Wow, the ‘enshittification’ of the internet is really taking off now. Sites are either already dodgy, or well on their way there!
I know this has been a bit of a slow burn for a while now, but it really feels like it’s all coming to a head suddenly.
We really gotta back decentralized platforms if we don’t want everything to become an overmonetized hellscape where all information and communication is skewed to suit business interests. I wouldn’t pay for Reddit Gold and Twitter Blue but I should send some money to the Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon folks.
The Great Internet Recession™ has begun
Forreal, what’s going on? Why does it seem like so many separate sites are suddenly so much worse/going downhill quickly?
Apparently they have been living on life-support.
I can’t claim to fully understand how it worked, but apparently as long as sites could show user growth they could attract investments, but with inflation causing interest rates to go up (and other economy hocus pocus) , that money is quickly drying up.
I don’t know if the investors believed that if the user base could grow large enough, someone would buy the companies, or they suddenly could come up with some fantastic monetization of said user-base.
Now as companies are listed on the stock exchange, and facing the falling investor interest, they are expected to react (aggressively) to secure future revenue.
Adding to what you said about interest rates: We’re at the end of a long period of cheap borrowing (very low interest rates) during which overvalued assets were used as collateral to secure loans for investments. These propped-up assets are beginning to drop to their true (intrinsic) values. In other words, speculation and irresponsible practices were propping up a house of cards that’s starting to collapse, and now investors are scrambling to cash in or cut losses wherever they can. So they’re deciding that time has run out for online platforms that promised to grow but still haven’t hit their numbers/monetization goals.
tl;dr: Infinite money glitch got patched (because it was wreaking all sorts of financial havoc) and now investors need to end life-support for risky/unprofitable investments.
Same thing is happening to streaming services
Streaming fell apart quickly, it’s so hard to find anything decent on most of them. It’s become clear they can’t curate new content as readily.
It’ll be even worse when there are no new series to watch because all of the people who write them are on strike. The content mines are drying up.
Our entire Internet enjoyment has been heavily subsidized by venture capital for the last 30 years which hoped to monetize us more than they have been able (believe it or not).
Now they are calling in their bets…
Billionaires bought the internet and now they’re realizing that it isn’t profitable.
Oh sweet, it’s dot.com 2.0. Grab your popcorn, it’s time for the internet to implode… again! Never ever underestimate shareholders’ willingness to self-destruct a product for short-term profit.
It’s like the second implosion in a many weeks
Next one will be human instrumentality!
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Similar to what happened after the last dot com crash, it’ll be interesting to see how the internet evolves and what comes next.
It’s called fiduciary duty and it’s why every mega company sucks.
Cut costs by replacing cashiers with self checkout? Write a fat check to the shareholders! Then, shoplifting is becoming an even bigger issue from the self checkout… Cut costs again by preventing shoplifting by having people man the self checkout! Write another fat check to the shareholders!
Nevermind that it would have been easier and cheaper to just keep the system we had. Looking at you, Target.
Hey, but self-checkouts are good. Dunno how they use them at target, but at shops I go to they allow me to get to the shop, grab what I need and leave within 5 minutes.
And not so sure with cheaper. Again from my experience, shops have a setup of 6 self-checkouts per 1 employee.
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They’re only good if they pass the savings of not having to pay a person to ring up your groceries onto you
I’m with the other person on this one. Self checkouts have really reduced the queues where I live. They’re much more compact than the cash registers and the shop near me basically doubled its cash register capacity because of them. I rarely have to wait in a queue these days.
Tesco even has a scan as you shop service which is really convenient. You get a barcode scanner before you start shopping, then scan all products you want to buy and place them directly in your bags. At the checkout, you scan a barcode attached to the checkout machine, it prompts you to pay, you pay and leave. All your things are already bagged.
Fiduciary duty is an absolute circus. Obligating companies to maximize profits at the expense of the wider society is the exact opposite of how law should work.
Remember! You can’t say “fiduciary duty” without saying “douche” and “doody.”
