Technology

What happened with Twitch? I'm out of the loop there.

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.

The twitter/elon thing is hilarious. I honestly do think he accidentally got himself into quite the pickle and now his pride is keeping him there. As for reddit and twitch, I don't assume these are the surface-level-dumb moves that we think they are. My guess is that this is a calculated means of rolling out the changes they actually want by:

1. overshooting
2. letting everyone get mad
3. backing off to their actual changes (or something close)
4. letting everyone think they've won
5. and finally push forward a bit more once everyone is preoccupied with the next thing

Internet users love to cancel shit, but at the same time, are always looking for the next thing to cancel. So as much as people hate twitter or facebook or tiktok or youtube or windows or nintendo or chick-fil-a or whatever, they're all just looking for an excuse to forget all about it, and continue using their product as quickly as possible. And corporations know that, so they've worked "giving them that excuse" into their plans.

Big sites have made surfing the web so boring. I will end up spending the day on 2-3 sites. All this shake up will hopefully force me to look at more websites again.

The MacLeod life-cycle of corporations mirrors late stage capitalism pretty well:

I think it has to do with the Epstein and Maxwell case process. Maxwell had her fingers in many social media websites, especially reddit. I mean for Reddit she was the first user to hit 1m karma, and also one of the first powermods, controlling most of the powerful subreddits. Wouldn't surprise me if all the big rats are jumping ship before shit hits the fan.

Course-correcting, maybe? Web 2.0 really overstayed its welcome with Facebook/Twitter/Reddit being such dominant websites over the past 15+ years. Various reasons of greed, narcissism, and other factors finally popped the bubble.

I'm really enjoying the Feder-verse or whatever we're calling it since decentralization can prevent a lot of this nonsense from ever occuring. It feels like a new approach to the late 90's era of message boards and such.

Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter seemed more like an extremely elaborate shitpost that went horribly wrong. It's like Musk never intended to buy them in the first place but was legally forced to do so (he tried to back out of the deal beforehand.)

As for Reddit, that place has been going down the shitter since around 2016. Power users have ruined that site, especially the handful of moderators that control hundreds of subreddits between themselves. Spez is a blithering idiot who has done more to censor and subvert the site than Ellen Pao ever did (ironically, everyone accepted it and didn't revolt against him because he wasn't a woman.)

That being said, I really hope Steve Huffman doubles down on the API changes and kills Reddit as a platform. Nothing would make me happier.

Twitch and YouTube literally think they're too big to fall and work actively to fuck over the content creator, when decent competitors like Rumble and Kick are coming along. Mixer could have been decent but Microsoft's strategy was literally to offer two streamers nine-figure contracts and somehow think this would drive people to their Twitch-clone. At least Rumble and Kick are competently run.

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

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.