- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmygrad.ml
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Wow I love having large internet services that are used widely by the public be owned by inscrutable private companies that can trade them around between each other and randomly shut them down at their own whims, leaving a gigantic wreck of dead links in their wake
We really need an international free hosting service for images and videos. It shouldn’t be left to private companies that can go under.
Holy shit. A nationalised image hosting service would rock.
Video would be harder to figure out with the costs.
Simple, billionaires pay for it, or they're put in the billionaire bathysphere for a one way trip to the abyssal plain.
Make it out of carbon fiber and say it's going to explore around the Titanic, and they'll climb in there themselves!
In the US we'll probably end up with these sites being deemed too-big-to-fail and then Congress will step in to hand them all a bunch of money to keep things going
The congressional committee to investigate volume of furry porn hosted on the public image repository would be highly entertaining
The really funny part is that Photobucket self-destructed by pulling "fleece the users" shenanigans too.
don't worry, we still have the internet archive to make sure we can still see the stuff that people worked hard on and was lost to the ether!
Is there some kind of enshitification domino effect going on right now or what? So many user-hostile decisions being made nearly at the same time can't be coincidence.
Free VC tech money has dried up post COVID, the bubble has burst. Capitalists want a return on investment now. Most IT stuff is not profitable. YouTube isn't profitable, most Amazon clones aren't profitable, social media outside of the Facebook/meta owned model is not profitable.
Does anyone else find it really funny that the model just doesn't exist? The Vultures Capitalists are busting at the seems for 20 years now, the next big app is gonna break free! but no, its not.
Yeah, the profitable way to do social media is the Facebook/meta model, but I don't think most companies can pull that off or copy the meta model. And Zuckerberg blew all the meta cash on VR metaverse nonsense.
Ad based and user data based in which data on everything and anything is sold in large user packets by certain demographic groups to ad agencies.
Yannis Varoufakis has an interesting view of this reality - that it's digital serfdom. We are the serfs that browse many places on the internet for 'free' (living on the lord's land) and our data is our bodies being worked to farm the land. The profit ratio is the same - we get nothing but the 'privilege' of inhabiting a space, whilst they keep all the profits of our living.
I've probably butchered the explanation somewhat, so go check it out for yourself.
got it. so, much more intel-based, matching the ad against the user "need" or "interest" as it were. I had something similar to that happen on reddit but much more cringey. This was a couple years ago and I hadn't changed my settings to prohibit reddit selling my info to third parties. And I think also that they were less restrictive on who they sold user data to. Anyoo, I had made a comment in like a kayaking subreddit or something very topical like that completely showing absolutely no interest, just a comment basically on kayaks for whatever reason, using the term "kayaks" in my comment. The next day I was getting kayak ads sent to my gmail account. I quickly changed all my settings and it stopped, but it was quite interesting, and a proof of sorts. I posted about in on r/lifehacks and within an hour had over 1,000 likes or whatever. But all the main "front page" subs have rules that users are not allowed to post about reddit itself, so my advice got deleted. I remember feeling pretty frustrated, but also impressed by this organism's incredibly effective self-preservation techniques.
Except ads don't work outside the very top level agencies and brands anymore, so FB's model is also fucked in the medium term because the current digital agency model is fucked.
Yeah, and they have their own service for each demographic that they created or bought. Facebook for boomers and family friendly profile, Instagram for younger people and hustle nonsense, WhatsApp for instant messaging. And even within those services there's stuff like Facebook marketplace, WhatsApp communities and business, Instagram video and stories, etc.
This allows them to monopolise everything and sell nicely collected user data based on each demographic that uses the different services.
China does something similar with Weibo and WeChat
The actual start-ups never need to profit. The VCs invest early when they are worthless, hype the shit out of them, and liquidate their positions at IPO time to start the cycle anew. A bunch of suckers get left holding newly minted overvalued stock in doomed companies.
Yea, sounds right. Or as the imminent humanities scholar and Chicago saloon owner, Michael Cassius McDonald once put it, "...There's a sucker born every minute."
Also, the SBF crypto collapse had knock on effects. It's essentially wiped out Silicon Valley startup culture, hurt the balance sheets of a lot of angels/VCs and they're desperately trying to work out how to monetise AI to keep the grift going.
And now the credit freeze is reaching the top.
Free VC tech money has dried up
Maybe related to the Fed raising interest rates?
Correct. When you're paying no interest, you just take out loans and plow them into anything and everything. Crypto, Timeshares on future Mars colonies, you name it. When you actually have to pay interest on the loans, it suddenly becomes very expensive to run this enormous corporate and technical infrastructure with no realized profits.
The Web 2.0 bubble is bursting, web 3.0 is dead on arrival. On top of that capitalism on the whole is collapsing. It's not just tech that's floundering. The whole thing is unraveling
The Economist in a year:
"The death of the internet was caused by people not buying our bullshit while we use free labor to run these sites."
I think, at least in part, the free money from a galaxy of VCs is drying up. And many services that never were profitable in the first place, or hardly so, are having to disappear or make do.
As the funding dries up (for all the reasons everyone else said), investors are going to start pulling their money out of the least profitable businesses first. So all of the web businesses are trying to squeeze their users a little more than the others, so they can be slightly more profitable than the others, so they're not next on the chopping block. And all of them are doing this, so they're in a race to squeeze their users more than the other companies.
And investors are also kind of dumb and have their own capitalist class biases about what should be profitable, so companies can make themselves look better to investors by performatively cutting costs, squeezing customers, and appearing ruthless, regardless of whether those things actually will help the bottom line.
I was wondering the same thing. It seems like reality finally kicked in, and people see the funding vanishing for whatever reason. Someone else mentioned above to keep our eye out on the international stage, maybe there will be some players emerging from India, China, etc.
if everyone is angry at other companies at the same time you piss people off it has less of an impact probably
Internet 2.0 is at the very least and good riddance imo
"Web 2.0 is dying, and Web 3.0 struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."
Web 0 was static content and Usenet
Web 1.0 was millions of tiny BBSs, blogs, and content aggregators
Web 2.0 was social media giants and millions of apps
Web 3.0 was crypto bullshit (dead on arrival)
Web 4.0 is ???
it just seems like whatever phase of the internet that these various social media apps occupied is heading for a new digg. like, we gonna have digg-type apps that no one wants, but that the vast majority of users are powerless to revolt against, and will thus begrudgingly accept, and will thus begrudgingly accept being commoditized. And thus it will be like accepting commercial television after cable. There will be bile in the usage, and that bile will glimmer through always, permeating the experience, making it feel commercial, and cheap. There will also be a sub-set of users who realize that the internet of that phase is over, it's not coming back, these are users who know what is possible, and who do not want to be commoditized. These are your Lemmy users.... Is it perfect? No. Are you going to have to learn to get along with people who don't agree with your politics and personal philosophy lockstep? No, but it will make the experience a lot easier, for everyone involved. Are you going to have to be basically civil? Yes, anything else seems to be a nonstarter from what I've seen in my brief stint here on Hex Bear.
Are you going to have to be basically civil? Yes, anything else seems to be a nonstarter from what I've seen in my brief stint here on Hex Bear.
What do you mean by this?
Sorry if I wasn't more clear. I don't see a lot of tolerance for uncivil behavior. Either users call it out directly as comments, or it gets dealt with in the mod logs. That's my perspective only, of course.
