Why do so many tech companies, like Reddit and Twitter are making their platforms worse for their users all of a sudden?

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

from Cory Doctorow's article on 'enshittification', which has become mandatory reading.

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In short: money.

Long story is that a lot of these tech companies started as startups funded by VCs.
Borrowing money was cheap so they got dumped buckets of money onto them to burn in an effort to try to get a foothold and/or kill off competition by undercutting them.

Now that they've gained a foothold and in some cases have a near monopoly or duopoly and now that borrowing money isn't cheap anymore, they need to start cutting cost if not outright turn a profit.

And so the enshittification begins.

Specifically for Twitter, Musk needs to cut cost because he bought Twitter at a severe premium and has made it less valuable by the minute ever since he took over. This to the point that he is leaving bills unpaid.

Specifically for Reddit, they've burned through all that VC money and have been eying a juicy exit in the form of an IPO. An IPO would be a payday for everyone who initially invested into Reddit because now they can sell their shares for more than what they invested (or at least that's their hope). In order to get a good price once they go public they want to cut cost and increase revenue to seem as valuable as possible.

Specifically for YouTube, the ad game has been generating less and less revenue over time and advertisers have been burned in the past by having their ads placed next to objectionable content.
So the knee-jerk reaction is to severely tighten the rules for content, lest they be demonetized.
This however made creators realize that their livelihood in the form of the pittance that's called AdSense payout is very fragile, so they started moving to doing sponsorships, soliciting Patreon donations and partnering with Nebula.

Now YouTube is missing out on those revenue streams and often ad revenue as well as creators often turn off ads on their video when they have sponsor deals etc. So what does YouTube do? They started monetizing videos of creators who are not eligible for their partner program (i.e. place ads on videos and not share it with creators) and not give those creators the option to turn off ads, they started severely increasing the amount of ads on videos that do run ads, they started severely pushing YouTube Premium and now they're cracking down on adblockers.

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Check out Cory Doctorow's post on a term he coined called enshittification. Good primer to some of the same patterns we are seeing.

I believe there is another comment that breaks down a supposition for Reddit's enshittificationw, too, in this thread.

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Deleted.

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Rabbits

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Rabbits

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They are trying to squeeze as much money out of their platforms as possible, regardless of the fact that it's at the expense of users and will downgrade users experiences.

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The user bubble has popped now that investors started questioning why the fuck they’ve been investing huge amounts of money into companies that make no money just because they have lots of users. With that investment money drying up, these tech companies are desperate to start making a profit so they can survive and grow their value still.

TLDR: investment in unprofitable tech companies is drying up and companies that aren’t profitable are scrambling to make money.

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Because they realize they can get away with pretty much anything.

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Permanently Deleted

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Cory Doctorow termed it "Enshittification", and wrote about the process here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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I'm glad I read through the whole thing.

Bummed that I won't be winning a testicle 😰

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I'm glad I read through the whole thing.

Bummed that I won't be winning a testicle 😰

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I'm glad I read through the whole thing.

Bummed that I won't be winning a testicle 😰

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Capitalism. The incentive for any large, profit-motivated firm will always be to get the most people to pay as much as possible for as little as possible.

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Startup releases nice product

Product is cheap or free

Startup gains huge customer base while burning through money

Investors are interested

When initial money runs out, startup either asks for VC money or goes public

Now investors want more growth

Product goes through enshitification to extract more money out of customers

Product loses customers as it loses its original charm

A tale as old as time
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Interest rates go up. Quantitative Easing go down.

They might have to play with real money lol

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This is it. 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.

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Capitalism. Monetise everything no matter the cost to the users

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do you think this move will be good for their business?

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- Exactly -- this is almost certainly bad for Reddit's business at this point. The problem here isn't necessarily capitalism so much as it is a egocentric CEO gone mad with power.
  
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To expand on this, it's not just capitalism - it's greed.

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- I don't think "greed" is quite the right word. "Greed" would be the right word if they were trying to make themselves more profitable. But they're not: they're trying to make themselves profitable at all. That's not about greed, but about surviving. You can't survive unless you stop hemorrhaging money at some point.
  
  Maybe the question is "Why do investors invest so many hundred of billions of dollars into companies that cannot be profitable without becoming super-shitty? And why do users join them knowing that they're going to become super-shitty one day?"
  
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- To expand on this, it’s not just capitalism - it’s greed.
  
  No it's just capitalism lol. Every company has to continue reaping in profits for capitalists or else it dies. This is just Reddit's way of doing that.
  
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- Well,greed causes capitalism
  
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Let’s be honest. Reddit lost it’s original charm around 2015. Capitalism has a way of killing off all our nice things.

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I wonder if restricting API access might be related to the explosion of GPT where ML companies need training data and they've been sucking it up from everywhere they can. Reddit and Twitter realized that they could charge these companies for access instead and hence all of a sudden API access costs money.

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That has been the reasoning from Reddit. I believe it's one of those business conveniences where yes, he's not wrong, and gives them an excuse to kill something they think is extracting revenue from them (3rd party apps). Convenient excuse, but no one believes it.

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- I mean the purpose of a commercial platform is to create profit for the owners of the platform. I find it kind of funny that people are all outraged that these platform are pursuing their business interests. The mistake people made was to rely on these platforms to build their communities thinking that made them stakeholders.
  
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Ultimately a for-profit social platform can only make money via advertising. If you are depending on advertisers to be profitable you become beholden to those advertisers. Advertisers do not care about "community," "sustainability," or what made the platform attractive to users in the first place. But they do care about "public perception," and "number of users," and most importantly number of impressions per user, per hour. The advertisers customers care about things that hurt their branch, so they dont' want NSFW content, they don't want violent content, they don't want controversial content, they don't want anti-capitalist content, they want "quality" impressions.

So if you are twitter or reddit, or facebook, or whatever, if your advertisers make a demand that will piss off your users and make it worse for them you will always do it and you will continue to do it until the platform dies.

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