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

It’s honestly really sad what’s been happening recently. Reddit with the API pricing on 3rd party apps, Discord with the new username change, Twitter with the rate limits, and Twitch with their new advertising rules (although that has been reverted because of backlash). Why does it seem like every company is collectively on a common mission of destroying themselves in the past few months?

I know the common answer is something around the lines of “because companies only care about making money”, but I still don’t get why it seems like all these social media companies have suddenly agreed to screw themselves during pretty much the period of March-June. One that sticks out to me especially is Reddit CEO, Huffman’s comment (u/spez), “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive”. Like reading this literally pisses me off on so many levels. I wouldn’t even have to understand the context behind his comment to say, “I am DONE with you, and I am leaving your site”.

Why is it like this? Does everyone feel the same way? I’m not sure if it’s just me but everything seems to be going downhill these days. I really do hope there is a solution out of this mess.

ozmanthus ,

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

Aesculapius ,
@Aesculapius@kbin.social avatar

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.

This is the future of centralized web services.

Jaysyn ,
@Jaysyn@kbin.social avatar

No idea, but I'm here to help them finish the job.

theinspectorst ,
@theinspectorst@kbin.social avatar

I know the common answer is something around the lines of “because companies only care about making money”, but I still don’t get why it seems like all these social media companies have suddenly agreed to screw themselves during pretty much the period of March-June.

It seems like the proximate trigger for many of these decisions has been the rise of ChatGPT at the end of last year. Before this, they saw the best way to monetise their platforms as being about encouraging new content to create new clicks for advertising revenue. Since ChatGPT, they realised they're all sitting on goldmines of old content that could be used to train their own AI models - so suddenly they're prepared to take a range of seemingly-mad actions that will harm the quality and quantity of new content being created, because they think they've got enough revenue-generating potential from the existing content.

Of course the problem here is that a) they're killing the golden goose - monetising the back book while degrading the new content means they can only do this once, so they better hope it works and makes them a shit load of money, whilst b) although there's loads of potential in AI, we're yet to see someone actually make money through it and it has the potential to be a huge bubble where the hype eventually dissipates and the market collapses upon itself, with only a handful of players making it through unscathed to become the big success story.

All of these social media companies are betting the future of their platforms on them being the one that makes it through the AI bubble. Most of them will fail.

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Another potential problem with trying to monetize off the back of AI is that AI is such a rapidly developing technology that there's no guarantee that their stashes of data will actually be all that vital. There's been a tendency lately toward training AI with a smaller but more highly refined and curated data set rather than just shoveling vast quantities of text at them, for example.

Deathsauce ,
@Deathsauce@kbin.social avatar

It's the age of Techtalitarianism. They've become more brazen and less discreet in the fact they want everyone to pay to access what has become an essential communication method. Soon enough, the "free" aspect of social media will be on par with a video game demo. One or two levels (or features in this instance), certain amount of posting and reading privileges per day, just enough to get a feel for the real thing hidden behind an increasingly hefty paywall.

Robotoboy ,
@Robotoboy@kbin.social avatar

Silicon Valley is feeling the backlash of not being able to deliver on their promise. The entire sector has been funded off the promise of forever growth, inflated valuations based on easily manipulated numbers and the concept that tech is the future.

Which yeah, tech IS the future - but it's not the future because some sociopathic individuals are good at social engineering.

It's a panic. Musk never intended to buy Twitter but was essentially forced to... and has ego issues. So instead of allowing it to function and making edits to the business model (that was already failing) he has simply shown that he has no idea how to run a Social Media platform. So he tries to exert force on his userbase so that he can monetize them. Reddit's CEO sees this powerplay, and that a vast majority of Twitters userbase stuck around, and didn't immediately leave, and decided to play the bullish part as well. Twitch has always suffered operating at a loss, so I can only assume Daddy Amazon has forced them to start making bigger changes to make a profit finally. Discord... well Discord is still mostly in its infancy. It's not completely a dominating force in the industry and it knows it. That's way their changes come much more incrementally.

If it's one thing you'll notice about big tech, it's that they have always operated at a loss. They grew, and their services kept expanding because Venture Capital kept coming in at the promise of this future mythical profit. Their model was never sustainable though.

The number one lesson to learn from all this is that investments are just a game for the rich... and I'm going to be real, they're often just as stupid as your average moron.

Moving on to the ActivityPub protocol will be for the good of everyone. It's a bit of a return to the old net... We lose some convenience for the benefit of freedom.

So yeah, they'll continue to make stupid decisions and ruin their companies... but keep in mind that ActivityPub and the Fediverse isn't immune to these sociopaths. We may well see a well funded VC backed venture that uses the protocol.

We'll just have to see how this holds out.

HuskyTranslator ,
@HuskyTranslator@kbin.social avatar

It's the inevitable enshitification of platforms due to capitalism, explained here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys better than I ever could

TacoButtPlug ,
@TacoButtPlug@kbin.social avatar

@HuskyTranslator this really did a fantastic detailed postmortem

Edwardo_Elric ,

It's called enshittification of platforms. The article is not about Reddit, but applies just as well.

Phanatik ,

I don't think Discord's username change is on the same level as what Twitter and Reddit have done. It's annoying for sure but it's not as harmful. It's not like the username change prevents you from using it.

fearout ,
@fearout@kbin.social avatar

Yeah, I missed out on that outrage. What are people disliking so much about that?

I remember seeing that pop up, realizing that all this time I just had some generic username with my name and numbers, and changing it to my usual username. Were there some negative consequences to the service in general?

