Social media sites that have been in the red, growing primarily through fostering good will in their customers, are finally trying to turn a profit, and there isn't much available to profit off of without intentionally kneecapping some aspect of your product. Taking stuff away is the fastest way to pissing someone off.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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People are more concerned about privacy and adblocks are almost ubiquitous to using the internet. The companies need more data to profit than what the users are willing to provide, so they are shutting down or severely limiting API access. These API are also what bots and karma farmers use to create content and engagement on these platforms. But platforms have a hard time separating the two.
Users who are used to using these services for free (in exchange of their data) are now not happy they can't have it their way while they limit the company's means of profit. So they are "threatening" to leave.
Reddit is an echo chamber manipulated by bots and mods are facilitators of karma farmers and PR/marketing agencies. They're protesting in the name of users but really are just afraid of losing that bot generated content/engagement.
What I find funny is that if these people just did old fashioned ad banners at the top, bottom or sides of the page, I would leave ad blocker switched off.
Old fashioned ads are much less lucrative than highly personalized ads. It's why so many sites require you to create an account to access their content. The end goal of the platform is to extract heaps of advertising data from you.
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The drive to make a profit.
Taking those little projects and extracting every dollar you can until it implodes then you go to the next one.
they are realizing that if they want to maximize profits they don't actually need to maximize users.
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Well, while it is surprising it's all happening within a year or so, it's not unexpected at all.
They're ultimately for-profit companies. They have openly demonstrated the obvious truth that when push comes to shove, users don't matter to them, at least not as much as money. Our attention was the product.
These companies have proven time and time again that a quick moneygrab will win over retaining the people who make the site work. capitalism 101 baby.
Yep, think of the math like this:
1000 users that we can get $1 of profit from totalling $1000 profit
Or 500 users we can get $3 of profit from totalling $1500 profit.
$1500 > $1000 Therefore it's a good decision.
Welcome to the mind of corporate executives
Source: I work with these dumbasses
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Higher interest rates means less investment, resulting in these companies racing to make a profit. The reality is that Reddit is bleeding money and has been for years, and Twitter is barely profitable.
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What happened with Twitch? I'm out of the loop there.