No Stupid Questions

This is the consequence of the fed raising interest rates and companies finding it much harder to find money to pay salaries and operating costs. So companies have to actually seek profit or go bust and CEOs and board of directors are getting desperate and showing how little they understand what makes their products great.

One thing is chain reaction, another is that these media mostly came to existence in the same period of time. So they were aging synchronously.

This was predictable and predicted many times. Just like a building constructed with violations is not going to collapse immediately after it's finished, these things were not going to break (in various ways) immediately after being launched.

They are breaking now. Oopsie.

I hope XMPP makes a triumphant comeback. It's not dead yet.

Higher interest rates means they have more pressure to start being profitable is my guess.

Because you are the product, not the client. You are only catered to enough so that you may be coralled. You are basically cattle to these corporations.

As for why this is happening now:

• The economy is in a downswing right now so we are going to see cost cutting and belt tightening.
• Entrenched proprietary social media platforms are basically monopolies. You cannot choose to use an alternative because these are walled gardens and leaving means losing your ability to communicate with large groups of people. The larger and more entrenched these big firms get, coupled with lack of regulation means they can do whatever the fuck they want. You have no power and no choice (except for the Fediverse, a one-time pain to migrate to).

A lot of technological flux going on right now, what with an entire generation partially trained to do WFH and job mobility that brings, the retirement of the tech-phobic boomers, the extremely tight labor market, Russian money going to "more important endevors" (which might also be why bit coin is down), and AI threatening to automate 80% of the workforce. Tech company owners are frightened and making random dumb or scared decisions because of it.

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Because a user base has yet to demonstrate that there will be significant consequences for such actions. Maybe there will be, but they will be less-tangible long-term consequences that can’t easily be attributed to these actions.

Capitalism. Companies go public (or already were public) and then they can no longer be happy with what they had and need to acheive infinite profit growth. That's partially why companies like Valve, that are still luckily entirely private, can make seemingly consumer-focused decisions and not just chase infinite profits. That's how they've been able to invest so heavily in Linux with such little short term gains. Valve still makes shitty decisions sometimes but it would be 10x worse if they decided to go public.

I feel it's like a sellout on stock exchange: once the first company started to heavily monetize, the others felt like they needed to cash out now, before "stock values drop" i.e. the internet users find different models of social media that make the corporation owned ones obsolete. Thank you lemmy! :)

Centralization, money, power, money, stocks, money. These are just a few reasons. Did I mention money? Oh, and also, money. They're sucking up to investors, and finding ways to get through the up-coming(or on-going) recession without major losses. The only losses are ours.

A lot of them go into business with venture capital, a great idea with future potential, but no idea how to monetize any of it.
Eventually the capital is starting to dry up and the owners will want return on their investments - so the company is forced to start turning profit. Enshittification of service at all costs follows. And then perhaps public IPO and the founders cashing out and buying yachts.

That's the lifecycle of a tech-startup

Higher interest rates, less vc money, have to actually start being profitable

Thats just living in late stage capitalism. Everything you have now will be rented to you by a corporation in a couple of years.

They are doing everything in their power to make this the worst timeline.

It's a general trend of vulture capitalism, or more accurately locust capitalism, over the last several years.

Investors want extreme ROI(Return on Investement, aka their money back and some extra), so they'll cut every single corner and monetize everything, and even run companies into the ground to make it happen faster. And then just move on to another company and to the same thing, with absolutely zero interest in long term income, customer retention, etc.

Over-centralisation.

This kind of slow degredation of services is quite normal, however, this time around the wider use of these degrading platforms is hitting harder. Even 5 years ago, most communities had an IRC rather than a discord, and most ran a forum, or a community forum, with other info being on a wiki.

These days a lot of content that used to sit on a forum now sits on twitter, or on reddit. Discord is the new IRC, and so on. These separate services were a lot less convenient, but more resilient.

Odds are, we might see similar smaller communities pop up again as things get worse in the larger ones. Folks are pinched for cash at the moment, and so free services like neocities might see a boom as fandoms abandon larger sites (again).

Silicon Valley Bank collapsing is putting pressure on tech companies to actually turn a profit, so they're turning to slimy tactics just to survive IPO

I think also we've become so dependent that they can just do whatever the fuck they want.

I've lived in a bunch of countries and FB messenger is the only way for me to keep in touch. FB can do whatever they want to me because I'm never going to persuade a bunch of people to all move to signal or something.

Reddit has communities that simply don't exist on any other platform.

They have the critical mass.