This is a false dichotomy. You can have services, and not have them devolve into complete unusability in the name of profit. This isn’t sustainable either. The myopic pursuit of short term gains at the expense of the product will collapse at some point in the future, no matter how much you believe in this weird frog-boil internet we’ve inherited now.
Complete unusability is when ai tools clone the content and people stop visiting the original service and participating. I'll leave it up to them to defend blocking duck duck go for example, but blocking "AI" bots for an online community is a matter of survival at this point.
Alternatively, it's because the base platform has also devolved into unusability. Both Reddit and Twitter are in a position where their info is easily scraped, and their community is barely worth the advertising/paid-premium experience they demand from you. As both platforms continue to decline in quality, you might not even need to replace the original service. Both businesses appear intent on getting replaced.
> The myopic pursuit of short term gains at the expense of the product will collapse at some point in the future,
The myopic pursuit of short-term gains is the only playbook that works. Long-term business strategy is a gamble, and today's businesses have all learned that they'd rather make hay when the sun is shining than be remembered as a good business.
Twitter tried a long-term playbook to reverse their unprofitable sinkhole of a website. That ended up with them being undervalued and sold to the highest bidder.
> Twitter tried a long-term playbook to reverse their unprofitable sinkhole of a website.
From what I recall reading at the time, Twitter was finally becoming profitable before the sale (last two years? It’s hard to find a source now since every story since is about some shit show or other post sale).
> That ended up with them being undervalued and sold to the highest bidder.
You make it seem they were in dire straits and had to be sold for scraps, but that’s far from the case. They sold for more than their valuation to the only bidder because they understood what a good deal it was for them. They forced the buyer to not back out, after all.
We did. As in we, the Internet, existed for a long time without anyone making money and we paid for the privilege. Websites were built and hosted at owner's expense, for years, with no expectation that they be financially rewarded. Sure some would run donation drives, or work with sponsors relevant to the community in question, but a whole ton, mine included, just cost me a lot of money over many years.
Those websites were definitely technically inferior, as the march of progress is unavoidable, but web hosting is cheaper than it's ever been. A VPS that utterly blows away what mine was capable of in 2007 for nearly a hundred a month can now be had for about $10 per month. Yet everyone wants these monolith platforms, but even that wouldn't be the worst thing ever, except that every one of these platforms has a backend to support that we in the Old Internet never did: a C-suite's worth of executives and millions of shareholders, who for some reason have decided that reddit can't exist unless reddit makes them reams and reams of money.
I'd be very, very interested to see how much of, even what's probably the most massive one of all, Facebook, is non-essential busywork that could easily be shut down tomorrow with no adverse effects to the platform. Firstly the entire executive class, just, they don't do shit to make Facebook the product. In fact I'd argue their decisions almost universally have made it worse as a product very consistently for it's entire lifetime. Then, all the marketing people. There's just no goddamn reason to advertise Facebook (or reddit for that matter) the brand is so ubiquitous, if you actually found someone who'd never heard of it, I'd give you a large chunk of money. Add to that, if Facebook was doing a good job of being what it ostensibly is, then people immediately become the best advertising, because people want to hang with people in these digital spaces. Then get rid of the people working to make Facebook addictive with dark patterns. Then get rid of the entire targeted ad division, because it's gross and inhumane. Pare the company down to engineers who build the product, and if anything, expand the moderation team so they can actually ensure the safety of the platform, and of course the IT staff to back them. Now what does Facebook cost to operate?
As far as I'm concerned, this pearl-clutching about "well websites have to make money" is grossly, grossly overstated. Websites don't cost that much to run. A ton of money is being siphoned off by the MBA parasites playing games in Excel all day. A ton more is being wasted developing features that advertisers want and users hate. A ton more is being funneled into making products artificially addictive to vulnerable people, to exploit them, so let's just not do that. And of course, leadership, rewarding themselves with generous compensation packages they aren't even remotely able to justify. Now what does your website cost to maintain? Surely not nothing, and for websites of substantial size, it will still be high, but I'm willing to bet it's a hell, hell, hell of a lot less than it was before.