So, twitter, Reddit, Imgur, and now Gfycat are all killing itself
Has the internet bubble finally popped?
The privately-owned for-profit Internet is starting to pop. User-driven FOSS will reign supreme.
Just like the good old times of internet. When every kid had a hobby and installed a forum software into a shared hosting to spend time with others. “If you build it, he/they will come.”
You mean popped again? It has already popped back in 2002 with the dot-com bubble bursting. Seems investors never learn.
Wait what’s happening with imgur?
Removing porn and all images not uploaded from an imgur account
Been wondering how they detect how many videos you’ve watched without being logged in.
Cookies can be cleared, IPs can be changed, and if we all use something like the Mullvad Browser fingerprinting will be far more difficult.
I just spin up new virtual machines, with different flavors of linux. They’re all fairly interchangable at this point.
Damn, and end of an era…
Had no idea this was even at risk of shutting down…
It’s like the enshitification cycle somehow synced! https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
On Baconreader it wouldn’t show a gif, it would just be link, which was pretty good.
His name was Bacon Reader… His name was Bacon Reader…
Not a coincidence. End of cheap money era.
Yeah, no - it’s definitely not a coincidence, that was said tongue in cheek https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/04/07/vc_funding_falls/
This is insane. I wonder what other relatively large internet service will go down.
Apparently PornHub already lost 80% of their traffic due to age verification laws. I’ll add the source when I’ll get back to it.
Edit: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/3/23782776/pornhub-blocks-mississippi-virginia-age-verification-laws
Edit 2: Maybe I misunderstood, see below comments
I feel like that can’t be true, I imagine a huge amount of pornhubs users are international
It’s a poorly written sentence (not surprising as it’s The Verge lol) but I think they mean they lost 80% of traffic from Louisiana when they started enforcing age verification in that state which is why they now just block access entirely to states that enact these laws instead of bothering with the age verification.
Reading the article would make me believe it’s 80% of traffic from Louisiana and not overall. So they will be fine lol.
Still Though, when Pornhub falls, that’s when we know were in trouble.
RIP Nippy Kind Langur
And the custom https://gfycat.com/brutalsavagerekt in response to its popularity.
That’s crazy. Things are moving fast these days. It seems every private company owning a big website is trying to squeeze money out of user or closing.
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The death of the old internet continues…
Most likely the new internet. That, where every website was created with money in mind.
So what’s the open-source alternative for gfycat? We got a trend started here let’s keep it going!
The problem with something like gfycat isn’t the source code, it’s the storage and bandwidth. That shit is expensive and there’s no way to do it for free without showing ads and not go broke.
What the hell is going on?
Everything is falling down:
- Google is dropping Reddit and Twitter from their searches.
- Twitter is throttling Tweets and you have to signin to view anything. Which would be crazy antivaxxer radicals, so not missing anything. No more free API use.
- YouTube is blocking you after 3 videos if you use an adblocker.
- Reddit has killed all 3rd party apps among API changes
- Now Gfycat is going, man that’s like most of the sites I used since a kid. Imgur seems to be around still at least.
Do ya remember photobucket? … Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Imgur doesn’t even load for me on Firefox Mobile + uBlockOrigin. It also tries to redirect me to their broken front end if I just want the .jpg file. I absolutely hate them and wish people would stop using it.
- Imgur banned and purged NSFW images
After 2008, interest rates were set to zero and basically stayed there for the next 15 years. What that meant was that investing your money in literally anything was better than putting it in a savings account or loaning it to the government (bonds). What thatmeant is that any company with a dream and a product found themselves swimming in piles and piles of venture capital fund funds. And all that money meant that customers were getting a lot of stuff at or below cost from companies that had lots of cash to spend, and no real concern about making it back. Now the free ride is over and everyone is trying to cash in, only to find that’s not as easy as they made it sound to their investors.
Enshittification is a sexy concept and I understand why everyone has glommed on to it. Unfortunately, the interest rate explanation is the much more complete and correct one.
