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?
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?
The line has to go up.
The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don’t demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don’t sell and bail.
Now, with Twitter there’s a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn’t the place for it.
Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it’s money.
Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it’s Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they’re making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.
Facebook: I don’t even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it’s just ads.
Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn’t feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they’re a bad thing, just using an example)
Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.
Yep, it’s this. Despite how it seemed in the 2010s investor capital is not free money. Investors want it paid back many multiple times over and they’ll risk destroying the underlying product if necessary.
Facebook: Mainly because of Facebook groups. They’re pretty whacky, have a lot of fun normie non-degenerate drama, and a well moderated facebook group is more wholesome than any reddit sub in my experience.
It is relaxing to not have the hivemind like reddit or having users constantly one-up each other like twitter. Also wayyy less bot accounts in Facebook groups.
Although it is declining because of FB’s shitty censors and bans, the group scenes are very much alive and fun.
I hate how much of the entire internet experience is focused on ads, ads, ads. I go out of my way to block trackers so the ads often aren’t that relevant and really transparent. Buy, consume, give us your data, repeat. But what would the alternative look like?
Surely wouldn’t it be easier for them to just inject ads into the API and keep it cheap?
IF that’s something they can do? I don’t know. I don’t know a thing about backend work on third-party programs.
There’s a part of the that thinks Reddit is the same way and just went “Hell with it, use us or nothing at all” and nukes the whole API except for the big-rollers.
I wouldn’t even know who would pay such a high price for that anyway, outside of advertisers and algorithm scrapers.