It’s just a bit more platform enshittification, honestly.
Every social-oriented company is realizing that the Free Money Tree has died, burned down, and is now a rotting stump in the middle of the High Interest Rates woods, and they’re in utter panic because not a single one of them is actually profitable, has ever been profitable, or reasonably has a path to profitability.
Reddit, Twitch, Discord, etc. are all living on borrowed money and time and the only way they’re going to survive is if they either squeeze money out of the users directly, squeeze it out of their partner/content creators, or find a new investment which isn’t something that’s happening anywhere.
100% have to agree. The cost of operating these massive online platforms vastly exceeds any profit options they have available to them. Without some form of aggressive data mining, advertising, subscription services or combination of all 3 they will continue to lose money.
Part of the problem is, IMO, the corporate structure built around these companies.
I’ve always wondered why Twitch has 1200 employees, or Reddit has 2000, or Twitter had 5,000. What do they all do, and is the cost of carrying so many people justified?
I’m betting (and honestly, the Twitter shitshow kinda has shown) that you maybe don’t actually need 1,200 people to run a streaming site, and maybe you don’t need 2,000 to run a text-based link aggregation site and that this weird tech company obsession with growth and size is actively counterproductive, at least to some extent, when it means you can’t carry the costs of the company without having to absolutely trash the experience of your users to do it.
IMO, exec salaries (and any equity grants) should be exclusively tied to company profitability but that’s one of those things that’d never happen in a million years.
There’s just no incentive to build sustainable businesses when you’re working with free money and I think a lot of tech firms (not just social media ones) are going to crash land over the next couple of years.
They don’t have to, but for capital intensive industries like streaming, it’s not something that you can easily build or federate, at least not until bandwidth and processing gets a lot cheaper
Chinese effort to nationalize segments of their internet tech industry has had pretty bad consequences in the past 5 years, so I’m not quite sure that will magically solve the problem either.
It’s just a bit more platform enshittification, honestly.
Every social-oriented company is realizing that the Free Money Tree has died, burned down, and is now a rotting stump in the middle of the High Interest Rates woods, and they’re in utter panic because not a single one of them is actually profitable, has ever been profitable, or reasonably has a path to profitability.
Reddit, Twitch, Discord, etc. are all living on borrowed money and time and the only way they’re going to survive is if they either squeeze money out of the users directly, squeeze it out of their partner/content creators, or find a new investment which isn’t something that’s happening anywhere.
100% have to agree. The cost of operating these massive online platforms vastly exceeds any profit options they have available to them. Without some form of aggressive data mining, advertising, subscription services or combination of all 3 they will continue to lose money.
Part of the problem is, IMO, the corporate structure built around these companies.
I’ve always wondered why Twitch has 1200 employees, or Reddit has 2000, or Twitter had 5,000. What do they all do, and is the cost of carrying so many people justified?
I’m betting (and honestly, the Twitter shitshow kinda has shown) that you maybe don’t actually need 1,200 people to run a streaming site, and maybe you don’t need 2,000 to run a text-based link aggregation site and that this weird tech company obsession with growth and size is actively counterproductive, at least to some extent, when it means you can’t carry the costs of the company without having to absolutely trash the experience of your users to do it.
I thinks costs could be trimmed a ton in a lot of companies. Although that likely means layoffs and not lower salaries for the executive team.
IMO, exec salaries (and any equity grants) should be exclusively tied to company profitability but that’s one of those things that’d never happen in a million years.
There’s just no incentive to build sustainable businesses when you’re working with free money and I think a lot of tech firms (not just social media ones) are going to crash land over the next couple of years.
Maybe the commons shouldn’t be run as for-profit businesses
They don’t have to, but for capital intensive industries like streaming, it’s not something that you can easily build or federate, at least not until bandwidth and processing gets a lot cheaper
nationalize amazon
Chinese effort to nationalize segments of their internet tech industry has had pretty bad consequences in the past 5 years, so I’m not quite sure that will magically solve the problem either.