Current Events > Why do websites insist upon killing themselves

(+) Yeah! (+)

Especially once they think they've become "too big to fail" like Twitter and YouTube

Y-combinator infinite growth strats are a hell of a drug

or, to reframe it a little: These companies were not built with profit in mind (or even sustainability, in some cases), they've been massively funded to conquer a niche and then be sold at ridiculous price to investors to then figure out. The ghouls who then buy it are literally never interested in how the product is used, or why, or even the particulars of how it's been built. They want it because Lots Of People use it (people who can - theoretically - be milked for profit).

This scheme falls apart when taking into account the logical consideration of the internet being essentially a luxury service to most of the world - people can and do live without social media, youtube, whatever, which renders attempts to turn the theoretical money-faucet on ultimately self-destructive.

this pattern is extremely frustrating because if/when these dominant sites implode there's nothing to fill the gap that remains, and the niche they fill is extremely good, overall (how many billion hours of good stuff is on youtube, alone? How many artists and collateral creatives like VAs, animators, etc, make a living via their twitter clout? At risk, because some person who is already rich enough for their next twenty generations of family to never need to worry or work needed More Money)

Can we have the *fun* late stage corporate dystopia instead? This one's depressing.

YouTube will be fine. Twitter not so much. Charging people to use a free service where the users are literally the content is fucking stupid.

Imagine if YouTube charged you to post a video or charged you to watch a video. Their views would plummet.

You don't have to specify just websites. Name a company whose practices have gotten better in the last ten years.

It's usually because of a greedy CEO/ owner that doesn't care about their own company or people who helped led them to that fortune in the first place. They take the money and dip or maybe they crash and burn in their own success

Thought this was about GameFAQs tbh

Strider102 posted...

Thought this was about GameFAQs tbh

That's a websight. There's a difference

They wanna make some money

Sacrifice profitability for usability > Users flock to the laltform thanks to its usability, high quality users bring more and more people in > decide you can use all the traffic you're getting to make some money > gut all the usability in favour of profit-milking.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Capitalism

it's the hip thing to do

Its usually depression.