- cross-posted to:
- technology@kbin.social
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Wow the internet really took a nosedive the last few months.
I like to think of it as a reset to early 2000s internet, which was basically the golden age.
I hope you’re right. Everything was a lot more wild. You’d discover a blog through some link and feel like an adventurer explorer a blank part of the map. It was much more fun.
Stumbleupon!
I miss Stumbleupon. I wish someone would attempt to create a spiritual successor to it. I found so much good stuff with it back in the day.
Yeah I miss it too. I found a nice community of people there too.
I still maintain a regular blog. Have for a long time!
(https://semioticstandard.com for the curious)
I think I might run a personal website, if this trend back towards the wild-ish west continues.
I was too young back then and in the past years I felt that it’d be too weird, but why not, right?
Yeah, it seems like people made the internet something valuable, a bunch of commercial businesses turned up to take the reins so they could harvest hat value for wealth for investors, it’s reached a point where that juice is no longer worth the squeeze for them and we’ll go back to a phase where the progress and generation of value will revert back to regular people again for a while. Likely that balance will then tip back towards profitability again and the cycle will start anew.
@Piers @z500 I remember in the early days of commercialization of the interwebs, the capitalists just could *not* wrap their heads around the idea of *sharing*. Legalities aside, putting music or art or whatever that you had spent money and time on, and then just… putting it out there for anyone was so foreign to them.
We may be past the point of a profit driven internet. At least in terms of social media. I would like to hope that we’re at least close.
Tech bubble is over.
Let’s hope the old web returns.
I don’t believe that
To be fair, this really does feel like the dot com bubble all over again
You know, come to think of it, the internet has been oddly stable for the past decade. Prior to modern social media, sites used to come and go all the time. I had to switch forums twice because the ones I was using shut down. Same for my image hosting sites and flash game sites. We were honestly due for a major shake up.
Very true. The only sites I’ve seen disappear and pop up semi-regularly in the last years were of the Youtube-to-MP3 type.
remember that one year a few years ago when all the celebrities died? was it 2016? now we’re getting the internet version.
Oh man, let’s do politicians next!
billionaires
I do believe there’s room for both.
It’s going to have to be a much bigger submarine though.
Nah, we just need a ferry, and a whole bunch of wash bins and concrete.
The link rot from this is going to be monstrous, RIP
The Summer of enshittification continues apace.
No need to coin cute new terms like, “enshittification.” It is just good old rent seeking. Nothing new. Just capitalism working as intended.
I think there is value in coining a term for a specific process like “enshittification” as rent seeking doesn’t describe the entire process. From how they get users, to how they get vendors/advertisers their forsaking the users and finally the vendors then all that’s left is a husk that survives because it’s a monopoly. While I understand the term is used to describe the second half imo the first half is integral because those are the steps that set up the monopoly, starving the market of competition.
Oh wait, hmm, no rent seeking adds nothing of value to the market where someone like amazon added value at one point but that took resources from aws to make it not operate at a loss, unless you see that as rent seeking
I guess my point was just that it seems counterproductive to focus on one hyper-specific market (tech), when this is a massive problem everywhere in one way or another.
Many people seem like they’re able to recognize this in the specific market they’re familiar with due to their work, or whatever, without being able to connect it to the bigger picture that this is everywhere, and not just a localized phenomenon. They don’t take the next logical step that, “maybe there’s something fundamentally wrong with capitalism,” because it seems like it’s just the failure of one market.
I see what you mean, i thought ‘enshittification’ was a universal term coined out of a more easily observable atmosphere.
Tech is just the sort of lightning rod that everyone is watching, if people read about a phenomenon in tech and recognize it in their personal lives then maybe they start to question the system of profit that is capitalism.
I agree, rent seeking doesn’t always cause enshittification, it can just be inflated prices. Rent seeking is also a process to try to create a “home” for your financial leeching, while Enshittification is more like bait users in with a product, entice businesses, screw over everyone and cash out.
We’re not coining a new cute term, it’s been described in greater detail before, that applies specifically to tech: https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df91979
“New” relatively speaking. I have read the article and am aware where the term came from. I just wouldn’t consider a term that Cory Doctorow made up back in January anything but “new”.
Anyway, my point is that this isn’t a new concept. Focusing solely on one super-narrow field like tech, when this is something that is happening nearly everywhere in capitalism, in nearly every market, does the problem a disservice. It betrays the reality of the situation by making it seem like something unique to tech. It seems like people are aware of this behavior happening in whatever hyper-specific market that they’re familiar with, yet so many seem unable to connect that to the larger picture that this is everywhere.
The Internet seems to have latched onto the idea that enshittification = tech decline, so you’re probably ‘too late’ to try to stop that flood. But, I’m open to having my mind changed. Can you describe any other industries where things started out great with a lot of user growth but slowly declined as competitors died out and corporations put the squeeze on their users? Are you thinking maybe Walmart as a more classic example, moving into an area and crushing small business before raising the prices, dropping the quality, etc.?
Yeah, for sure Walmart and other big box stores are a great example… It’s hard to even fathom what they’ve taken from us. All of the money that used to be re-invested into the community by local small business owners is now being extracted by massive corporations and taken elsewhere (usually to be hoarded). Not to mention the strain they put on our already threadbare safety net by underpaying their employees and then profiting even more when their employees use their food stamps at Walmart.