Part of the issue is that it isn’t just the web, but the inevitable american corporate shareholder model. Even businesses could be mom and pop ified and made way more popular overnight: quit raising prices and cutting corners and it would actually stand for itself like a massive $7 burrito. However the expectation is that shareholders get returns. Costs must be cut. Prices must be raised. Margins must be improved. It doesn’t matter if this eats the business alive, as shareholders are sufficiently leveraged. The whole system is incentivized to select for inferior quality and taking all the available money on the table.
My rant above and your response reminded me of all those tons of MMO games out there that are ancient, with a tiny playerbase, that remain profitable nonetheless simply because if you have a product that people like using, putting it into maintenance mode and doing the bare minimum to keep it running is a perfectly valid business strategy. The companies that buy these service games and run them effectively just buy completed money printers and keep them operating. It's not going to make anyone rich probably, but it's a perfectly valid and profitable way to go about things.
The silicon valley "grow at all costs, always evolve and innovate forever" model is so detached from the reality of most businesses in my experience.
Popular websites that allow user content to be uploaded or linked do cost that much to run, due to content moderation.
There might be a small (relatively) forum here and there that a few good moderators are willing to slave away at keeping clean, but you will never see a website that allows user content with as many users as Reddit/Youtube/Instagram/etc be cheap.
Although, due to AI, the cost to spam the small forums might be so small that even they might come into the crosshairs.
Although it is quite surprising that mainly text websites (Reddit, Twitter) are hard to run sustainably but video and image websites (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) can because it is easier to sell ads against them.
This is a false dichotomy. You can have services, and not have them devolve into complete unusability in the name of profit. This isn’t sustainable either. The myopic pursuit of short term gains at the expense of the product will collapse at some point in the future, no matter how much you believe in this weird frog-boil internet we’ve inherited now.
Complete unusability is when ai tools clone the content and people stop visiting the original service and participating. I'll leave it up to them to defend blocking duck duck go for example, but blocking "AI" bots for an online community is a matter of survival at this point.
Alternatively, it's because the base platform has also devolved into unusability. Both Reddit and Twitter are in a position where their info is easily scraped, and their community is barely worth the advertising/paid-premium experience they demand from you. As both platforms continue to decline in quality, you might not even need to replace the original service. Both businesses appear intent on getting replaced.
> The myopic pursuit of short term gains at the expense of the product will collapse at some point in the future,
The myopic pursuit of short-term gains is the only playbook that works. Long-term business strategy is a gamble, and today's businesses have all learned that they'd rather make hay when the sun is shining than be remembered as a good business.
Twitter tried a long-term playbook to reverse their unprofitable sinkhole of a website. That ended up with them being undervalued and sold to the highest bidder.
> Twitter tried a long-term playbook to reverse their unprofitable sinkhole of a website.
From what I recall reading at the time, Twitter was finally becoming profitable before the sale (last two years? It’s hard to find a source now since every story since is about some shit show or other post sale).
> That ended up with them being undervalued and sold to the highest bidder.
You make it seem they were in dire straits and had to be sold for scraps, but that’s far from the case. They sold for more than their valuation to the only bidder because they understood what a good deal it was for them. They forced the buyer to not back out, after all.
People were paying for forums before Reddit came along.
We did. As in we, the Internet, existed for a long time without anyone making money and we paid for the privilege. Websites were built and hosted at owner's expense, for years, with no expectation that they be financially rewarded. Sure some would run donation drives, or work with sponsors relevant to the community in question, but a whole ton, mine included, just cost me a lot of money over many years.
