Lets take the example of Reddit. Reddit could have kept its costs to the minimum and could have run the site with the ad revenue that came in. In fact they could have talked transparently about their opex and asked for a simple donation drive every now and then like Wikipedia. If need be, they could have removed silly GIF replies and other stuff and focused on text alone. However this would not let them become the next Facebook. That’s what they wanted to be. At some point in their story was a choice to be forums 2.0 or get into a race to become a cash grab. Sadly they went for the latter.

It’s the money.

US Fed has raised interest rates, destroying money for the first time in decades in an effort to stop our inflation problem

The knock on effects is that banks literally have less money to lend to companies. Some companies are affected more than others by this environment. Tech was hit hard, extremely hard.

With hundreds of thousands of layoffs, tech industry is contracting. Silicon Valley bank literally evaporated in the span of 3 days. Twitter was losing money and had to sell out. StackOverflow is losing money and is currently selling out.

In this environment, Reddit is about to launch it’s long awaited IPO, the time when the public is allowed to directly buy Reddit stock and invest into the company. That’s what Initial Public Offering means. If Reddit does well, Reddit will pull in lots of money this year through this IPO.

The CEO of Reddit needs to prove Reddit is profitable, or if not profitable… Will eventually be profitable. Stockholders don’t care about Reddit drama for the most part, but most are smart enough to read financial sheets. Reddit needs to show growing revenue, growing profits and cutting costs to attract money.

As such, all of what Reddit’s CEO has done makes sense in the context of the IPO. He is betting that shareholders won’t notice the drop of high quality content creators from Reddit, since that’s not a financial number that’s reported. He can IPO, raising millions, maybe even billions for himself. The golden parachute outta here when everything gets screwed up in a year or two and collapses.

I think today’s investors are smarter though, and the bearish economy and high interest rates means more investors will pay attention to underlying issues.

Late stage capitalism You make a business and it goes well, you make some money everyone is happy.

But with time your profits will plateau or even decline. It’s natural, but businesses don’t understand that it is insane to expect a company to always turn crazy profits when the product does not evolve.

Companies like apple and Microsoft don’t worry as much because they are constantly evolving with new product.

Companies like Twitter, Facebook, reddit, Netflix have hit a wall where there really isn’t anywhere else to go so they start making shareholder centered decisions made by people who aren’t even in touch with the user base of their product.

Running out of VC dollars, now they gotta actually make a profit.

$

https://medium.com/@mikegrindle/reddit-and-the-enshittification-of-social-media-659d41b5ab73

Because of capitalism, no seriously these decisions are based on money and growth. But both of these things are relatively finite. You can’t keep have exponential growth year after year. Eventually you will plateau but there isnt a mechanism in capitalism to accept that. So companies start forcing monetary gain.

Many tech companies were overvalued for a long time. Everyone was happy to invest and pump money into those companies because “those platforms are going to be the future and I want to be part of it when they are starting to make a ton of money”. It didn’t matter that many of those companies were not profitable because they always promised to make up for that in the future.

This classic idea is starting to break down a bit. Many Tech companies have become profitable in the meantime, but many of them also have various troubles like moderation.

So why are so many media companies making “shitty decisions”? Well, because from a business perspective, they aren’t necessarily “shitty decisions”, they are kinda smart decisions. Reddit makes money by gathering data and by showing ads. They cannot show ads on apps they don’t control. So they have to handle a lot of traffic for which they get nothing back. That’s why they are trying to push as many people to use their app as possible. They know that the hardcore oldschool community won’t like that, but they are probably pretty sure that enough will switch to the app to make it worthwhile for them.

Meta is fighting to stay relevant as well. Facebook was the foundation of social media for a long time, but in the digital space, this can change very quickly, so they constantly have to try new things.

And if we look at games like the Sims, the game who really escalated the whole DLC thing, it’s a similar story. From a consumer perspective, what they are doing is bad. From a business perspective, it’s smart. And that’s what it ultimately comes down to.

Companies’ main goal isn’t to satisfy their customers, it’s making money. If fucking over customers makes them more money, they do it in a heartbeat.

What were the bad decisions discord is making? Im out of the loop

I think the free money train in leaving the station and everyone is scrambling to be profitable. But that’s just an assumption based on twitch and Reddit right now.

only now? to me most social media platforms were shitty to begin with, or had become shitty long before.

I feel this is a matter of perspective. The average Joe whose concept of “social media” is Facebook probably has never noticed anything getting any worse. The mainstream users who just want to see funny pics and couldn’t care less about 3rd party clients might actually be quicker to side with Reddit than with the protesters.

Twitter has never been attractive to me. Even back when its API was public (ancient history). Not only is their feed noisy and of poor quality, constantly swayed by “trending” stuff I don’t care about, it also has always had you depend on a privative and closed source walled guarden. Things were much more open before twitter, when people used blogs to post their stuff instead.

Reddit might have been a bit more open once… but it stopped being so long ago, this is not a change in behavior. Maybe this is an unpopular thing to say, but I’m actually glad this is happening. I think the API fiasco might be an overall good thing if it helps people get away from Reddit, and if so I hope Reddit does not backtrack.

A lot of these companies have never been profitable and have been running on VC money on speculation alone until they reach critical mass and can turn on the monetization streams.

Start making alternatives, open source alternatives.

Cory Doctorow has some very interesting blogposts on the topic. He call it enshittification. It’s more or less the business model of plattform Capitalism.

Capitalism slowly shits up everything. Even the things it helps create.

I mean this in the most general way possible. Not just platforms. Even if reddit was profitable it would still continue. It’s just part of the cycle of seeking not just profits but ever rising profits.

It’s just more obvious lately on digital platforms because it has been kind of compressed into smaller amounts of time.

That which is free must find a way to cost.

That that makes money must find a way to make more.

And slowly but surely its takes on a fine shine. A glean seen from a distance. But when you get close you realize. “oh, its fucking shit all over it.”