You have to remember, most apps and sites all boomed around (roughly) the same time.
I think it’s a mixture of two things I saw other commenters say: investors demanding constant growth (I’m not one of those rabid anti-capitalists, but this cutthroat unforgiving attitude of boards and investors is NOT sustainable), and the other factor is these sites/apps focused on finding their niche and building an audience/userbase first and worried about monetizing second.
Since websites and apps all had the same start point just a couple of decades ago (for the oldest sites), it’s not a huge surprise they’re all running into the same dilemmas around roughly the same 5 year time span.
If I had to hazard a guess, I’d wager we’ll see a few major companies rise up, build a huge audience, screw up the monetization, and drive everyone scattering to smaller sites/apps. Then in a few years one of those smaller apps has a good run, rises to the top, pulls all the users that were previously scattered, and then botches their own model eventually, scattering the users again. Rinse and repeat. Just my thoughts though
Something I read someone else here on Lemmy, but which is a good point, is the fact that there aren’t that many investors around anymore. Boomers are slowly dying out and Millenials don’t have that much money (Gen Y even less so). All of those social media apps were/are running at a loss for a long time before eventually becoming (barely) profitable, needing a steady stream of investors chasing the potential value of the app to stay afloat.
Saudi Arabia are currently a significant portion of venture capital. They have a ton of money coming from a dying source (oil) so they need to diversify.
The sequence of events from Elon Musk acquiring Twitter to now is an incredible journey.
Elon Musk bought a social media company for tens of billions, attempted to back out of the deal but couldn’t because of his ineptitude by signing away the ability to reneg on the deal.^[1]
Then there was the freedom of speech advocacy from Musk where he ultimately unbanned racists and then began sharing bigoted Tweets. But it’s only freedom of speech for his bigoted supporters, when authoritarian governments ask Musk to censor people/tweets he abides by their requests.^[2]
The site becomes inundated with the alt right, it’s become rife with bigotry.^[3]
There was the whole verified blue check mark debacle where verification became something you could pay for, with people making fake “official” accounts. For example a fake account impersonating a pharmaceutical company caused their stock to drop abruptly following a satirical tweet.^[4]
Twitter engages in mass layoffs and multiple things break on the site. There are also reports that they can’t pay rent in certain locations across the globe. Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisors, as they record a 59% reduction in advertisement sales.^[5]
Elon Musk posts tweets seemingly apologizing for some of the changes and says he will follow the will of the people by posting polls for users to vote on policy changes. Musk asks if he should step down, to which the majority vote in favour of his removal. He then goes on a tirade about bots after losing in the poll. He goes on to say that only paid subscribers will be permited to vote in future polls. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.^[6]
The crème de la crème is Elon Musk implementing a new restriction where you have to be logged in to see tweets and restricting the number of tweets you can view. Inadvertently DDOSing his own site.
It truly has been a wonderful ride, is amazing that Spez could pull away last second and destroy reddit right before musk pulls this shit. 8 do thing when is all said and done musk will have fucked himself the hardest … I think anything can happen
Omfg you’re here! I’m so fucking excited now! I would always read through your such well written and referenced comments!!! This is such an exciting moment!
Elon doesn’t pay rent, one member of the transition team told Hawkins. Another member of the transition team put it more bluntly to Killian: Elon told me he would only pay rent over his dead body.
Both Killian and Hawkins were told that for Musk, the fact that Twitter was legally or contractually obligated to pay a particular sum would be irrelevant to the decision of whether to actually pay it when that amount came due that Musk operated on a zero cost basis"
And
Between the demands that he effectively participate in theft and fraud and instructions to take actions inviolation of California law and that could put his colleagues lives at risk in the event of a fire a possibility only increased by the unlicensed use of space heaters Killian had no choice but to walk away from the job he had dedicated over a decade of his life to .
Not realistic, they’d make very random gem numbers to confuse people as much as possible.
“Buy 295 gems for $4, or for a limited time get 699 gems for $10! Subscribe now for 295 gems a week for one month! Recharge your tweet limit for only 365 gems!”
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