Oh sweet, it’s dot.com 2.0. Grab your popcorn, it’s time for the internet to implode… again! Never ever underestimate shareholders’ willingness to self-destruct a product for short-term profit.
It’s called fiduciary duty and it’s why every mega company sucks.
Cut costs by replacing cashiers with self checkout? Write a fat check to the shareholders! Then, shoplifting is becoming an even bigger issue from the self checkout… Cut costs again by preventing shoplifting by having people man the self checkout! Write another fat check to the shareholders!
Nevermind that it would have been easier and cheaper to just keep the system we had. Looking at you, Target.
Fiduciary duty is an absolute circus. Obligating companies to maximize profits at the expense of the wider society is the exact opposite of how law should work.
Hey, but self-checkouts are good. Dunno how they use them at target, but at shops I go to they allow me to get to the shop, grab what I need and leave within 5 minutes.
And not so sure with cheaper. Again from my experience, shops have a setup of 6 self-checkouts per 1 employee.
They’re only good if they pass the savings of not having to pay a person to ring up your groceries onto you
I’m with the other person on this one. Self checkouts have really reduced the queues where I live. They’re much more compact than the cash registers and the shop near me basically doubled its cash register capacity because of them. I rarely have to wait in a queue these days.
Tesco even has a scan as you shop service which is really convenient. You get a barcode scanner before you start shopping, then scan all products you want to buy and place them directly in your bags. At the checkout, you scan a barcode attached to the checkout machine, it prompts you to pay, you pay and leave. All your things are already bagged.
We really gotta back decentralized platforms if we don't want everything to become an overmonetized hellscape where all information and communication is skewed to suit business interests. I wouldn't pay for Reddit Gold and Twitter Blue but I should send some money to the Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon folks.
After 2008, interest rates were set to zero and basically stayed there for the next 15 years. What that meant was that investing your money in literally anything was better than putting it in a savings account or loaning it to the government (bonds). What thatmeant is that any company with a dream and a product found themselves swimming in piles and piles of venture capital fund funds. And all that money meant that customers were getting a lot of stuff at or below cost from companies that had lots of cash to spend, and no real concern about making it back. Now the free ride is over and everyone is trying to cash in, only to find that’s not as easy as they made it sound to their investors.
Enshittification is a sexy concept and I understand why everyone has glommed on to it. Unfortunately, the interest rate explanation is the much more complete and correct one.
Google is dropping Reddit and Twitter from their searches.
Twitter is throttling Tweets and you have to signin to view anything. Which would be crazy antivaxxer radicals, so not missing anything. No more free API use.
YouTube is blocking you after 3 videos if you use an adblocker.
Reddit has killed all 3rd party apps among API changes
Now Gfycat is going, man that’s like most of the sites I used since a kid. Imgur seems to be around still at least.
There’s been a lot of talk about this, but I’ve yet to see it. It’s either being A/B tested and not fully rolled out, or whatever way they’re detecting adblock isn’t catching me.
There’s plenty of pictures online though of people getting the message.
Damn. Imgur was so awesome when it first came around. I remember the creator doing an AMA when he made it. It mainly served as a image hosting site, just for Reddit… Then it gradually went to shit
Imgur doesn't even load for me on Firefox Mobile + uBlockOrigin. It also tries to redirect me to their broken front end if I just want the .jpg file. I absolutely hate them and wish people would stop using it.
Yea me too i am a bit wondering why. People kept saying this was the reason, but idk if they really mean that or if its just 'saying what sounds possible as a half joke' (like when people answer any question about any shady business or very expensive auctions as "its money laundering" even tho there may be other explanations. I think ppl say it half jokinly?) Idk what reason snap would do this tho? Maybe theyre planning to make a gif hosting thingy by theirself?
Snap(chat) is Gfycat's parent company. The short version is they're hemorrhaging money and have been for years so they're cutting this as part of cost saving measures.
The other comment already mentioned that Discord uses Tenor, but you’re probably thinking of Giphy, which is another service similar to Tenor. Gfycat is a bit different, and was more like Imgur.
The problem with something like gfycat isn't the source code, it's the storage and bandwidth. That shit is expensive and there's no way to do it for free without showing ads and not go broke.
Maybe we need a bittorrent style protocol but for images, and people could host them on their own NAS or something. IPFS maybe?
Or maybe the Fediverse already solves this in a way - certainly on kbin I can add images to replies, but that storage must be coming out of Ernest's pockets? Perhaps having a modest file size limit for free users, and a larger allocation for premium users is a way that a fediverse host could cover the costs.
There were a few crypto solutions for distributed file storage (Siacoin and another whose name I can't remember) but I haven't paid any attention to crypto since it became a joke a few years back so I doubt they're still relavent.
The problem with a Blockchain style solution is there's no good way to remove content that needs to be removed. You can't modify the chain without a fork which requires at least half the people on it to agree every time it's forked. So what do you do if someone uploads something illegal, and then how do you remove it from all the people that opt to stay on the old side of the chain?
There's no central owner so it becomes an unmitigated disaster with nobody accountable.
I'm not sure how the file storage portion works but I don't think the files are stored on the blockchain. You're definitely right that there would be some hurdles to overcome and it might not even be feasible at all.
That storage and bandwidth is absolutely coming out of the instance operator's pocket. The bandwidth for just the actual html/javascript payload, too, but less since it's more easily cached and has smaller payloads. That's not even including the server costs.
A bittorrent like protocol is an option, but now you're talking about users running actual software to engage with the platform. That's a much higher lift and is a virtually guaranteed barrier to entry for casual users.
You have exactly three options here: 1) show ads, 2) charge money, 3) hope for donations.
Your only other option is to go under, eventually, or get purchased by someone with deeper pockets who will eventually use option 1 or 2.
Kinda glad GIFs are dying… they were beyond annoying specially in discussions. didn’t help that reddit started incorporating them into the comment section.
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