YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
I think it’s a consequence of higher interest rates drying up VC money, meaning that tech companies now have to actually be profitable, rather than just grow.
If the plan was grow now, profit later, then later has come
Nailed it, investors are demanding profit increases, it’s not just interest rates (though they’re the main reason) but also the corporate tax cuts in 2018 basically dumped a ton of profit onto corporations because they repatriated all their offshore cash they’d been hoarding.
That bump lasted 2 years, but the expectation of higher revenue is still there, it doesn’t matter if you got lucky at slots last month, if you make your normal salary this month investors will be absolutely pissed.
This sounds too stupid to be real but I was working for one of the largest corporations in the world during this period and we were congratulated on 20% growth even though we did nothing. Of course we didn’t get an extra bonus or anything but they acted like we had an incredible year when we really just had an average year with a massive tax cut.
Then the next year, our goal was to grow at 20% again and when we missed it by 17%, no one got a bonus or raise.
This timeline is the stupid one.
This is what irritates me. You still made money just not as much as you wanted or hoped so your company punishes you. You can’t have infinite growth
You can’t have infinite growth
Every publicly-traded company: “Hold my beer”
Capitalism: “Numbers go brrrrr”
Most companies really are that retarded because everyone wants to look good and take credit for every great thing happening. People like that should not be in charge of anything.
This is also a great example of why higher interest rates aren’t automatically a terrible thing. In general, it’s probably a good sign for the economy that companies are expected to be profitable. Means resources are being used well. The limitless VC money kinda meant any dumb idea regardless of merit got funding.
I wish we lived in a society where not everything needed to be profitable. People deserve treats and sucks to have things that made our lives better go awake because shareholders demand money
There are a number of ways things can function that way. Unfortunately, they don’t scale well.
This is part of my hope of federalisation, it lets a group of small entities act as a single large entity. It also lets non-profit and profit making work together. The for-profit provide the brute force, the non-profits keep them from going off the rails too far. It might be the workaround we need.
Also, be the change you want. For-profit businesses often win due to the far better returns. More people are willing to pour the effort into a business that could make them rich than a charity that never will.
I think we’d see loads of improvements if the philosophy went from “be as profitable as possible” to “just be profitable”. You’re 15% lower than last year, but still profiting? That’s just a smaller bonus for all employees and a smaller dividend for the investors, after putting a healthy amount of it into savings.
There’s no concept of “enough”. That’s the big problem. It goes for both economics and career advancement. There doesn’t always have to be a “higher”. It’s okay to say “it isn’t worth it to go further”.
Whether we like the ongoing enshittification of Reddit or not, I think it’s fair that shareholders expect a return on their investment and they have the right to pressure spez to seek aggressive monetization of the platform.
That problem wouldn’t have existed if Reddit was a non-profit though, like the Wikimedia Foundation.
expect a return on their investment and they have the right to pressure spez to seek aggressive monetization of the platform.
Whilst I agree that investors have everybright to expect a return on investment I think this could have been resolved and a number of ways which didn’t include alienating a large proportion of the user base.
Exactly I’m tired of all these capitalism apologists. The aim is to innovate, there must be a more decent way to monetise or profit. If pursuing such hardline tactics means profitable at the expense of your customers and enshitification of your platform, I’d urge you to reconsider your business setup.
The capitalism apologist is going to tell you that this is necessary for innovation as Venture Capital firms fund 100 start-ups of which 99 fail to turn a profit, and thus the 1 that does has to make up for the other 99 by making extreme profits.
But that that is just as flawed logic as thinking that there can be a “decent” capitalism that doesn’t destroy everything in its path in its pursuit of profit. If you are trying to be “decent” you will be out-competed by someone else under the current economic setup.
The modern Neoliberal capitalist philosophy of shareholders being the only priority, isn’t the only capitalist philosophy.
The Embedded liberalism after the new deal, worked quite well. Since the employees are making the products, and management is making the decisions, while the shareholders don’t directly make anything for the company; People understood that the shareholders were the last priority, in getting profits. It’s why worker wages scaled with productivity until the 80s.
