What’s with social media companies trying to destroy themselves recently? ( kbin.social )

Roundcat , 11 months ago

We are at the end of the "free lunch" era of tech. Before, there was a lot of investment in tech because it was very easy for rich people to get loans, and sink it into tech companies or startups. With inflation at its high pace, banks failing, (esp. CV bank for our case) and the hike of interest rates, many tech companies are trying to make up the loss of revenue in anyway they can. Either by cutting staff and laying off people, or squeezing every dime out of every customer they can.

Before it was just accepted that some users would not monetarily engage with a platform, either by just lurking, blocking ads, mooching off a friend's account, or never buying any of the monetary perks being offered. Now they are doing their best to apply pressure to these people. Either they will go away entirely, and not expend anymore of the company's resources, or they will cave and put some money into the system by making purchases and consuming ads.

This has been growing trend since late last year, but this year in particular has caught many tech companies with their pants down. The days of burning free money for tech are over, and they are trying to scrounge together cash by any means necessary.

Bendersmember , 11 months ago

Solid point. One thing that these companies will realize quickly if they plan to move from ad based to subscription services is that a lot of them won't make it. Especially when the price of everything is so high. It no feasible for people to sub to 8 streaming services between film and music, add on a VPN, the odd Patreon, lots of people with ring and other camera and security subscriptions. I get that people will shuffle between services, but that might not be enough, and the more they go for the customers throat, the more likely people will realize it's a want and nowhere near a need.

thehatfox , 11 months ago

Successfully monetising a platform means doing it in harmony with the the user base though, at least to some degree. A platform can't make money from users if it scares them all away. Social media platforms are especially vulnerable too because they rely on users to create their content. Nobody comes to Twitter to marvel at the system infrastructure, they come to read tweets.

The way certain tech companies are behaving currently is too knee-jerk and heavy handed. They are panicking and damaging their platforms in the process.