Half of the year is now FINISHED. Time flies, sure... and it's July 1st already. We've just written about what happened to Twitter on the last day of June and what we found out about YouTube on the last day of June [1, 2]. It's truly unbelievble because it seems like commercial suicide. It's like they do exactly what would piss people off the most. There is discord in Discord, a new reason for uproar in Reddit (covered in Daily Links hours ago), and it seems likely the mass exodus at Twitter will rapidly accelerate. Some people paid over $9 a month to Elon Musk. And in return he SHUTS OUT all the people who follow them without having an account. HOW DO PUBLIC OFFICIALS AND GOVERNMENT AGENCIES JUSTIFY THEIR (MIS)USE OF TWITTER NOW? They've just basically slapped a paywall or imposed walled gardens on almost everything, even on things people wrote 16 years ago.
"2023 isn't just a tough year for the "tech" sector; it's especially unforgiving to the social control media bubble."As it turns out, "ad tech" was just massive bubble. They sit on loads of data they said would be worth a lot. It's not. They don't know how to really "monetise" those expensive-to-operate platforms. Social control media [sic] sites are thus collapsing so fast this year. Facebook's layoffs are phenomenal in scale. They throw in the towel. Tumblr, Twitch, Reddit, soon YouTube (pissing off everybody!) and now Twitter. LinkedIn (Microsoft) had had MASS LAYOFFS for 3 years already. They recently shut down entire offices.
Truth be told bluntly, social control media operated at a loss for too long. Like "ad tech", it was just a longstanding bubble. Spotify is not worth 38 billion dollars as Wall Street would arrogantly boast (Apple isn't worth 3000 billion either); it's BILLIONS IN DEBT and LOSING a BILLION bucks each year. There is hardly a business model. There are also mass layoffs at Netflix, which offloaded ads to Microsoft, a company which is itself having massive issues, including more mass layoffs to come.
2023 isn't just a tough year for the "tech" sector; it's especially unforgiving to the social control media bubble.
What about federated, Freedom-respecting, decentralised social control media? A bubble also. It doesn't scale. Twitter is a dumpster fire, sure. But Mastodon is dumpster fire with source code available. You can also deploy it and spend a fortune on hosting "toots"; for a few sentences and some connections you sooner or later pay a lot of money. If you have many users to host for, bills grow exponentially (plus "moderation" overhead). Why not just use an RSS reader instead? The other day we saw "claims of stalled Mastodon adoption [which] might ring a bit true."
That does not surprise us at all. We said it years ago. It would inevitably happen because there are many structural and economic deficiencies. You cannot forever rely on the generosity of hosters. They will lose patience and call it quits. Then everything goes offline. ⬆