The corporatization of the world feels like it’s coming to a head. You’re not allowed to own anything anymore. Everything is a subscription and it’s impossible to afford property. You just rent everything putting you on constant edge until you die.
also, you now are required to log in to view twitter. I don’t care that much, but sometimes people would link to tweets and now I won’t be able to view them when they do.
I was just thinking the exact same thing.
Things seems to have accelerated lately, but I don’t know if this is something regular users even notice or care about and it just feels significant to us because of the recent twitter and reddit idiocy.
I am super excited about all the attention the fediverse is getting. There are still a ton issues to be solved here, but decentralization feels like the next evolutionary step of the web.
One of the issues is “who’s gonna pay for it”? And I think the answer is something like “most users are”, in the sense that you’d pay your local instance, the same way you used to pay for newsgroups. Thus keeping it out of the hands of venture capitalists, hedge funds and billionaires in general, because hopefully we’ve learned that that’s a bad thing.
Big tech was basically a big dumping scheme, built on top of cheap money (i.e. low interest rates). This prevented smaller competitors from challenging oligarchs, but now the interest rates are too high for this to be sustainable, so they are scrambling to make their businesses actually profitable without admitting the entire business model was unethical and, well… just plain stupid in the long term.
“The 2030’s are going to be a reckoning for how much of the 21st century was built on the back of low interest rates.” See Adam Conover’s interview with Dan Olson of Folding Ideas.
I think companies have seen what happened with Twitter and it has convinced them that they can try more drastic revenue generation strategies with little repercussion. They have all become strong monopolies in their respective domains and users who have grown up with the current offerings are not willing to put up with lesser alternatives.
The internet is basically ~10 websites for most people, only occasionally veering off the path to find some one off information. The casual user sees no reason to put up with the growing pains of alternatives and will put up with a lot from Google and friends if it means not having to create a new account on another website with no content.
How can you possibly replace YouTube and Reddit? Their value is in their user base and it’s impossible to replicate that type of “success” overnight.
Musk started it with the extreme monetizing of Twitter. Cutting off api access, charging premium subs for reach, selling verified… and he got away with it. All the brainless Twitter users are still there using his platform and bitching instead of leaving.
Musk proved you can piss all over your userbase and they won’t leave. Now all tech companies are doing it. Meta is charging for verification. YouTube cutting adblock. Google looking to stop supporting adblock in chrome. Even Reddit CEO citing Musk as his inspiration going forward.
LEAVE these platforms, people. The CEOs are literally laughing at your stupidity while cashing checks.
Isn’t this just what many people predicted what would happen when everybody would use adblock? Now most people use some kind of blocker and some browsers even ship with a content blocker. Now pages need to make money in another way, so that’s either subscriptions, donations. or just force people to watch the ads anyway. I doubt people would want to donate any money to YouTube so then you get this.
It is not nice for users, but without income they would have to shut the site down. The same will happen when Lemmy gets popular, people will really have to donate to instance owners or they will also be forced to get money in another way.
This feels incredibly charitable towards multibillion dollar corporations that are in a race to the bottom for pandemic level revenues by making these changes, but I’m no expert.
Bingo. It seems like everything these days are different corps trying to replicate pandemic-level profits while forgetting that everyone isn’t still sitting on their asses at home
Oh, you mean the multibillion dollar corporations? The ones that get more per minute than many business will get in their whole existence, not to mention any of us people? No, adblocking is a drop in the ocean for them, that has always been bullshit, same with piracy. What we’re seeing is the result of economical effects outside of all this, namely changes in interest rates, all the VCs and shareholders are now demanding the return of their investments at any cost. That’s why ALL of them are squeezing at the same time.
And about Lemmy instances? Absolutely! We cannot depend on the generosity of admins forever, and i’m OK with this.
This is the fallout from the technology industry shrinking and coming to terms with itself. See the crash of the Silicon Bank recently as an example. Basically as the positive outlook toward these kind of businesses and pursuits continues to mellow out we’ll see these companies look inward to squeeze as much money out of their products as possible.
I feel like this is the best outcome because we’ve seen people address what really matters to them. People are switching to more local solutions. Engaging with communities they actually care about.
What the actual heck is happening to the internet. It feels like it is being destroyed at a breakneck pace.
