Technology

I hope you’re right. Everything was a lot more wild. You’d discover a blog through some link and feel like an adventurer explorer a blank part of the map. It was much more fun.

Yeah, it seems like people made the internet something valuable, a bunch of commercial businesses turned up to take the reins so they could harvest hat value for wealth for investors, it's reached a point where that juice is no longer worth the squeeze for them and we'll go back to a phase where the progress and generation of value will revert back to regular people again for a while. Likely that balance will then tip back towards profitability again and the cycle will start anew.

I don’t believe that

Very true. The only sites I've seen disappear and pop up semi-regularly in the last years were of the Youtube-to-MP3 type.

Oh man, let's do politicians next!

I think there is value in coining a term for a specific process like "enshittification" as rent seeking doesn't describe the entire process. From how they get users, to how they get vendors/advertisers their forsaking the users and finally the vendors then all that's left is a husk that survives because it's a monopoly. While I understand the term is used to describe the second half imo the first half is integral because those are the steps that set up the monopoly, starving the market of competition.

Oh wait, hmm, no rent seeking adds nothing of value to the market where someone like amazon added value at one point but that took resources from aws to make it not operate at a loss, unless you see that as rent seeking

We're not coining a new cute term, it's been described in greater detail before, that applies specifically to tech: https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df91979

Stolen from another discussion thread: Interest rates are up and quantitative evening is over. For nearly 15 years money was basically free for tech companies. Banks don't pay anything, bonds don't pay anything, the stock market is overheated and investors are still looking for return. So if your tech company was already public you could borrow in the form of bank loans or bonds for dirt cheap and if it was still privately held you can get money from individual and corporate investors.

Now that the free money era is over a lot of companies have had to finally think about making a profit so that they can keep the lights on. This is why there have been tens of thousands laid off in the tech sector in the last year or so.

As far as Reddit goes I have no idea what they've been thinking. It seems like they've been spending money developing features nobody wants or needs: locally hosted images and video which have to cost a fortune, live chat, and NFTs, to name a few. They've got the ~20th most popular website in the world with millions of daily active users and they can't figure out how to make it profitable?

The API the third party applications used doesn't serve ads. All they had to do for a bump in revenue is to insert ads and require third party applications to display them or risk losing their API access. Users would grumble but it's a pretty reasonable ask. The fact that they didn't do this demonstrates to me that they don't think the money is in serving ads, they think it's in data mining and they can only get the data they want from the official app.