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  • NeverWas.jpg

    It's assinine that these companies keep investing in ideas that A/ Rely on video and B/ Rely on the majority of their content creators contributing their content for free.

    The only thing that Twitch was ever going to do was drive traffic elsewhere. Hence why Amazon bought them. But they failed to get good at being Twitch. It still sucks in terms of performance and there's no subsidiary platform for Twitch clips. Also didn't they chase off most of their adult content creators?

    So they're basically trying to be profitable off of traditional advertising? Ha!

  • This is essentially admitting that the cheap money dried up as interest rates returned to normal and now they're in trouble.

    This is basically the story of the last year in tech and while the fed has indicated rates aren't going to rise further and may start to decline in 2024, we're unlikely to return to the ultra low rate environment that's existed for the past 15 years.

    I fully expect we'll hear a lot more stories like this as Silicon Valley companies are forced to actually operate as profitable businesses.

    • This. People quickly forget about this:

      2008's free money is gone, COVID-19 free money reprieve is gone, now it's time to show your work or go bust.

  • So little of our modern internet is realistically profitable in the long term. Same with other big segments of tech.

    They exist do to this notion of “ if we just get the user base and replace this old thing with our new thing, we can then monetize later.” They think they are successful because their new services is more innovative or better than existing services, some times they are, but people don’t use them because of that. People use these services because they are cheap, free, or convenient.

    If you try and charge for the real cost of operations, or monetize in some other way (basically all options here make it less convenient or hurt UX), people wouldn’t use them. Ether they have to keep operating at a loss or lose their dominant market position and survive on captive audiences.

    Modern tech is an oroborous of investors subsidizing the new guy to dethrone the old guy. But this only works so long as there is investor cash available to subsidize all this stuff, and that’s starting to dry up because of shifts in the world market. Labor shortages forcing industry to substitute capital for labor, meaning they’re competing for capital with tech, for example.

    The biggest for profit platforms are getting worse and more hostile to users/content-creators in an attempt to turn a profit, nothing new there, but now there is way less money to fund cheap convenient new start ups to replace them as they die off. If I had to wager a guess, much more basic, less feature rich, and cheaper to operate alternatives are going to start eating the lunch of these platforms.

    Some of it maybe new start ups that just don’t have the funding to develop their platforms beyond the bare minimum people will accept, some might be community organized projects that are run by volunteers and donations, see Wikipedia. Maybe decentralized interoperable systems where the capital and labor can be distributed over a larger number of willing parties.

    Ether way we’re going to see a lot of blood in the water over the next few years.

    • The sad thing is that if all these investors, finance bros, and tech bros actually paid their taxes and paid their employees decent salaries, so that income and wealth inequality was lower and more people had more money than barely enough to live on... people would have spare money that they might actually spend on things like better services that have fees attached. People use the free, cheap, convenient options because they don't have the time or money to spend on the higher quality ones, since the vast majority of internet services are luxuries, not essentials. No one's going to pay for Twitch if they're spending all their money on ridiculous things like food and rent. The best way to make the internet profitable is, in fact, to redistribute wealth away from the investors, finance bros, and tech bros who are so desperate for the internet to be profitable.

    • They exist do to this notion of “ if we just get the user base and replace this old thing with our new thing, we can then monetize later.”

      This has been the case since at least the .com bubble (and subsequent crash) in the late 90s to early 2000s. Even now, 25 years later, things haven't changed much.

      The main monetization strategies are still either to:

      • Charge money for the service, which people don't like since they expect way too much for free. It also alienates low-income users. OR
      • Show ads, which people don't like because ads. The increasing expenses and lack of people willing to pay for services has resulted in ads becoming larger and more intrusive. It's a cycle that I'm not sure anyone knows how to fix yet.

      There's a newer third option but it's mostly for smaller services:

      • Admins pay the costs out of their own pockets, and allow users to donate to support the service

      It's part of the reason why I think decentralized services could be the future. Lemmy or Mastodon can have a lot of small servers with reasonable costs spread across many admins, instead of one centralized service that costs a significant amount to run.

      • It's part of the reason why I think decentralized services could be the future. Lemmy or Mastodon can have a lot of small servers with reasonable costs spread across many admins, instead of one centralized service that costs a significant amount to run.

        Ohh, absolutely, or rather, it is the past. I mean, internet was built that way, as a resilient federation of networks and protocols. Lemmy could be seen as us just rediscovering emails after the tech giants almost succeeded in killing it. We should approach all the services we use by asking ourselves basic sustainability questions:

        • is that thing opensource?
        • self hostable?
        • does it federate/interoperate with equivalent services?
        • can I pull my data out of it/relocate to another provider on a whim?
        • if not, is this a trustworthy and ethical business?
        • is it profitable?
        • are there open financial records available showing where/for what the money is going?
        • is it at risk of being acquired?
        • is it subject to foreign/unlawful interference

        Etc Etc

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