First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?
On one hand, I can name sites that, in 2023, either screwed over their user base, or just went under.
- Teknik (obscure file host/git repo host)
- Enjin (forum host for clans/everyone and their dogs’ minecraft servers, rebranded to peddle NFTs)
- Imgur (currently scrubbing their servers of anonymous uploads/nsfw content)
- Discord (changing their username system to a bad one)
- Reddit (charging exorbitant prices for their api; $20m per year for Apollo’s developer)
I have been considering a domain name to access hypothetical home servers as of late, just so I don’t have to worry about shit like this.
If you’re interested, I wrote about some of the things I moved to self-host on my blog; https://blog.aaronbieber.com/2022/11/20/the-rise-of-the-indie-web.html
I recommend checking out https://indieweb.org/ as well!
I didnt even realize Enjin went down.
Zippyshare went under too
:O how?
It’s services were dropped a couple of weeks ago
I suspect that we’re at end-stage capitalism, essentially every company feels they should be constantly making record profits and they think of predicted profits as granted, when they didn’t reach predicted profits it was seen as losing money which in the CEO’s eyes meant they needed to increase their income to make up for losses and the only way for companies that rely on user generated content for revenue was increased advertising which is the route youtube is currently going for the rest they had no way they could see to increase their income till elon decided to crash twitter with introducing the payed blue checkmark. What we saw when elon did that was a failing company but what twitch and reddit saw was an opportunity to not be blamed for following musks example, funnily enough though they fucked up on the attempt and everyone saw them as money grabbing
This is it. When there are millions of people using a platform every day, the advertisers start foaming at the mouth. Corporate greed (capitalism?) Is a poison and will eventually destroy anything it touches.
Its really funny though cause as dwarf fortress proved when they released their game on steam its more profitable to not run a company solely for profits, as when you get down to the details profits get in the way of things people enjoy.
louis rossman talks about this in two of his recent videos on twitter and reddit. obviously he tackles it using layman’s terms, but there’s still a lot of valuable insights and it’s super palatable.
essentially it boils down to what @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml says here:
“The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company.”
I don’t think that’s true. The web is growing.
However what you might be seeing is a natural progression of a web project. Reality is that not many business projects in IT make it to 10+ years.
I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES I HATE PUBLICLY OWNED COMPANIES
Hell, any such company is going to pursue infinite growth and always aim to squeeze as much money as possible from it’s costumer base in the short term.
My guess is that because there is currently a big possibility of economic turmoil and these companies are appealing to investors, advertisers,etc. and trying to gain as much capital in order to look stable.
Making it so that companies prioritize their own shareholders in the short term above all else, even the companies long term health, has become an absolute disaster for humans
As soon as you go public, your stock is your main product. Sucks every time it happens.
Couldn’t have said it better myself
The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company.
This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.
I’ve always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn’t invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I’m probably on here too much though!
I think we do have a sufficient number of users now to keep going irrespective of how reddit fares. Communities are beginning to form and even if there is no futher mass exodus from reddit, I think Lemmy will be fine and will see organic growth over time.
I’ve already noticed I’m spending more time of Lemmy than reddit since the past few days.
It’s easier to spend time on Lemmy for me because the comments are actually worth reading. Seems like the type of person who’s drawn here are actually interested in holding a conversation vs. reddit where it’s about saying something witty or whatever to get them upvotes
What’s going on with Twitch ?
They were going to ban multi-streaming. Basically most streamers stream to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and I forgot the last site but Twitch was going to ban this so they could only stream to Twitch no matter if they were official twitch partners or not.
Ultimately all these big platforms are gonna cannibalize their userbase at some point. That’s the reason I started since 2 years archiving all the YouTube channels/playlists I care about. I already have many videos that were taken down by YT afterwards.
I assume you’re using some form of youtube-dl.
Do you have a quick script for downloading the video and scraping the data like the uploader, date, and title of the video?
Right now I use https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist
It requires a bit of technical skills to setup the instance but offers an easy UI to quickly add channels/playlist and automatically archives new videos.
If you want an easier script checkout https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate-YouTube-DL-Scripts-Collection/
You can put in a file the list of channels/playlists it videos to save and run the script, it downloads everything organized in folders including subtitles and video descriptions.
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This is the first time I heard of odysee, so I just went and looked, and oh my god who picked the “lady fungus” monstrosity as a help avatar. 0.o They could’ve at least made her a cute mushroom or something instead of fleshy finger-thing, what the hell.
I have no real opinion of it yet otherwise, except that I’m automatically wary of anything touting blockchain at this point.
Youtube does need a viable competitor or three so badly, regardless.
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they were also going to ban sponsorship overlays, but backpedaled on it the next day.
I thought this was already forbidden if you’re an affiliate / partner (i.e. have a subscribe button)?
iirc it’s only partners that have exclusivity deals. affiliate lets people subscribe to your channel, while partner contracts are mostly standard across the board, aside from the obvious exceptions (significantly large channel streamers).
That could be the case; the only folks I’ve heard mentioning it are partners.
Is it because interest rates are higher so investors are hanging onto their money? The money doesn’t flow as freely in that direction, but it has to come from somewhere. That means, the “free lunch” users have been having while money was flowing from the investor side has to end, and the tech companies put the squeeze on the users instead to bring in money from that direction.
I don’t know if that’s it, but maybe?
Social media sites that have been in the red, growing primarily through fostering good will in their customers, are finally trying to turn a profit, and there isn’t much available to profit off of without intentionally kneecapping some aspect of your product. Taking stuff away is the fastest way to pissing someone off.
Let them self destruct.
I’m just glad to have found this place. 😂
The drive to make a profit.
Taking those little projects and extracting every dollar you can until it implodes then you go to the next one.
Late Stage Capitalism.
There is a crisis of democracy in contemporary societies, every time that you invoke the direct power of the people, the status quo conservationists ban your participation and exclude you of most of the expression spaces.
People are more concerned about privacy and adblocks are almost ubiquitous to using the internet. The companies need more data to profit than what the users are willing to provide, so they are shutting down or severely limiting API access. These API are also what bots and karma farmers use to create content and engagement on these platforms. But platforms have a hard time separating the two.
Users who are used to using these services for free (in exchange of their data) are now not happy they can’t have it their way while they limit the company’s means of profit. So they are “threatening” to leave.
Reddit is an echo chamber manipulated by bots and mods are facilitators of karma farmers and PR/marketing agencies. They’re protesting in the name of users but really are just afraid of losing that bot generated content/engagement.
What I find funny is that if these people just did old fashioned ad banners at the top, bottom or sides of the page, I would leave ad blocker switched off.
Old fashioned ads are much less lucrative than highly personalized ads. It’s why so many sites require you to create an account to access their content. The end goal of the platform is to extract heaps of advertising data from you.
Then they end up getting nothing and making things worse. This is why we can’t have nice things :|
Although there’s a lot of protesting going on over at Reddit right now, I really don’t think it can be compared to twitter. 6 months from now, I doubt things will be all that different at Reddit. A small number of users (relatively speaking when compared to their total number of users) will leave, and that’s probably it.
Depends on whether Reddit deletes NSFW content once they go public
That’s my guess. I started on old Reddit 10+ years ago, but now use only the first party apps. They’re clunky and sluggish, but good enough if you just want your doom scrolling fix.
I’m glad this drama alerted me to Lemmy, though. I probably would have joined one sooner had I known about them.
But… why