Those websites were definitely technically inferior, as the march of progress is unavoidable, but web hosting is cheaper than it's ever been. A VPS that utterly blows away what mine was capable of in 2007 for nearly a hundred a month can now be had for about $10 per month. Yet everyone wants these monolith platforms, but even that wouldn't be the worst thing ever, except that every one of these platforms has a backend to support that we in the Old Internet never did: a C-suite's worth of executives and millions of shareholders, who for some reason have decided that reddit can't exist unless reddit makes them reams and reams of money.
I'd be very, very interested to see how much of, even what's probably the most massive one of all, Facebook, is non-essential busywork that could easily be shut down tomorrow with no adverse effects to the platform. Firstly the entire executive class, just, they don't do shit to make Facebook the product. In fact I'd argue their decisions almost universally have made it worse as a product very consistently for it's entire lifetime. Then, all the marketing people. There's just no goddamn reason to advertise Facebook (or reddit for that matter) the brand is so ubiquitous, if you actually found someone who'd never heard of it, I'd give you a large chunk of money. Add to that, if Facebook was doing a good job of being what it ostensibly is, then people immediately become the best advertising, because people want to hang with people in these digital spaces. Then get rid of the people working to make Facebook addictive with dark patterns. Then get rid of the entire targeted ad division, because it's gross and inhumane. Pare the company down to engineers who build the product, and if anything, expand the moderation team so they can actually ensure the safety of the platform, and of course the IT staff to back them. Now what does Facebook cost to operate?
As far as I'm concerned, this pearl-clutching about "well websites have to make money" is grossly, grossly overstated. Websites don't cost that much to run. A ton of money is being siphoned off by the MBA parasites playing games in Excel all day. A ton more is being wasted developing features that advertisers want and users hate. A ton more is being funneled into making products artificially addictive to vulnerable people, to exploit them, so let's just not do that. And of course, leadership, rewarding themselves with generous compensation packages they aren't even remotely able to justify. Now what does your website cost to maintain? Surely not nothing, and for websites of substantial size, it will still be high, but I'm willing to bet it's a hell, hell, hell of a lot less than it was before.
Part of the issue is that it isn’t just the web, but the inevitable american corporate shareholder model. Even businesses could be mom and pop ified and made way more popular overnight: quit raising prices and cutting corners and it would actually stand for itself like a massive $7 burrito. However the expectation is that shareholders get returns. Costs must be cut. Prices must be raised. Margins must be improved. It doesn’t matter if this eats the business alive, as shareholders are sufficiently leveraged. The whole system is incentivized to select for inferior quality and taking all the available money on the table.
My rant above and your response reminded me of all those tons of MMO games out there that are ancient, with a tiny playerbase, that remain profitable nonetheless simply because if you have a product that people like using, putting it into maintenance mode and doing the bare minimum to keep it running is a perfectly valid business strategy. The companies that buy these service games and run them effectively just buy completed money printers and keep them operating. It's not going to make anyone rich probably, but it's a perfectly valid and profitable way to go about things.
The silicon valley "grow at all costs, always evolve and innovate forever" model is so detached from the reality of most businesses in my experience.
5 replies →
>Websites don't cost that much to run.
Popular websites that allow user content to be uploaded or linked do cost that much to run, due to content moderation.
There might be a small (relatively) forum here and there that a few good moderators are willing to slave away at keeping clean, but you will never see a website that allows user content with as many users as Reddit/Youtube/Instagram/etc be cheap.
Although, due to AI, the cost to spam the small forums might be so small that even they might come into the crosshairs.
Although it is quite surprising that mainly text websites (Reddit, Twitter) are hard to run sustainably but video and image websites (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) can because it is easier to sell ads against them.
> Popular websites that allow user content to be uploaded or linked do cost that much to run, due to content moderation.
Reddit outsourced most of it's moderation to unpaid volunteers.
2 replies →
how can we keep paying the ever-growing profits of multi-trillion dollar companies? This is insane.
Reddit is 100x from being a trillion-dollar company, and is not profitable.
Reddit offers no magic is just a forum. Google used to do some magic decades ago and still profit from it.