The corporatization of the world feels like it’s coming to a head. You’re not allowed to own anything anymore. Everything is a subscription and it’s impossible to afford property. You just rent everything putting you on constant edge until you die.
also, you now are required to log in to view twitter. I don’t care that much, but sometimes people would link to tweets and now I won’t be able to view them when they do.
I was just thinking the exact same thing. Things seems to have accelerated lately, but I don’t know if this is something regular users even notice or care about and it just feels significant to us because of the recent twitter and reddit idiocy.
I am super excited about all the attention the fediverse is getting. There are still a ton issues to be solved here, but decentralization feels like the next evolutionary step of the web.
One of the issues is “who’s gonna pay for it”? And I think the answer is something like “most users are”, in the sense that you’d pay your local instance, the same way you used to pay for newsgroups. Thus keeping it out of the hands of venture capitalists, hedge funds and billionaires in general, because hopefully we’ve learned that that’s a bad thing.
Big tech was basically a big dumping scheme, built on top of cheap money (i.e. low interest rates). This prevented smaller competitors from challenging oligarchs, but now the interest rates are too high for this to be sustainable, so they are scrambling to make their businesses actually profitable without admitting the entire business model was unethical and, well… just plain stupid in the long term.
“The 2030’s are going to be a reckoning for how much of the 21st century was built on the back of low interest rates.” See Adam Conover’s interview with Dan Olson of Folding Ideas.
I think companies have seen what happened with Twitter and it has convinced them that they can try more drastic revenue generation strategies with little repercussion. They have all become strong monopolies in their respective domains and users who have grown up with the current offerings are not willing to put up with lesser alternatives.
The internet is basically ~10 websites for most people, only occasionally veering off the path to find some one off information. The casual user sees no reason to put up with the growing pains of alternatives and will put up with a lot from Google and friends if it means not having to create a new account on another website with no content.
How can you possibly replace YouTube and Reddit? Their value is in their user base and it’s impossible to replicate that type of “success” overnight.
And each of sites are just rehosting or screenshots of the other 9.
Musk started it with the extreme monetizing of Twitter. Cutting off api access, charging premium subs for reach, selling verified… and he got away with it. All the brainless Twitter users are still there using his platform and bitching instead of leaving.
Musk proved you can piss all over your userbase and they won’t leave. Now all tech companies are doing it. Meta is charging for verification. YouTube cutting adblock. Google looking to stop supporting adblock in chrome. Even Reddit CEO citing Musk as his inspiration going forward.
LEAVE these platforms, people. The CEOs are literally laughing at your stupidity while cashing checks.
Isn’t this just what many people predicted what would happen when everybody would use adblock? Now most people use some kind of blocker and some browsers even ship with a content blocker. Now pages need to make money in another way, so that’s either subscriptions, donations. or just force people to watch the ads anyway. I doubt people would want to donate any money to YouTube so then you get this.
It is not nice for users, but without income they would have to shut the site down. The same will happen when Lemmy gets popular, people will really have to donate to instance owners or they will also be forced to get money in another way.
This feels incredibly charitable towards multibillion dollar corporations that are in a race to the bottom for pandemic level revenues by making these changes, but I’m no expert.
Bingo. It seems like everything these days are different corps trying to replicate pandemic-level profits while forgetting that everyone isn’t still sitting on their asses at home
Oh, you mean the multibillion dollar corporations? The ones that get more per minute than many business will get in their whole existence, not to mention any of us people? No, adblocking is a drop in the ocean for them, that has always been bullshit, same with piracy. What we’re seeing is the result of economical effects outside of all this, namely changes in interest rates, all the VCs and shareholders are now demanding the return of their investments at any cost. That’s why ALL of them are squeezing at the same time.
And about Lemmy instances? Absolutely! We cannot depend on the generosity of admins forever, and i’m OK with this.
But most people don’t use adblockers. They are going after like 10% of their user base
Turns out that storing and delivering petabytes of data isn’t free.
Cool, can we start charging them back for all the data they sell about us?
We never assumed it was, where do you think these billionaires got their money?
This is the fallout from the technology industry shrinking and coming to terms with itself. See the crash of the Silicon Bank recently as an example. Basically as the positive outlook toward these kind of businesses and pursuits continues to mellow out we’ll see these companies look inward to squeeze as much money out of their products as possible.
I feel like this is the best outcome because we’ve seen people address what really matters to them. People are switching to more local solutions. Engaging with communities they actually care about.