Google is dropping Reddit and Twitter from their searches.
Twitter is throttling Tweets and you have to signin to view anything. Which would be crazy antivaxxer radicals, so not missing anything. No more free API use.
YouTube is blocking you after 3 videos if you use an adblocker.
Reddit has killed all 3rd party apps among API changes
Now Gfycat is going, man that's like most of the sites I used since a kid. Imgur seems to be around still at least.
Our new Terms of Service will go into effect on May 15, 2023. We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content. You will need to download/save any images that you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms. Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content.
Huh. I didn't know they were keeping the active ones. Though one has to wonder how they define active.
Kinda crazy that they didn't run a garbage collection routine on their data stores to begin with. One of the first things I ever did at my new job was write a python daemon that runs on our jump host and cleans up data older than a year.
Damn. Imgur was so awesome when it first came around. I remember the creator doing an AMA when he made it. It mainly served as a image hosting site, just for Reddit... Then it gradually went to shit
There's been a lot of talk about this, but I've yet to see it. It's either being A/B tested and not fully rolled out, or whatever way they're detecting adblock isn't catching me.
There's plenty of pictures online though of people getting the message.
Unless content creators get paid there's never gonna be a critical shift to a fediverse platform from YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok. Users may switch but they'll be straight back if there's no content.
Personally, I think that's better. Let people have their favored platforms. Have accounts on several. Use them as much or as little as you want. Advertising might be a deal breaker for you, but some are willing to put up with it. Some are happy paying for premium.
It doesn't stop federated platforms from existing. If anything, it helps deal with the volume of users. These closed platforms with VC money can barely afford to keep the lights on - self hosted servers can not handle that kind of traffic.
Sadly, Twitter is similar to Youtube. It may not have as many ADU as other platforms but the news media is heavily dependent on it. You'd need essentially every significant US politician to migrate to a new platform to see a critical shift away from Twitter.
That's an extremely good point: youtube actually does pay out to creators in a way that most other sites do not. Sure, they will often supplement this income with kofi or patreon, but if that youtube income stream dries up, a lot of the youtubers will simply call it quits instead of migrating to other platforms.
If YouTube does go entirely the route they are going, peertube may as well become a competitor. We need people to start downloading and storing YouTube videos to host on these servers. It just sucks, the legal hoops people will need it fly through... It's almost as if people are going to need to start moving to the darkweb as well.
Imgur doesn't even load for me on Firefox Mobile + uBlockOrigin. It also tries to redirect me to their broken front end if I just want the .jpg file. I absolutely hate them and wish people would stop using it.
After 2008, interest rates were set to zero and basically stayed there for the next 15 years. What that meant was that investing your money in literally anything was better than putting it in a savings account or loaning it to the government (bonds). What thatmeant is that any company with a dream and a product found themselves swimming in piles and piles of venture capital fund funds. And all that money meant that customers were getting a lot of stuff at or below cost from companies that had lots of cash to spend, and no real concern about making it back. Now the free ride is over and everyone is trying to cash in, only to find that’s not as easy as they made it sound to their investors.
Enshittification is a sexy concept and I understand why everyone has glommed on to it. Unfortunately, the interest rate explanation is the much more complete and correct one.