I’ve had this feeling that since there are forces that do not want us to have free speech, and that the destruction of Reddit and Twitter does this effectively, creating a chilling effect, destroying social links and communities. Might it not be an intentional effort to stifle the ability of the downtrodden to organize and fight the power?
There are so many other ways things are engineered to benefit the minority and prevent the majority from gaining power, why not this too?
Just a thought rattling around in my head.
So conspiracy probably isn’t the right term, although there are common factors that are causing - or at least influencing - a lot of these trends.
With inflation being a major issue, central banks are reacting by increasing interest rates. These rate hikes have the effect of making credit and borrowing more expensive.
This is significant because central rates had been low (nearly 0%) since basically 2008, with quantitative easing (cash printing) pumping billions of additional dollars into the stock markets in particular.
The effect of loaned cash being effectively free is an explosion of activity from investor hedge funds who were willing to take huge risks on speculative projects. This fuelled the massive boom in tech startups across the 00s.
The trouble is, many of those startups weren’t profitable, they were ‘potentially profitable’ and fuelled by credit. Or they had the underpants gnome model of profit where the means and mechanism of the ‘???’ stage would be figured out later (WeWork).
Investors were happy to fund those losses to create products that controlled markets (Uber) or amassed huge userbases that could be flipped from potential to profit in the future (Reddit).
Only now the rates have gone up, and credit is suddenly expensive. Business models that rely on running at a loss suddenly aren’t viable, and those startup investors that owns chunks of those businesses are now insisting on actual returns on their investments.
You can see the effects all over social media and tech, but Reddit (urgently need to get profitable for a stock launch, need the stock launch for funding) and Twitter (basketcase debt load at the worst possible time for debt) are the most obvious examples.
Techbro austerity means worse products for consumers or aggressive monetization policies which users will likely dislike. So not a conspiracy, but decades of reckless investment by hedge funds that have been caught with their pants down by interest risk.
Thank you that was extremely insightful.