- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- technology@kbin.social
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Wow, the ‘enshittification’ of the internet is really taking off now. Sites are either already dodgy, or well on their way there!
I know this has been a bit of a slow burn for a while now, but it really feels like it’s all coming to a head suddenly.
We really gotta back decentralized platforms if we don’t want everything to become an overmonetized hellscape where all information and communication is skewed to suit business interests. I wouldn’t pay for Reddit Gold and Twitter Blue but I should send some money to the Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon folks.
Things happen slowly, then all at once.
The Great Internet Recession™ has begun
Forreal, what’s going on? Why does it seem like so many separate sites are suddenly so much worse/going downhill quickly?
Billionaires bought the internet and now they’re realizing that it isn’t profitable.
Question is what do you do then? First, you try to reach profitability. Get out of the red by milking users and reducing costs, but there is little chance to get that really sweet ROI that you dreamt of in the last decade. What do you do next? My guess is that we will see some websites change ownership into some shadier hands in the next years. The personal data collected could still be worth something after all.
Do websites even make much from collecting data? There are so many trackers and only so many people. Ads are obvious, but it’s clear that relying on those two isn’t enough for revenue.
I’m guessing that websites with a large userbase will start charging for access to their sites. It might look like the NYT, where you get your 3 free articles, sign in for more, then you’re required to pay. Free tiers won’t be a reasonable compromise like they are now.
Will people stay and pay, or will they migrate? Most likely the former, especially for the older demo. Moving to the fediverse has been confusing enough for many of us who actually committed to learning about it. An average Twitter user wouldn’t put in this much effort.
I’m skeptical that ads themselves actually have a return on investment. There are so many, they are almost entirely ignored. Of course the advertising companies have done a good job convincing people to buy ads. But do they work well enough to justify the cost?
Ads don’t make enough. I play a solitaire game that pays out money for sitting through the ads. Those ads are highly targeted and very likely to drive traffic to those other apps that say they will also pay you to play solitaire or even Candy Crush! I still only get maybe $.10 per game and sit through around 3 ads. I accidentally click ads a lot, too.
What else are web companies going to do for revenue, though? It doesn’t really cost them anything to host ads.
Our entire Internet enjoyment has been heavily subsidized by venture capital for the last 30 years which hoped to monetize us more than they have been able (believe it or not).
Now they are calling in their bets…
How will enjoying the internet look like in the future? Lots of things we took for granted clearly weren’t, and now we’re used to a kind of internet that might just not be sustainable.
I guess things aren’t looking too good.
Interesting question…probably going to be a lot more expensive for us, which will result in fewer services being used, and therefore higher amounts of service lock-in due to personal investment into specific service(s)…
Apparently they have been living on life-support.
I can’t claim to fully understand how it worked, but apparently as long as sites could show user growth they could attract investments, but with inflation causing interest rates to go up (and other economy hocus pocus) , that money is quickly drying up.
I don’t know if the investors believed that if the user base could grow large enough, someone would buy the companies, or they suddenly could come up with some fantastic monetization of said user-base.
Now as companies are listed on the stock exchange, and facing the falling investor interest, they are expected to react (aggressively) to secure future revenue.
Adding to what you said about interest rates: We’re at the end of a long period of cheap borrowing (very low interest rates) during which overvalued assets were used as collateral to secure loans for investments. These propped-up assets are beginning to drop to their true (intrinsic) values. In other words, speculation and irresponsible practices were propping up a house of cards that’s starting to collapse, and now investors are scrambling to cash in or cut losses wherever they can. So they’re deciding that time has run out for online platforms that promised to grow but still haven’t hit their numbers/monetization goals.
tl;dr: Infinite money glitch got patched (because it was wreaking all sorts of financial havoc) and now investors need to end life-support for risky/unprofitable investments.
Infinite money glitch got patched
This is an amazing way to describe things. Lol
Same thing is happening to streaming services
Streaming fell apart quickly, it’s so hard to find anything decent on most of them. It’s become clear they can’t curate new content as readily.
It’ll be even worse when there are no new series to watch because all of the people who write them are on strike. The content mines are drying up.
The internet was far more enjoyable 20 years ago, so if content goes back to being user hosted instead of corporation hosted I’ll be happy.
I agree. But I think spam-bots, especially backed with ChatGPT or better level AI will prevent real user generated content, on that level from 20 years ago, to resurface.
They are unable to find investment funding because boomers are retiring and taking their money out of stock market.