That’s when the Neoliberal capitalist philosophy took hold and gained power. First the Republicans with Regan, then Democrats with Clinton, then the global economy, since so much of it is driven by the US.
I think in part there’s an essential misunderstanding of current events at the core of Reddit’s behaviour (not yours, I mean - spez/investors/etc).
Historically the rule was supposed to be ‘if it’s free, you’re the product’, which is to say that our attention (and profiles and demographics) were on sale to advertisers. The big recent development is someone figuring out, or thinking they’ve figured out, how to monetise us a different way - specifically, by using the things we create as training data for AI. A sensible organisation would continue to balance these two possible cash flows and, since both really require user retention to remain profitable in the long run, seek a middle ground. But the perception is that there’s more money in the training data than there is in the user attention, so they focus on maximising that and spit on the users. The obvious consequence is that they lose users and their source of training data dries up.
I don’t think the problem is earning a profit, the problem is the need to earn even more profit than last year. Investors aren’t content to buy into a company like Reddit just to let it continue in a steady state. They want to double their money in a few years and then cash out. They don’t care if they destroy a valuable service that many people enjoy.
You’re conflating investors, who lent Reddit the money and want a return on it, and spez, who actually runs the business and made those bad decisions. The investors weren’t the ones who told spez how to create the return on investment, they merely pressured him to find a way to do so. Do you think Warren Buffett tells Apple how to run things? I’d be surprised if an old fart like him had any say in how iPhones should be designed or how the Apple Store should operate.
I don’t think investors are the ones who told spez how to run things. They likely simply pressured him to make changes as quick as possible to make Reddit profitable. Investors don’t usually specify how to generate that profit though, otherwise they’d run their own companies.
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Twitter has been around for so long, it takes some time to kill. The latest move to allow access only to verified users together with meta may actually kill it though.
I don’t think the problem is so much profitability as it is the demand/expectation for endless growth. It becomes a positive feedback loop and is completely unsustainable after a certain point.
You know what else is endless growth? Cancer.
Yeah this is critical. These promises for money later mean that all sorts of stupid ideas were being funded, and therefore people hired, etc, but now that’s coming to a close. Companies and investors will be more likely to scrutinize spending (as they should) and see how to rightsize with reality and line of sight to profit. For significantly more complex reasons, it’s similar to an individual borrowing themselves into crazy debt, and banks eventually determining that they need more than credit/promises to keep seeding you cash.
Time to pay back some promises.
any dumb idea regardless of merit got funding
That’s still the case and high interest rates haven’t really fixed that because they are still not high enough. Just look at how any company mentioning “AI” in their earnings call gets extra billions in market cap overnight without having a real product yet.
That rather assumes that it actually matters that VC money is being wasted.
After all it keeps the money in circulation and keeps people employed. They then get paid and will then buy useful things from companies that do make profit, so in the end it all works out. It’s only bad for the investors, but that’s always been the thing about investment, it’s always been a risk, and it’s never been guaranteed.
If the goal is simply to keep money circulating and people employed, there are more efficient ways to do that.
Reddit, as a whole only has about 2000 employees.
“only 2000 employees” Reddit should have maybe 200 employees. 2000 is an insane number of people for a single relatively simple piece of software.
Especially since they have free content moderation. What are all those people even doing? They couldn’t even keep Victoria for AMA’s.
This seems like a non sequitur: what is good about only profitable ventures getting funding? These unprofitable ventures were creating good jobs and providing enjoyable and sometimes useful products to consumers for low prices. So why is it good that funding is drying up?
It doesn’t seem completely crazy to me that it would be better for money to go to successful projects than just be sprayed like a fire hose in hope that you land a Facebook or Google sized moonshot.
Of course it sucks for the people that lose their job, but presumably that money should go towards sustainably growing things where they could work.
No. I don’t mean to be rude but most of that message is wrong.
VC Money is very much not drying up. 2023 has seen record rounds in most markets. What is drying up is “VC Money for early stage startups with no revenue, no traction, and barely a functional idea”, but even that is not new it has been going on since at least 2018. Remember that guy who raised 1.5M$ with an app that just let you say “Yo” to your contacts ? That was 10 years ago. Those times are dead and buried.
