It’s advertising revenue collapsing and people realizing you can’t just run things for free. I am fine with not having these things if it means I get digital privacy
I tried Lemmy yesterday but today, probably thanks to the influx of new users, it's been extremely slow to the point of unusability. So now I'm trying out kbin which seems to be running faster (although still slower than old.reddit). Ignoring those issues, I can't decide yet which I like more.
I'm also still kinda confused about all the Federation stuff. So supposedly you should be able to interact with kbin hosted stuff on lemmy and vice versa and I can indeed see posts from lemmy on kbin's "front page" but what if I happen to come across something directly on the lemmy.world website (or any other Fediverse instance for that matter, where I don't even have an account), is there an easy way to access it from kbin.social?
I feel like the decentralized nature of Fediverse is at the same time its strength but at the same time makes it harder for users to switch.
As users of these platforms, you are not the customer, you are the product. Your attention, your eyeballs, your information. That product is sold to the real customers - advertising agencies, marketing groups, retail companies, service companies, etc. Now that production of that product has gone through the design phase and scale up, it's time to monetize.
The real issue with Reddit didn't have anything to do wtih API rates. It had to do with product value. Third party apps don't carry through their ads, thus reducing their value to their customers (again, not you). Moving NSFW subs, which significantly increases their product (you), increases the value to their customers. If they were going to allow third party apps to exist, they desire recompense for the dilution in value, hence the high API costs.
Most of them aren't profitable, especially twitter and reddit. YouTube is also doing it now, they're going after adblocks. They even threatened invidious recently.
But tbh discord change is for good. It's easier to invite someone, especially if they have special chars in nickname.
Simultanous enshittification. If they see that the competitors are enshittifying, then it's the perfect opportunity to enshittify themselves without the risk of losing significant market share to the competitors! Every gets worse; no one loses except the users, and who gives a shit about those poors? /s
Twitter and Reddit both want to get profitable fast - which doesn’t work, as both companies have never been profitable and don’t have any experience with actually making money.
The reasons behind this are different (Elon just wants to make some money after he bought Twitter, Reddit wants to be somewhat presentable for an IPO), but the effects are similar and make me question if we’re at the end of the "free corporate social media" era of the internet.
Discord has two possible reasons for that specific change. For one it wants to get more mainstream and therefore loses parts of what made it special as a social network (e.g. the special username system).
I also think Discord (over-)reacts to its spam/scam problem here and tries to make usernames more distinctive.
I feel like the VC/investor money that's kept huge swaths of the internet afloat for the last 20 years is finally starting to run dry. All these huge platforms who have been in "burn mode" since they were founded never figured out how to become profitable earlier on, and are now scrambling to keep themselves sustainable.
It's hard to feel sorry for them, even in the midst of their downfall. They've all had plenty of time to prepare for the day the their corporate sugar daddies leave them, and instead sought short-term profits over long-term sustainability.
I do feel bad for the communities, though. We've basically seen the Walmart-ification of the internet, where a few big corporate entities moved into the neighborhood and basically took over the landscape with their presence, effectively strong-arming smaller competition out of existence. So it'll be good to see more homegrown communities sprout back up in their place again.
Maybe we can see something like this happen with actual Walmarts soon, too. :)
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