It’s like the enshitification cycle somehow synced! https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Not a coincidence. End of cheap money era.
Yeah, no - it’s definitely not a coincidence, that was said tongue in cheek https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/04/07/vc_funding_falls/
On Baconreader it wouldn’t show a gif, it would just be link, which was pretty good.
His name was Bacon Reader… His name was Bacon Reader…
Oh sweet, it’s dot.com 2.0. Grab your popcorn, it’s time for the internet to implode… again! Never ever underestimate shareholders’ willingness to self-destruct a product for short-term profit.
Similar to what happened after the last dot com crash, it’ll be interesting to see how the internet evolves and what comes next.
It’s called fiduciary duty and it’s why every mega company sucks.
Cut costs by replacing cashiers with self checkout? Write a fat check to the shareholders! Then, shoplifting is becoming an even bigger issue from the self checkout… Cut costs again by preventing shoplifting by having people man the self checkout! Write another fat check to the shareholders!
Nevermind that it would have been easier and cheaper to just keep the system we had. Looking at you, Target.
Hey, but self-checkouts are good. Dunno how they use them at target, but at shops I go to they allow me to get to the shop, grab what I need and leave within 5 minutes.
And not so sure with cheaper. Again from my experience, shops have a setup of 6 self-checkouts per 1 employee.
Hey, but self-checkouts are good.
They’re only good if they pass the savings of not having to pay a person to ring up your groceries onto you, which as far as I can tell they definitely fucking don’t. Groceries are considerably more expensive than they were a couple years ago and grocery corporation profits are sky high, so it’s not just the cost of everything going up.
I’m with Bill Burr on this one. Count to five Mississippi “Eh I guess they don’t wanna get paid” and start walking out. What are you gonna do, cut my hours? I don’t work here!
They’re only good if they pass the savings of not having to pay a person to ring up your groceries onto you
I’m with the other person on this one. Self checkouts have really reduced the queues where I live. They’re much more compact than the cash registers and the shop near me basically doubled its cash register capacity because of them. I rarely have to wait in a queue these days.
Tesco even has a scan as you shop service which is really convenient. You get a barcode scanner before you start shopping, then scan all products you want to buy and place them directly in your bags. At the checkout, you scan a barcode attached to the checkout machine, it prompts you to pay, you pay and leave. All your things are already bagged.
Fiduciary duty is an absolute circus. Obligating companies to maximize profits at the expense of the wider society is the exact opposite of how law should work.
Remember! You can’t say “fiduciary duty” without saying “douche” and “doody.”
It’s like the second implosion in a many weeks
Ooooff baby. Pulled that burn from the depths, did ya?
Next one will be human instrumentality!
The times, they are a changin’…
I’ve watched the internet evolve since I first logged on to CompuServe in 1990. I don’t think I have seen such a dramatic and fast change since the beginning of the WWW over crap like CompuServ.
How did you get that bitchin username graphic?
Googled “fancy text generator” and picked one at random lol
I see you fixed the “I” so it doesn’t read like a “|”
The color was bugging me more than anything lol
Test test
Test test
Test test
Had no idea this was even at risk of shutting down…
This is insane. I wonder what other relatively large internet service will go down.
Apparently PornHub already lost 80% of their traffic due to age verification laws. I’ll add the source when I’ll get back to it.
Edit: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/3/23782776/pornhub-blocks-mississippi-virginia-age-verification-laws
Edit 2: Maybe I misunderstood, see below comments
Reading the article would make me believe it’s 80% of traffic from Louisiana and not overall. So they will be fine lol.
I feel like that can’t be true, I imagine a huge amount of pornhubs users are international
It’s a poorly written sentence (not surprising as it’s The Verge lol) but I think they mean they lost 80% of traffic from Louisiana when they started enforcing age verification in that state which is why they now just block access entirely to states that enact these laws instead of bothering with the age verification.
Still Though, when Pornhub falls, that’s when we know were in trouble.
So, twitter, Reddit, Imgur, and now Gfycat are all killing itself
Has the internet bubble finally popped?
The privately-owned for-profit Internet is starting to pop. User-driven FOSS will reign supreme.
Just like the good old times of internet. When every kid had a hobby and installed a forum software into a shared hosting to spend time with others. “If you build it, he/they will come.”
You mean popped again? It has already popped back in 2002 with the dot-com bubble bursting. Seems investors never learn.