Then the link between VC markets health and interest rates is… contentious to say the least. VCs don’t borrow money - they raise funds from family offices and individual investors, every 2 or 3 years. So every change to the financial landscape will have a progressive effect over 3 years, not a brutal one after a few months. Also you have to bear in mind that the people who bankroll VCs are looking for performance of at least 2X over 10 years. Interests would have to go up to 7% to even be in competition with VC investment. Of course there’s a psychological aspect to investment so the effet is not ZERO but it’s not as automatic as saying “interest go up => vc dry up”.
Finally, the companies we are talking about are in vastly different situations and not necessarily looking for VC money. There is no explaining their behaviour with a single cause, what we’re seeing is probably a cluster effect, because executives are like fish they always follow the movement of the other fish in their field.
- Youtube has been profitable for years and is part of Google which is massively profitable. VC Money has no bearing on their decisions - they are in a quasi-monopoly with no credible competition and want to squeeze their users out of greed
- Reddit has a long and complicated cap table including some very powerful institutional investors so they are aiming at an IPO rather than more VC money. They’re in a pretty good place actually with 1.5 billion MAU, and in the process of shaking off the 10% of hardcore users who are super hostile to monetization. Their monetization is so low (<2$/month/user, when the competition is 10 to 20 times higher) that they could bear to lose 50% of their userbase and still make bank with the remaining ones. They don’t need VC money right now.
- Twitter is… uh… well there’s no telling what Elon is up to but he is absolutely not raising any VC money especially after the shit he’s pulled off since the buy-off. I think it’s just a bunch of bad moves because he’s inept at the social media game.
Their monetization is so low (<2$/month/user, when the competition is 10 to 20 times higher) that they could bear to lose 50% of their userbase and still make bank with the remaining ones.
What’s left unsaid here (but I’m sure you realize) is that these same users whose monetization is so low also provide most of the content and moderation on the site. When you spread out the value of that among the (human) userbase, the total value returned to Reddit by each human is higher.
Steve thought he was targeting the AI with this move, but in reality he has been charging his most engaged users. If he’s upset that Apollo has turned a profit, the correct move was to acknowledge that one guy has done a better job than Reddit’s team, not tell all the users that Apollo helped bring to Reddit that they were no longer welcome
I think they’re operating under the assumption that there is no shortage of people willing to work for clout on a leading social media. They think the users they lose are replaceable and you know what it’s not an unreasonable expectation. It sucks but that’s just the way it is, there will always be people willing to post memes and delete nazi comments.
Only time will tell, but it’s not uncommon to kick out power users when they get uppity and think they run your platform. Way easier/cheaper to fire unpaid volunteers than tech-bros with Silicon Valley salaries.
I’m not so sure about Google nowadays. What started out as an everyday product killing, ended up as the first of many. They killed Stadia from one day to the other, and then started to basically sell and kill everything that is not massively profitable to the point they sold their domain distribution as well to Squarespace. That does not seem like something a massive monopoly with no regards to investor opinion does.
Well i don’t know about that. They still generate 15B$ in profit every quarter. Sure they’re losing some growth, but even amid a historic advertising budget bust they are still beating expectations.
When i mentioned their monopolistic position i was talking more specifically about Youtube, but anyway buying and killing off products is standard operating procedure for a company this size on a market this mature. There’s nothing alarming about Google’s health.
99% of their profit comes from their search engine ad revenue though. Google has only ever had one truly profitable product and the advent of chatgpt, driven by their only true rival in Microsoft, has them scared shitless. They are way behind in the AI department and it’s the only thing out their that fundamentally threatens Googles goose with the golden eggs: their search engine.
I mean when you’re at that level of profit you’re not “scared shitless” of much. Sure they have some risk around AI but i think a global ad market collapse is higher in their list of stuff to be worried about.
Coming back around to the original subject, they are publicly traded anyway so the VC market is not their problem.
