what is happening? Is big tech profitability collapsing? It seems like every big website is trying very hard to cut costs and find new sources of revenue right now
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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it was never profitable. Its all sort of been a big scam from the beginning
the tech industry now is a lot like the 1800s rail industry in that it's changing society and hype drives investment but profitability just isn't there
i firmly believe it's the interest rate hike. the fed rate has been set to "free money" since the GFC in 2007.
[aside from a little blip between 2016 and COVID when rates were gradually increased up to a whopping 2% over 4 years before being flattened to "free money" when COVID hit].
now, in less than 1.5 years, it's gone from "free money" to 5.5%. that's enough to make "investors" [aka, people who negotiate giant loans from investment banks to invest in companies] squeamish about negotiating additional operating loans and pressuring executives to find money under the couch cushions, so to speak..
to be fair, i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism, but the rise of interest rates so high over such a short window set a fire under it.
i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism
you could even call it enclosure
Literally one of the smartest things that Capital could do is to pool a tiny amount of their resources and make Netflix and Youtube free for the masses. These are incredible tools for keeping the masses placated.
one of the only good things about the stage of capitalism that we're in right now is that the capitalists are complete fucking idiots with no instincts for the preservation of their class. the competence has been fully bred out of them Habsburg-style at this point
Death to America
Conversely, they've realized the general population is even more servile and neutered then they expected and they are doing this to constantly reinforce there's nothing we can do and they'll make things as shitty as they want and nobody's gonna do anything about it. They're trying to soft sell us on being back in a feudal society and they're about 60% of the way there.
Working in exchange for housing with no pay is gonna be a thing again in our lifetimes.
"Now watch this drive" but about the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
Honestly if they take us back to feudal relationships it makes it easier to do revolution because it completely decomplicates who the oppressors are to the average person. It makes the enemy easy to see. One of the biggest factors of capitalism that helps them prevent revs is how the enemy is less identifiable.
But how are the investors supposed to make money off of it?!
It's a shame the ruling class can't agree on anything if it gets in the way of their short term returns.
I go out of my way to follow the rules, like watching a sport even on the NBC website with their commercials, and then after ten minutes they say “you must sign in to your tv provider”.
So I get aboard my ship, put on my eyepatch and find the game in an Iranian server farm. I don’t want to be a pirate, they make me.
Trying to find the seasons of the One Piece anime that haven't been uploaded to Netflix yet (and were taken down from Crunchyroll and Funimation) turned me into the King of the Pirates. 
A VPN and a decent sized hard drive with Jellyfin is way cheaper than 12 different streaming services that either all have the same shit, don't have the shit I want, or has ok original content that gets canceled after 2 seasons.
I dont understand how there isnt a mass exodus from youtube already, whats keeping people there? If they pulled this shit in 2005 itd be done for.
massive backlog of content, only place creators can easily make money from uploading vids I'm pretty sure, so the big creators will never switch, and a lot of smaller creators have at least a fantasy of making it big if their vids go viral, if not a goal. Honestly a government would have to step in a break up YT at this point, it's got a monopoly on vids and I don't think any platform will ever be able to break it tbh.
Boomer take
With the attention span of Zoomers and younger generations, TikToks will be everything that anybody needs as nobody can watch videos longer than 3 minutes anyways