Wait what’s going on with Imgur? I’m aware of all the others. Also, you can add Stack Overflow to the list.
Been wondering how they detect how many videos you’ve watched without being logged in.
Cookies can be cleared, IPs can be changed, and if we all use something like the Mullvad Browser fingerprinting will be far more difficult.
I just spin up new virtual machines, with different flavors of linux. They’re all fairly interchangable at this point.
Wait what’s happening with imgur?
Removing porn and all images not uploaded from an imgur account
But why the porn?
Nsfw images can’t be monitised with ads.
Damn, and end of an era…
What the hell is going on?
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.
Everything is falling down:
- 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.
Oh damn that YouTube bit is news to me. Mostly I just watch on my phone or ipad on my break at work, but always use an ad blocker at home.
Honestly, you don’t even really need an ad blocker for YouTube. I just report every ad immediately and it skips through them.
Facebook is looking might well run these days.
Do ya remember photobucket? … Pepperidge Farm remembers.
- Imgur banned and purged NSFW images
And imgur banned porn and removed all posts not linked to a user account!
Sorry but that’s not accurate, they’re removing inactive images from unregistered users.
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.
Please don’t start working at archive.org
YouTube is blocking you after 3 videos if you use an adblocker.
They what now
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.
Who is YouTube’s competitor ?
Alternatives to YouTube include Vimeo and the fediverse’s Peertube, but I am not sure they qualify as competitors.
Actually, the peer-sharing nature of Peertube makes me wonder if it could handle a sudden surge of users better than the rest of the fediverse.
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.
Kinda glad GIFs are dying… they were beyond annoying specially in discussions. didn’t help that reddit started incorporating them into the comment section.
Gfycat was the only good gif hoster. The rest, tenor, giphy, etc, are all corporate buzzfeed slop, that were primarily used by dimwits to decorate their shitty blog posts with (remember the various reddit admin feature announcements that had like 300 stupid gifs in them?)
Quick question… Discord uses an inbuilt gif thingy. Is that Gfycat or going to be impacted in some way?
The other comment already mentioned that Discord uses Tenor, but you’re probably thinking of Giphy, which is another service similar to Tenor. Gfycat is a bit different, and was more like Imgur.
That’s crazy. Things are moving fast these days. It seems every private company owning a big website is trying to squeeze money out of user or closing.
It’s almost as if tech companies were entirely propped up by venture capital firms and didn’t have to be profitable or sustainable and focused entirely on growth and now that interest rates have gone up and VC funding has shrunk, a lot of them actually have to cut costs and justify themselves in order to get funding.
It’s kind of nice to see, to be honest and I hope it continues. I’m kind of sick of these companies and these tech bro dipshits unleashing their untested products on society willy nilly.
anyone have an archive?
It’s not a very informative article, it barely hints at why this is happening. Presumably Snapchat wants to shut it down, and rebuild it themselves?
Popular animated gifs hosting service gfycat.com is shutting down on September 1, 2023 and all hosted content will no longer be accessible at that point.
The service is one of many that is used by Internet users to upload and share animated gifs on the Internet. Founded more than eight years ago, Gfycat has risen to popularity and is widely used in some Internet communities.
The official website of the service informs users about the shutdown. There, the company writes: “The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com” Existing users have time until September 1, 2023 to save their uploaded animated gifs for safekeeping. On September 2, 2023, all data will be deleted from the company’s servers and will no longer be accessible.
Any image embedded on third-party sites will no longer display either and show an error instead. Uploaders may download their animated gifs from the service and upload it to another, and then change the embed codes of their posts to keep the images visible.
Gyfcat banned adult content in 2019 in the app and created a new service, called redgifs, for that. This service was later sold to another company.
The service was acquired last year by Snap, makers of Snapchat. Gfycat is not the only animated gif service that has been acquired recently. Meta, owner of Facebook, tried to acquire the popular service Giphy but was blocked to go forward by regulators. Meta had to sell Giphy at a $260 million loss to Shutterstock as a consequence.
Snap has not made an official announcement regarding the shutdown of Gfycat.
Here are some Gfycat alternatives
- Giphy – While now part of Shutterstock, Giphy remains available at the moment on the Internet.
- Imgur – One of the oldest standing sites that allows users to upload animated gifs and images.
- Kikliko – Animated Gifs with sounds support is what sets this site apart from many others.
- Tenor – Another site that allows users to upload animated gifs and embed them into third-party sites.
Now You: do you use another site for hosting animated gifs?”