Couldn’t it be argued that it’s a mistake from reddit to think of themselves as being comparable to platforms that make more money per user?
For example reddit and youtube are completely different in terms of the nature of the platform. Could attempting to monetize an average reddit user to the level of those using youtube might be a mistake? Keep in mind that reddit has much lower overhead for keeping the service running.
The mental image I’m going after is a country that exports mainly wheat arguing that its’ exports should be valued the same as a country that produces complex electronics. The products are at a different realm of complexity. Commodities should be valued for what they are and not be confused with higly refined products.
Couldn’t it be argued that it’s a mistake from reddit to think of themselves as being comparable to platforms that make more money per user?
You’re right it could very much be argued. I mean isn’t that the whole underlying question ? I would imagine that anybody who invests in reddit has the assumption that yes, you can monetize comparably to other platforms. Or even cut the pear in half and sit comfortably at 10$/user which would already be a fucking money printer at >400M MAU.
Now whether they are right or wrong in their thesis is anybody’s guess. Even after the recent debacle reddit is still in a very good position, but social media is such a clown world that you can never really tell.
Yeah I think with a net income of $60 billion annually Google is a wee bit past needing VC money lol.
Google in panic mode cause they don’t know if they’ll be able to close their 10M$ round from local VCs 😱
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maybe inflation.
just because U don’t see a price tag doesnt mean its not there.
if you cant see the product, then you are the product!
the state of wellbeing had never really been that great to start.
Venture capital has shifted very quickly from companies HOSTING content to companies SCRAPING content (LLM’s). This means renting compute is now very expensive and moving into the hands of ‘AI’ companies. It’s like trying to fly a plane while monkeys are tearing the wings of.
That plus interest rates are going up. For twenty years VC’s has near limitless cheap loans, now they’ve got to be marginally more careful than before and the companies which grew large but only ever broke even (if that) now need to pivot to profitability to justify all the debt they took on. Would not be surprised if Uber and Lyft start really hiking rates soon.
I think most taxi companies have adapted, so they are pretty competitive now.
Most of the aspects have already been covered but I would want to add one:
This was always the plan, it just wasn’t as highly prioritised as growth.
I work as a developer at a big tech company. We (the company) had our roadmap and it was mostly about getting more users. The more users you have the day the economy turns - the better off you are (… If you manage to turn an profit).
So when the economy went to shit and we (and other tech companies) no longer can loan money for free to cover our running expenses - the priorities shift. Working towards attracting more users is only going to increase your costs at the point and you don’t want to run out of money. So all roadmaps changed and cost saving efforts became the highest prio all of the sudden.
Gain a monopoly, get users addicted and reliant, then change the rules of the game and hope they stick with you. It’s happening now because of the economy for sure, but it’s not like it’s surprising.
This was always the plan, to put a world in your hand…
And then squeeeeze it until the last drop of blood dripps out of it.
It’s the end of cheap credit.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=16J5X
That graph shows the Federal Funds Effective Rate. Until recently, VCs could borrow money while effectively paying zero interest. That meant their investments weren’t under any pressure to become profitable any time soon. Now, borrowing is expensive. VCs don’t want to loan any more money, and want their investments to pay off. Reddit and other pre-IPO companies are scrambling to become profitable.
I assume the big companies like YouTube / Google going against people blocking ads are just taking advantage of the chaos.
As for Twitter: Elon Musk is an idiot.
Tech companies were only favorable to their users during the corporate Web 2.0 genesis when these companies had to lure educated users in with extremely convenient free services, but they always did and continue to do so under terms of service that are intentionally made as hard to read walls of legalese bullshit, so they always click accept and hand them power by moving there.
These companies usually are either publicly traded or aspire to be publicly traded, and are backed by venture capital loaned to them by banks and investors.
