Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?
Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?
YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
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Interest rates and inflation is probably a significant source of panic for high growth tech companies with poor earnings.
When interest rates are low, there isn't a lot of worry about future dollars being eroded by inflation, and investors tend to pay a premium for growth and future earnings. Money is easy to borrow in that kind of environment, so a company that has lots of growth, increasing daily active users, poor earnings, but the hope of finding ways to increase earnings, that kind of company will see their valuation skyrocket and they can use that valuation to secure funding.
When it flips around and interest rates are high, inflation is high, future earnings get eroded by inflation (a dollar in 2021 was stronger than a dollar in 2023), suddenly a company that has shit earnings and huge growth is a lot less desirable compared to a company that has consistent earnings and dividends. That growth stock with shit earnings used to rely on their valuation to generate funding to power that growth, suddenly that entire siphon gets broken, their valuation falls from the sky into reasonable territory, money is hard to borrow, and they're stuck trying to stay afloat mostly with their shitty earnings.
After the great recession, tech was a very dirty word. We're talking years after the great recession, 2012-2014 even. People didn't want to invest in companies that didn't make any money. 2020-2021, pandemic, lockdowns, historically low interest rates, all that, money was so easy to borrow and growth was so huge from people being stuck indoors that a lot of tech companies with shitty earnings had such insane growth metrics like daily active users that these companies went to the moon. Twilio, TWLO for example, quadrupled from pre-pandemic highs. 2022-2023, inflation becomes a very real thing and things are opening up again, all those metrics drop to normal levels, money is harder to borrow, future dollars getting eroded, growth tech gets crushed, TWLO is suddenly trading at levels lower than pre-pandemic (lost 80% of its value from pandemic highs).
We're seeing a lot of 'internet' type tech companies go from boom to bust, and now they need to do whatever they can to drum up money the good old fashioned way - from generating income as opposed to securing funding through growth (debt).
Not only stuff like Twitter and Reddit, but Netflix cracking down on account sharing. A couple years back Netflix viewed account sharing less as a loss of revenue and more as an 'unauthorized permanent trial', hopefully some bandits eventually get their own account for the sake of convenience... But nowadays Netflix needs to think shorter-term and behave a bit more self-sufficiently, so they're starting to take a more direct approach to compel people to obtain subscriptions.
Something like gfycat, when money is easy to borrow and inflation is low, investors will line up to pile in even if there is practically no revenue, because eventually they might monetize it and become wildly profitable... But in this environment nobody wants to touch something like that, so a zero revenue entity either scrambles for profitability or they simply dry out
Couple this with the idea that Elon is proving you can do something drastically unpopular to increase profit, and most users still won't abandon the platform. Tech companies, traditionally, move quickly off of FOMO to make a profit. Elon has brazenly validated many choices that other companies have generally considered risky up until his point.
I would expect this to get even worse now that spez has doubled down. Many people talk about how Elon and spez are ruining their platforms, but at least for now, they have seemingly gotten away with it. Some users have migrated to other platforms, but many have stuck around.
Hit the nail on the head. Elon and spez don't need to keep anywhere close to all their users for this to be a success. From a business perspective, they could lose a quarter of their users and still come out stronger if it means they've monetized the rest. Then add in the additional bonus of getting rid of all your ideological, principled troublemakers, leaving you with a platform full of high quality, addicted users that are easy to take advantage of. I don't like it, but it really is a sensible strategy from a monetization perspective.
This is as accurate of a take as you can get. I did a scroll of reddit yesterday. It ain't dead.
This is the only response required. I'm quickly becoming exhausted of reading everyone's epiphany on "enshittification" as if it's some natural eventuality. Yes the money must eventually come, but not always at the expense of platform quality. If anything the results we see from "enshittification" are due to the fact that most businesses fail eventually due to poor leadership.
Just to echo what you have already said, money today is simply more expensive than it used to be. We even see the impacts of macro monetary decisions on households.
Buying a house or a car on loan is far more expensive than it would have been a year and half ago. A $500,000 house in 2021 would cost $2,000 a month at 2.75% interest and 20% down. Today same that payment is $2,800 or 40% more expensive at 7.75% interest.
Modern companies live on revolving debt, so if their suddenly gets 40% more expensive and that same amount of money is also less valuable at the same time (inflation), then they need to make up the difference somehow.
Corporations are trying to find the balance between squeezing more revenue to pay their ever increasing debt bills while also not destroying the environment that attracted the users (their products) in the first place. Twitter and Reddit are just going about it horrifically because of poor business leadership and decision making. Netflix's approach appears to be sustainable, and there is no doubt that YouTube will be fine in the long run.
This is not meant to be apologetic to the decisions made by Twitter and Reddit. They've made their bed through their own horrible decisions, and now they've got to sleep in it.
I remember a video, I think from ColdFusion, explaining how the economy has been working on debt on top of debt since the 2008 crisis. The whole idea of "grow first, profit
neverlater" is only possible thanks to endlessly rolling debts. A bubble begging to burstAnd the irony is that the same motherfuckers responsible for that problem will be responsible for this next one AND they'll still stay rich, while we slave away having to deal with "economists" complaining that we want to own houses.
Very interesting, thanks!
Any chance you know of any papers, ideally academic, that go into this, for further reading?
I don't know of anything academic but the first thing worth reading about is the Discounted Cash Flow model. It's a valuation model that takes into account the time value of money (in a hypothetical 0% inflationary environment a dollar today is worth just as much as a dollar 10 years from now, and in a hypothetical incredibly inflationary environment a dollar today can buy far far more stuff than a dollar will in 10 years).
That right there has a lot to do with the ebb and flow of growth stocks vs value stocks in regard to inflation. When there's no inflation a company with poor earnings but very high revenue growth looks very appealing because the revenue growth outpaces the diminished value of future dollars, but in an inflationary environment, that kind of company becomes a huge gamble, because they might never be profitable and their revenue growth is getting whittled down by inflation.