rimu

WhoRoger, 11 months ago

Everybody just wants money now. Some of that is reasonable, these companies tend to work if not with a loss, then with quite unpredictable margins.

Now that tech investors have found a new bubble - AI - they are no longer willing to sponsor old-fashion internet stuff and wait if it ever turns a profit.

Especially since many got used to becoming all that richer during the pandemic, and are looking to keep those numbers rising.

But there's also some sudden hatred of porn, and I don't know where that is coming from. Tumblr, Imgur have limited it completely, OF wanted to, Reddit probably will, coedcherry shut down. The owner of coedcherry said it was really a sudden 180° turn of the banks to no longer wanting to do anything with porn, and nobody knows why.

It's especially bizzare considering how these platforms keep assuring us that we'll still be able to post and see blown off heads and all kinds of other nasty stuff, it's just the titties that are being banned! Eh?

RadDevon, 11 months ago

Is it because interest rates are higher so investors are hanging onto their money? The money doesn't flow as freely in that direction, but it has to come from somewhere. That means, the "free lunch" users have been having while money was flowing from the investor side has to end, and the tech companies put the squeeze on the users instead to bring in money from that direction.

I don't know if that's it, but maybe?

empireOfLove, 11 months ago

All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.

The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet's history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the "next best thing".

Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It's only just getting started, you watch.

shortwavesurfer, 11 months ago

Oh really. Id say the chance of not existing in just a few short months is quite a hurdle to building something like a twitter. The fediverse has the right idea by nitting together many thousands of small communities into one cohesive whole such that the load on any one entity is never very large and off the shelf consumer hardware or vps services are capable of running it. This also distributes costs around making each entity pay a manageable amount

Archit, 11 months ago

I actually want to see reddit kill 3rd party apps, this will provide a huge opportunity to Lemmy, and show how much power these Reddit Admins hold.

animist, 11 months ago

Nah let reddit decay into FB 2.0