Phanatik ,

I personally haven't seen anything negative apart from the same issue people would have on other platforms and that's running into the issue that the name you want has been taken and you have to keep changing it until you get the one you want.

Duskfox OP ,
@Duskfox@kbin.social avatar

Yea ik that, I still wanted to mention it though to get my point across that companies are simply deteriorating the user experiences of their own platforms. Even as a Discord user myself, it doesn't bother me that much but my point stands.

Phanatik ,

I guess my contention is what you mean by the username change deteriorating the user experience. How does it do that? It's the name you log in with and the default nickname you have until you change it for each server. I'm missing the part where the username change makes the discord experience worse.

vtez44 ,

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.

IntendantTradwife ,

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

Quik2007 ,

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.

PabloDiscobar ,
@PabloDiscobar@kbin.social avatar

For reddit and twitter it's also induced by the threat of AI. Twitter and reddit host a lot of content, organized, sorted, coherent. It's invaluable for training an AI and these companies don't want to let it go for free. They want control over it, therefore they are making it very hard for AI companies to farm their content. The fact that it's happening now is because AI companies are probably rushing to copy as much data as possible before laws are voted to put a limit over them.

It will be the same for the fediverse, our content will be scanned by AI's. Our content is freely visible, organized, sorted and scored. We should be careful about that. If you are not a professional publisher or a public person then you should probably think about rotating your username as often as possible.

edit: But also, with the rise of tiktok, a lot of countries are now suspicious about the soft power of those apps, and are ready to legislate against them. The EU already did, they did vote fines against them and are regularly getting money out of them. The taboo is gone, you can attack those companies, it works. They were supposed to be out of reach, but they are not.

Also there is no genius in Twitter, as far as I know they have no patent over anything. If someone manages to become more popular than them on the same principle then twitter is done. Gravity will do the rest and users will move to a different platform. People are using it because people are using it. So the model is fragile and the value is questionable.

fearout ,
@fearout@kbin.social avatar

What’s so bad about giving AI models something to learn on? Add LLM-tier accounts to your social media company and have at it. And fix data/traffic issues by giving users the ability use their own tokens/api keys/whatever to limit bandwidth without affecting end users as significantly as they did with current decisions.

That way you could detect and address rogue scrubbers while still working with LLM creators who are open to an honest training integration. And if your company can’t really detect the difference between users and LLM crawlers after implementing something like this, well, then those crawlers don’t really affect the company as much as the CEOs would like to pretend.

ExistentialOverloadMonkey ,

The fuckwits at reddit and twitter HQs think they own that data. Data they didn't create, or even contribute to. They imagine that by providing server space, they somehow own the content. As if the government owned the cars that use the roads, or if an airline claimed they owned the travelers' baggage. Greedy bastards without shame.

PabloDiscobar ,
@PabloDiscobar@kbin.social avatar

What’s so bad about giving AI models something to learn on?

From a user point of view? A lot. So far the AI has made itself the champion of the creation of fake. Fake news, fake pictures, fake videos, fake history, fake identity. Do you think that the AI will be used for your own good? Do you think that your private data are farmed for you own good? I don't.

I posted an example about fake identities and fake posters on Twitter. This is the end goal. This is where the money generated by the AI will come from.

That way you could detect and address rogue scrubbers while still working with LLM creators who are open to an honest training integration. And if your company can’t really detect the difference between users and LLM crawlers after implementing something like this, well, then those crawlers don’t really affect the company as much as the CEOs would like to pretend.

Twitter and Reddit probably want to be their own LLM creators. They don't want to leave this market to another LLM. Also it doesn't take a lot of API calls to generate the content that will astroturf your product.

Anyway the cat is out of the bag and this data will be harvested. The brands will astroturf their products using AI processes. People are not stupid and will realize the trick played on them. We are probably heading toward platforms using full authenticated access.

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

From a user point of view? A lot. So far the AI has made itself the champion of the creation of fake. Fake news, fake pictures, fake videos, fake history, fake identity. Do you think that the AI will be used for your own good? Do you think that your private data are farmed for you own good? I don't.

That's addressing whether the mere existence of LLMs is "good" or not. That's not going to be affected by whether someone changes their username every couple of months or whether some particular social media site makes their content annoying to scrape. LLMs exist now, and they're only getting better; attempting to staunch the flow of genies out of the bottle at this stage is futile.

Personally, I'm actually rather pleased that my comments on Reddit over the years are factoring in to how LLMs "think." All that ranting about the quality of Disney's Star Wars movies not only convinced all the people who read it (I assume) but will now also convince our future AI overlords too.

chamim ,
@chamim@kbin.social avatar

Both Twitter and Reddit have failed to become profitable. And Twitter's in a far worse position right now than Reddit, because of its massive debt and lack of employees to fix or moderate issues. And since Reddit, who never had to pay for moderation, could not become profitable, it had to make some drastic changes toward that goal. Even if that dissatisfies users.

I was on Reddit for almost 10 years when I deleted my account. And while the platform will survive, it's difficult to say the same about Twitter. Not only was it a far worse experience to be on the platform after Musk acquired it, but now it's almost impossible to use it. People paying for the subscription have fewer issues, but I doubt that's going to drive up subscriptions, as Musk most probably expects.

Roundcat ,
@Roundcat@kbin.social avatar

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 ,
@Bendersmember@kbin.social avatar

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 ,
@thehatfox@kbin.social avatar

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.

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