I’ve had this feeling that since there are forces that do not want us to have free speech, and that the destruction of Reddit and Twitter does this effectively, creating a chilling effect, destroying social links and communities. Might it not be an intentional effort to stifle the ability of the downtrodden to organize and fight the power?
There are so many other ways things are engineered to benefit the minority and prevent the majority from gaining power, why not this too?
Just a thought rattling around in my head.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just capitalism, which is worse.
I think there are a lot of moving parts, there are tech investors who want their money, there are machine learning companies that are hungry for data, and there are certainly fecal matter stains who want more control of the discourse.
We’re no longer in the era of free money (when interest rates on loans were lower than inflation) so companies and investors can’t just take out more loans to pay for the growth of a company that will figure out how to make money eventually.
Additionally that “eventually” has come, a lot of people just retired at a much faster rate (we went from about a million people retiring a year to five million retiring a year in the US)
Everyone who is retired needs their investments to start paying out now, that means all the bankers, money managers and VC goons need ti start getting their money back form the tech companies they’ve been lavishing investment on the past two decades.
They poured money in to capturing the internet and now they’re locking everything down to make their money back, that means cracking down on ad blockers, herding users in to walled gardens where they can be price gouged, and halting the free scraping of data through free API
Machine learning systems are apparently the next hotness that’s going to gush profits, and the raw input for that is data off the internet to train programs, so the social media sites are locking down their data so that they can charge machine learning companies to train on it.
Combine all this and you get the anti-user crap storm we’re currently in. Ad blockers need to go, free and open API needs to go, the profit must flow and if it doesn’t a lot of people in the upper echelons will find their preverbal knee caps smashed in.
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Spez is trying to tie up what he thinks are loose financial ends to make (what he thinks) is an appealing IPO.
Elon is feeling the pinch as Twitter continues to bleed advertising partners and users and it becomes more apparent it will not make back either his purchase cost or Twitter’s existing debt. He’s the spoiled son of a rich mine boss and has no idea what he is doing. He is used to having far more capable people running his companies for him.
The mine went bankrupt in '89, just a few years after Errol bought shares in it. The boss was someone else.
*fall guy
Businesses do not become unprofitable in two years, they were always shells and someone sold it to a pansy.
Mines can absolutely become suddenly unprofitable. You don’t know how much good stuff is in the ground until you dig it up.
I’ve seen people shoot gold into the walls of a mine to make it look like there’s something left in there. Only those new to the industry would fall for it.
There are absolutely ways to find out the likelihood of how much is left. They’re either patsies or idiots who didn’t listen to their geologists.
Somehow I don’t think Errol Musk knew that much about the geology. Allegedly he bought the shares on a whim without first visiting the mine, which was in a different country.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. “Don’t attribute to malice what could be explained by incompetence.”
This ^^. It turns out that Elon is just a narcissistic idiot who doesn’t actually have good business sense, at least in the software world. The types of things he’s been trying are better explained as someone who wants Twitter to make more money but doesn’t understand how people actually think and behave and doesn’t realize that these decisions will alienate users and destroy the product. Spez decisions seem similar, although on the whole I think he’s less of a people idiot than Elon, and is probably just under tons of pressure to improve the financials right now and is making bad short-sighted decisions as a result.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy as much as it is the natural consequences of extreme wealth and narcissism, fueled by the necessity of continual quarterly increases in profit.
The idiocy of the ultra wealthy creates a feedback loop because they’re convinced that their wealth is proof of their brilliance and so they copy each others terrible ideas.
It isn’t the forgivable stupidity from lack of education, but from being surrounded by sycophants and profiteers coupled with a profound alienation from the rest of humanity.
Unfortunately, all of that is harder to fix than prosecuting a conspiracy.It’s the standard narcissistic downward spiral more likely.
One of the sadly interchangeable bozos who inherited a lot of money and/or lucked his way into a fortune can keep the spastic ego weasels in their heads in control for a while. Or has a team of people to both manage their companies and public presence.
But as one starts to bridle under all of this undue control from outside forces, the madness comes to fore. They begin to lash out at the perceived slights, which ironically were always for them and their company’s protection, and it all snowballs from there. Worse, seeing another such oligarch do the mad jig seems to encourage the others that THEY shouldn’t be shackled either!
Musk was always a giant pile of shit. He was just well managed and in control of his inner demons enough to present a ‘pleasing’ facade. And being forced to buy twitter completely unmoored him from reality.
Zuckbot is an odd case… he’s an unmitigated monster, but seems to be enough in control that the downward slide hasn’t started. Yet.
Bezos was fine until Amazon became mega profitable and he got to live out his corrupt CEO dreams. Look at not only the legions of shattered humans left in the wake of Amazon, from drivers all the way to corporate, but what he did to William Shatner. While Shatner has been a weapons grade asshole for much of his life, seeing him humbled to the point of tears from finally going to ‘space’ only for Bezos to frat bro it up to make sure that HE was in the limelight was grotesque.
Spez has always wanted a seat at the big boy table. And has a long, long, long history of douchebaggery.
Trump isn’t even worth mentioning. I was an teen when he came to prominence in the 80s and even then it was absolutely fucking obvious that he was large mouth, larger ego all wrapped in an empty suit.
This isn’t all to say that there isn’t a conspiracy to destroy these services. Only that the more logical takeaway is that these awful men have always wanted to be the garbage fire they’ve become… and it was just a matter of time.
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So conspiracy probably isn’t the right term, although there are common factors that are causing - or at least influencing - a lot of these trends.
With inflation being a major issue, central banks are reacting by increasing interest rates. These rate hikes have the effect of making credit and borrowing more expensive.
This is significant because central rates had been low (nearly 0%) since basically 2008, with quantitative easing (cash printing) pumping billions of additional dollars into the stock markets in particular.
The effect of loaned cash being effectively free is an explosion of activity from investor hedge funds who were willing to take huge risks on speculative projects. This fuelled the massive boom in tech startups across the 00s.
The trouble is, many of those startups weren’t profitable, they were ‘potentially profitable’ and fuelled by credit. Or they had the underpants gnome model of profit where the means and mechanism of the ‘???’ stage would be figured out later (WeWork).
Investors were happy to fund those losses to create products that controlled markets (Uber) or amassed huge userbases that could be flipped from potential to profit in the future (Reddit).
Only now the rates have gone up, and credit is suddenly expensive. Business models that rely on running at a loss suddenly aren’t viable, and those startup investors that owns chunks of those businesses are now insisting on actual returns on their investments.
You can see the effects all over social media and tech, but Reddit (urgently need to get profitable for a stock launch, need the stock launch for funding) and Twitter (basketcase debt load at the worst possible time for debt) are the most obvious examples.
Techbro austerity means worse products for consumers or aggressive monetization policies which users will likely dislike. So not a conspiracy, but decades of reckless investment by hedge funds that have been caught with their pants down by interest risk.
Thank you that was extremely insightful.