Then during the late 2000s and early 2010s these corporations gobbled up web traffic by having all the valuable information and communities behind their walls. This drove their operating costs up a lot but it was no problem, since the zero interest rate policy was in effect so these now-megacorps had basically interest-free loans to get infinite money to finance the platform. However they realized around the mid 2010s that they controlled the vast majority of the web so they realized they could be as greedy as they wanted since no one is going to ever step up to them (YouTube is a shining example of this) and ever since the mid-late 2010s they started nerfing and crippling the user experience in order to please their investors and ad networks. This process was extremely slow initially to minimize the backlash. They applied the boiling frog strategy and it worked.
By the early 2020s this was in full effect: websites do not respect your privacy and try to shove trackers and ads whenever and wherever they legally can, search engines are manipulated to put sponsored and SEO spam links first rather than useful answers, sites are implementing login walls to make sure the valuable content they hold hostage can only be accessed once they have the data of users, discourse is being controlled and micromanaged by corporations with automated censorship, mystery echo chamber algorithms, shadowbans and wordlists, news sites have article limits and paywalls now. It got so bad that it’s already harming society as a whole because it’s causing polarization and these platforms now have enough power to theoretically manipulate elections in some really bad cases.
This is a process known as enshittification: start great then become shit and die. Now that the zero interest rate policy is over, and interest rates started climbing up it means silicon valley free money is over so they can no longer afford to be boiling frogs, they are turning up the heat to 11 and just roasting the frog alive. In other words, the enshittification cycle is becoming exponentially faster and it’s only going to get worse for the corporate web and its users. The only solution is returning to decentralized technologies like Web 1.0 used to be, but it’s extremely hard since free as in you pay with your data services are addictive like crack cocaine.
Ads pay basically nothing now and VC funding has dried up. Most of these tech companies operated at a loss and are now being pressured into becoming profitable since investors don’t want to throw money at them anymore.
Data privacy laws have also gotten better, cutting off another revenue stream that was typically used.
Interest rates def have a factor in this also
But when did VC money get flushed in? I doubt that it just somehow stops out of nowhere. I mean all these companies weren’t exactly founded at the same time.
During the pandemic VC slowed to a crawl and the stock market went to shit. While the market eventually rebounded VC is doing so MUCH more slowly. VC scum doesn’t care about innovation, it cares about making money. If there’s some level of risk it shrinks like balls in a January pool and it takes forever to coax the little guys out.
Capitalism.
Capitalism is like cutting off your wings because you believe the reduced weight will make you fly higher.
Part of it is the standard crisis of capitalism, the profit you get from doing the same thing always declines, so over time you have to push up revenue (increasing prices, forcing people to pay, showing more ads, gathering more data, etc) & push down costs (fire engineers, run on less hardware, etc)
Part of it is capitalisms natural tendency to create monopolies, and the lack of competition in a given field causing the company to then lose sight of what it’s good at to compete in a bigger field.
Part is that interest rates mean loans are no longer cheap, so taking on debt to get customer, to at some point down the line make money, is a less viable plan. Twitter is a special case where the bad loans are because that was the original deal not interested rate related, and Musk is trying to pull all of the enshitification levers at the same time.
Part is that CEOs generally don’t have a fucking clue about their products or what they are doing (it’s a circuit job about who you know/blow, not what you know), so once one CEO starts firing/enshitifying, the rest just copy them so as to not be left out.
“Enshitify” is my new favorite word, right after “Polymascotfoamalate”.
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Capitalism is a system built on greed as a foundation to function. In a capitalist system, you must always continue to grow, expand, engulf, absorb, and acquire. This is why it is such a toxic and destructive system. Capitalism will always incentivize companies to get the most people possible to spend as much as possible on as little as possible, that’s literally the core principle of maximizing profitability.
It’s why enshittification keeps happening, the system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly how it’s supposed to.
Wouldn’t capitalism be relatively fine without the function of the Stock Exchange? I feel like the stock Exchange is what causes the issue with the need for continual growth. I feel like capitalism without the overarching need to continuously grow due to the demands of the stock exchange system, could work perfectly fine as you wouldn’t need to continuously grow but to maintain a profit and adjust for inflation where needed.
Capitalism codifies the acquisition and control of capital by an owning class separate from the workers (employees). The owners always want to see their profits grow, because in a system that is zero sum, where competition is glorified as the primary mechanism for fair pricing and business success, if you aren’t growing, then other competitors will eventually extinguish you.
