. We are also probably seeing jacked up pricing across the board because businesses are taking what they can before it’s gone.

So what’s left? Squeeze users for money. Additionally, shed users that actually cost them money and these tend to be power users. The question, which everyone seems to be assuming is a foregone conclusion, is if this shedding strategy will end up killing the service. In reality, we don’t know but the idealists would sure feel good if someone else ate their market share.

I’m just glad that federation is picking up steam in the social media space.

The twitter thing is sad, but honestly not a huge deal. I rarely used it anyhow.

The reddit thing is depressing, since I’ve been a huge supporter and user of Apollo for many years. It feels like getting stepped on and I feel for the developer Christian Selig who devoted so much time and energy to the app.

I hope nothing happens to Twitch in the way that Twitter and Reddit have though, the small time streamers I follow and support won’t survive a thing like that.