What the web is going through right now is "platform collapse": the giants of the web 2.0 era gradually failing as they scramble to cut costs and raise revenues.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this comes at the same time as interest rates are rising. For 15 years, most of the life of these platforms, they built themselves into giants by burning easy cash – but now the taps have been turned off.
Is it that interest rates rising means it’s too expensive to turn users into product for data extraction and monetization?
Imagine if we had platforms (and systems around those platforms) designed for actual, sustainable, human purposes rather than for commoditization and financial accumulation…
@tomw Reddit is still struggling to become profitable despite a decade of being one of the most visited sites on the web. It seems easy cash allowed them to postpone building a real business for too long, and now they’re panicking.
@tomw Do you think that the internet economy, in a way, is a kind of crypto currency illusion, writ very large? I mean so many business (hi there, #Uber) have either never or only very recently actually made money? I've been reading for years articles "How Do You Monetize The Internet?"
@SonofaGeorge I think a lot of venture capital money has been spent to try to insert new "middlemen" all over the place. While that money was cheap it allowed them to subsidise prices to capture market share. Now that is unravelling.
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