Capitalism mimics evolution in that way, where all organisms compete against each other in a winner-takes-all setting. Talk to any hardcore Capitalist and they will talk about Capitalism being the “natural order”, “human nature” etc. I know, I used to be a hardcore free market capitalist.
A system that places profit and private ownership of capital above all else will always result in the kinds of oppressive systems and company practices we see today.
It’s like how fundamentalist religious institutions are having abuse scandals over and over for literal centuries. They are built in such a way that makes abuse easy to get away with. Even if it starts out perfectly clean, safe, and incorrupt, eventually the very structure of the organization itself will cause abusers to join or allow already abusive people to commit those acts without significant consequences. It is a negative feedback loop that perpetuates itself until it collapses totally or is extinguished by an outside force.
It’s not pure greed though, if companies do not push down costs & push up revenues enough, they get replaced by those that do.
It is capitalism doing what it does “best”, here’s a clip from I’m A Virgo that explains it better than me: https://youtu.be/lpagmvYZKRc?t=84
There are niches where companies can hide out for a while, especially if they provide a service that needs local implementation, but social media isn’t one of those niches, if you get outcompeted, your toast, no matter how big you peak, MySpace, Tumbler, Digg, Slashdot, etc, this is the monopolization effect of markets.
It’s so common there’s even a term for it now, “enshittification”
To quote the article that describes it:
“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.”
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ The source is about TikTok but the author has gone on to describe how this applies to basically every modern tech company in various interviews.
Short answer : Enshittification.
Long and brilliant explanation here : https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Greedy capitalists believe line must always go up. They will sacrifice every moral principle to their invisible hand god.
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It’s simple, despite what big tech companies are telling themselves, current algorithm for personalized online ads doesn’t actually work, because you can’t force people to be interested something just by shoving media in front of them.
Instead of realizing that people want genuine human engagement to tell them HOW your product can help solve their problems, we are at the phase where tech companies double down on their incorrect assumption and thinks to make people want things, they just need to shove more things people don’t want to see in front of them.
Algo ads could be good, if they weren’t primarily advertising stuff to me after I already bought it.
I look up a specific type of product that isn’t consumable, buy it, then get ads for it for weeks.
How many mattresses or tires can one person need?
That’s the problem with personalized algorithms, because they don’t understand what people actually needs.
(What people actually need is tickets to “Barbie”)
The advertising companies, Google & Facebook, absolutely do understand this and are happy to mistreat small companies.
The worst part of using Google Search without uBlock is that if I’m just trying to get to a specific website without typing out the full html address, I have to scroll passed the top result which is an advert for the website I already typed.
Google charges companies for customers they already had.
It’s even worse than that. The ad is often a fake version of the website you are looking for. Ublock protects you from phishing and malware.
It’s even worse than that, Facebook and Google have been selling “impressions” that are actually bots for decades at this point.
Very often do I have to bypass the wrong links as well for competitor services I wasn’t looking for, because I explicitly wrote the service I had chosen.
Long ago I was searching for a new printer then the printer ads started following me to different places on the Internet. Places that should not have known I was searching for a printer. I decided I wasn’t going to have any of that and installed an ad blocker.
Not sure how effective that will be in future. Pretty sure ads as content written by AI is going to be the hot new thing. And by hot new thing I mean thing that can die in a fire.
Surely the fact that you bought a toilet recently means that you’re now a toilet enthusiast and will happily click on ads to add to your toilet collection!
We hear you like toilets
I’d say synchronous targeted ads work very well. I.e. showing me ads when I am searching for something explicitly on Google or Amazon. Asynchronous targeted ads - yeah, less so.
i hope that the internet becomes sort of how it used to be, made by the people for the people and ran by the people instead of made by a few huge corporations that sell our data and constantly try and squeeze profit out of their platforms. i love the sense of community in decentralised social media and there seems to be next to no arguments most places. im really enjoying everything so far after joining
free money has dried up, now they need to monetise your habits.