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?
Great read.
COVID.
COVID changed everything. In an attempt to recover quickly, companies ramped up their abuses to new levels. While billionaires defending them all had their masks removed as the world collectively realized that it’s impossible to make a billion without exploring others.
Toss in back to the office mandates and rising costs while those same companies post record profits…all while the population is Uber sensitive to that kind of thing, and we’re in the middle of a not so quiet proletariat revolution.
Thanks to COVID a lot of people realized that despite the elites best efforts, the enemy isn’t left or right, it’s us versus the super rich. And it’s having a trickle down effect.
deleted by creator
Theres many different lines to be on though.
You know what, I never thought of it this way. Your timeline is definitely accurate.
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.
If I remember he said no once he had a closer look at the financials and cybersecurity reports under NDA, but at that point in a merger and non-compete it’s basically telling you “good, you’ve bought it, here’s what to plan for” - it’s not something a competitor can just peek in and then back out of.
Thanks for Rumble and Kick, first time I hear about them
Rumble is “that place which welcomed Andrew Tate and Sneako” after they both got banned from mainstream social media. They’re the right-wing free-speech platform.
Kick was formed by a former Twitch streamer (TrainwrecksTV) cause he thought that Twitch went too far in banning gambling streams. Plus he got the backing of Stake, a cryptocurrency-fuelled slot machine website, who are the main investors bankrolling his company.
Thanks for the context, doesn’t seem as appealing anymore ha ha
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.
I think this all depends on their reaction to the blackout planned for the 12th. If Reddit starts taking over the default/large subs that shut down it’s 100% going to crash and burn. Not backing down on their API changes I think is an optimistic 60/40 in favor of Reddit chugging along albeit just a bit crappier for it all. (The 40% being a Digg situation that hopefully blows up their IPO plans and VC funding.)
I can certainly see Reddit’s admins staging a hostile takeover of all large subreddits, banhammering any moderator who takes part in the blackout, and installing their own yes-men.
But can you imagine the PR shitshow that would occur if Reddit suddenly deposed its most powerful users? Imagine if a major content creator like Linus Tech Tips, SomeOrdinaryGamers, Penguinz0 or Asmongold jumped on the ‘fuck Reddit’ bandwagon. It would be a major PR boost for any competitor.
Doctorow’s Enshittification describes it pretty much dead-on. It’s basically the cancerous form of late-stage capitalism that we’re living under now.
Wow that’s a great read!
Thank you for this! I never really thought about late stage capitalism but this post helped a lot.
Spot on! We are seeing it happen before our eyes and I love it!
Definitely accurate to the situation lol
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
they were also going to ban sponsorship overlays, but backpedaled on it the next day.
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?
deleted by creator
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.