The money ran out, now we have to face cold hard decisions regarding what parts of the internet we are wiling to pay for.
It’s better than ads
I hate ads more than most internet users but im not sure, what other way would be as efficient at getting the users to pay proportional to their use?
Or are you thinking just get everyone to pay $1 a year or whatever? That might work too but I doubt the person viewing/posting one or two gifs a year would want to pay for that experience.
Nationalise it! A public gif service.
Your free trial has ended.
Woah, that sucks. More ruined links across the internet
Oh gee I never even thought of that.
I am going to not be able to find obscure gifs i remember from the 2000’s 😩
So what you’re saying is nothing important is being lost.
I mean, if you don’t convey emotions to friend via gifs I don’t know what to tell ya!
it’s our generation’s Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!
I’m gonna take a wild guess and say the reason why gfycat integrated into basically everything was because they launched themselves at the tech giants and gave everything for basically nothing.
I thought it was pretty suss that they suddenly showed up on every platform.
They were purchased by Snapchat last year. So this is probably Snapchat seeing it as only a cost center with no return. Which tbh, it probably is.
Oh interesting I didn’t know about that purchase.
TIL that Snapchat bought it, any idea why they’re now killing it? The usual reason would be that it contained/owned something they wanted (tech, IP, data, etc) and they didn’t actually care about the service, reckon that’s the case here?
Saving money is my guess. Running it is costing more than it makes. Company shuts it down.
Stolen from another discussion thread: Interest rates are up and quantitative evening is over. For nearly 15 years money was basically free for tech companies. Banks don’t pay anything, bonds don’t pay anything, the stock market is overheated and investors are still looking for return. So if your tech company was already public you could borrow in the form of bank loans or bonds for dirt cheap and if it was still privately held you can get money from individual and corporate investors.
Now that the free money era is over a lot of companies have had to finally think about making a profit so that they can keep the lights on. This is why there have been tens of thousands laid off in the tech sector in the last year or so.
As far as Reddit goes I have no idea what they’ve been thinking. It seems like they’ve been spending money developing features nobody wants or needs: locally hosted images and video which have to cost a fortune, live chat, and NFTs, to name a few. They’ve got the ~20th most popular website in the world with millions of daily active users and they can’t figure out how to make it profitable?
The API the third party applications used doesn’t serve ads. All they had to do for a bump in revenue is to insert ads and require third party applications to display them or risk losing their API access. Users would grumble but it’s a pretty reasonable ask. The fact that they didn’t do this demonstrates to me that they don’t think the money is in serving ads, they think it’s in data mining and they can only get the data they want from the official app.
What I never understood was why not tie API to Reddit premium. Such a simple thing and it would’ve converted a lot of users without all this fuss.
Because it was about control. They want you on their app where they decide what you see and track how long you see it.
While I agree. It seems like such an obviously simple answer. If they’d granted “reddit premiun only API keys” to all the apps. Most free app users would switch to the free app like they wanted rather than pay after a few months. The smaller group would stay on the quality apps and pay for premium every month which would more than offset the lost ad revenue and juke their premium subscribers stats.
Now they have a large aliened group of technically skilled users looking for and willing to put effort into something better.
Now that the free money era is over a lot of companies have had to finally think about making a profit so that they can keep the lights on. This is why there have been tens of thousands laid off in the tech sector in the last year or so.
Ehh I’m not so sure about this part of it, though. Companies have been making record profits.
Revenue is certainly doing fine among the giants as described in the article. I’m too much of a philistine to interpret the publications those companies put out for shareholders to determine what they’re spending all that money on. There’s certainly got to be a degree of creative accounting.
You make an excellent point and I think I should also note that there’s more to the tech space than the FAANG-type megacorps that don’t need VC money.
I’ve never used gyfcat. Did it in any way compete with snap or provide a subset of services that snap could provide?
Acquisitions are always advertised for “synergies” but the real reason is almost always quashing competition
Where is DataHoarders representation here on Lemmy?? Anyone know?
!datahoarder@lemmy.ml I believe
- Juno ( @Juno@beehaw.org ) English1•1 year ago
Ty
That’s crazy! I wonder what the reason for the shutdown is. Given that Gfycat was used heavily on Reddit, I have to wonder if the recent Reddit changes are at all related.
Money. The reason is always money.
- Sky Cato ( @skycat@beehaw.org ) English3•1 year ago
I’m glad one of GIF platforms went down. GIF format is disgusting anyway. APNG is superior in every way and should replace ugly GIF garbage format.
I can’t say I knew anything about how they operated to begin with. How did they pay their bills?
I wonder why they’re shutting it down. Not seeing anything in the article.
Gfycat probably loses money and that’s no longer sustainable. With interest rates up it seems like the tech companies are having to justify themselves more.
In a way it seems like some things are moving back to the earlier internet where random people decided to host forums and other people had to figure out their own ways of hosting things.
Everything feels so detached from humanity at this point. Like, we’re using all these services and products that we as humans create and support, but there’s this obfuscation layer between those who use it and those who create and maintain it. It’s in software, hardware, our food, our clothing… pretty much everything we consume.
Maybe we’re finally getting back in touch with reality.
Yea, that honestly seems like how it’s going. It really feels like a bubble that just popped.