- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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The Great Internet Recession™ has begun
Forreal, what’s going on? Why does it seem like so many separate sites are suddenly so much worse/going downhill quickly?
Apparently they have been living on life-support.
I can’t claim to fully understand how it worked, but apparently as long as sites could show user growth they could attract investments, but with inflation causing interest rates to go up (and other economy hocus pocus) , that money is quickly drying up.
I don’t know if the investors believed that if the user base could grow large enough, someone would buy the companies, or they suddenly could come up with some fantastic monetization of said user-base.
Now as companies are listed on the stock exchange, and facing the falling investor interest, they are expected to react (aggressively) to secure future revenue.
Adding to what you said about interest rates: We’re at the end of a long period of cheap borrowing (very low interest rates) during which overvalued assets were used as collateral to secure loans for investments. These propped-up assets are beginning to drop to their true (intrinsic) values. In other words, speculation and irresponsible practices were propping up a house of cards that’s starting to collapse, and now investors are scrambling to cash in or cut losses wherever they can. So they’re deciding that time has run out for online platforms that promised to grow but still haven’t hit their numbers/monetization goals.
tl;dr: Infinite money glitch got patched (because it was wreaking all sorts of financial havoc) and now investors need to end life-support for risky/unprofitable investments.
Infinite money glitch got patched
This is an amazing way to describe things. Lol
Same thing is happening to streaming services
Streaming fell apart quickly, it’s so hard to find anything decent on most of them. It’s become clear they can’t curate new content as readily.
It’ll be even worse when there are no new series to watch because all of the people who write them are on strike. The content mines are drying up.
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The internet was far more enjoyable 20 years ago, so if content goes back to being user hosted instead of corporation hosted I’ll be happy.
I agree. But I think spam-bots, especially backed with ChatGPT or better level AI will prevent real user generated content, on that level from 20 years ago, to resurface.
Our entire Internet enjoyment has been heavily subsidized by venture capital for the last 30 years which hoped to monetize us more than they have been able (believe it or not).
Now they are calling in their bets…
How will enjoying the internet look like in the future? Lots of things we took for granted clearly weren’t, and now we’re used to a kind of internet that might just not be sustainable.
I guess things aren’t looking too good.
Interesting question…probably going to be a lot more expensive for us, which will result in fewer services being used, and therefore higher amounts of service lock-in due to personal investment into specific service(s)…
Billionaires bought the internet and now they’re realizing that it isn’t profitable.
Question is what do you do then? First, you try to reach profitability. Get out of the red by milking users and reducing costs, but there is little chance to get that really sweet ROI that you dreamt of in the last decade. What do you do next? My guess is that we will see some websites change ownership into some shadier hands in the next years. The personal data collected could still be worth something after all.
Do websites even make much from collecting data? There are so many trackers and only so many people. Ads are obvious, but it’s clear that relying on those two isn’t enough for revenue.
I’m guessing that websites with a large userbase will start charging for access to their sites. It might look like the NYT, where you get your 3 free articles, sign in for more, then you’re required to pay. Free tiers won’t be a reasonable compromise like they are now.
Will people stay and pay, or will they migrate? Most likely the former, especially for the older demo. Moving to the fediverse has been confusing enough for many of us who actually committed to learning about it. An average Twitter user wouldn’t put in this much effort.
I’m skeptical that ads themselves actually have a return on investment. There are so many, they are almost entirely ignored. Of course the advertising companies have done a good job convincing people to buy ads. But do they work well enough to justify the cost?
Ads don’t make enough. I play a solitaire game that pays out money for sitting through the ads. Those ads are highly targeted and very likely to drive traffic to those other apps that say they will also pay you to play solitaire or even Candy Crush! I still only get maybe $.10 per game and sit through around 3 ads. I accidentally click ads a lot, too.
What else are web companies going to do for revenue, though? It doesn’t really cost them anything to host ads.
They are unable to find investment funding because boomers are retiring and taking their money out of stock market.
Oh sweet, it’s dot.com 2.0. Grab your popcorn, it’s time for the internet to implode… again! Never ever underestimate shareholders’ willingness to self-destruct a product for short-term profit.
It’s called fiduciary duty and it’s why every mega company sucks.
Cut costs by replacing cashiers with self checkout? Write a fat check to the shareholders! Then, shoplifting is becoming an even bigger issue from the self checkout… Cut costs again by preventing shoplifting by having people man the self checkout! Write another fat check to the shareholders!
Nevermind that it would have been easier and cheaper to just keep the system we had. Looking at you, Target.
Hey, but self-checkouts are good. Dunno how they use them at target, but at shops I go to they allow me to get to the shop, grab what I need and leave within 5 minutes.
And not so sure with cheaper. Again from my experience, shops have a setup of 6 self-checkouts per 1 employee.
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They’re only good if they pass the savings of not having to pay a person to ring up your groceries onto you
I’m with the other person on this one. Self checkouts have really reduced the queues where I live. They’re much more compact than the cash registers and the shop near me basically doubled its cash register capacity because of them. I rarely have to wait in a queue these days.
Tesco even has a scan as you shop service which is really convenient. You get a barcode scanner before you start shopping, then scan all products you want to buy and place them directly in your bags. At the checkout, you scan a barcode attached to the checkout machine, it prompts you to pay, you pay and leave. All your things are already bagged.
Remember! You can’t say “fiduciary duty” without saying “douche” and “doody.”
Fiduciary duty is an absolute circus. Obligating companies to maximize profits at the expense of the wider society is the exact opposite of how law should work.
It’s like the second implosion in a many weeks
Ooooff baby. Pulled that burn from the depths, did ya?
Next one will be human instrumentality!
Similar to what happened after the last dot com crash, it’ll be interesting to see how the internet evolves and what comes next.
Wow, the ‘enshittification’ of the internet is really taking off now. Sites are either already dodgy, or well on their way there!
I know this has been a bit of a slow burn for a while now, but it really feels like it’s all coming to a head suddenly.
We really gotta back decentralized platforms if we don’t want everything to become an overmonetized hellscape where all information and communication is skewed to suit business interests. I wouldn’t pay for Reddit Gold and Twitter Blue but I should send some money to the Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon folks.
Things happen slowly, then all at once.
So, twitter, Reddit, Imgur, and now Gfycat are all killing itself
Has the internet bubble finally popped?
The privately-owned for-profit Internet is starting to pop. User-driven FOSS will reign supreme.
Just like the good old times of internet. When every kid had a hobby and installed a forum software into a shared hosting to spend time with others. “If you build it, he/they will come.”
The only thing that sucked about having my own PHPBB forum was the lack of actual users to communicate with.
But it looked and did everything just the way I wanted, so that was nice. 🥹
Haha not to mention the spam bots that would appear and ruin everything :/
The places I used to hang out with PHPBB or similar forums never really had problems with bots. And I’m at least pretty sure they were popular places. Penny-Arcade, Something Awful, NewGrounds, eBaums World…
They also weren’t a problem for small users either. Not only was there no incentive, they didn’t necessarily get discovered by web crawlers. I remember wondering why my websites never showed up on search engines when I first started fucking around with webpages, web hosting, networks, etc. I hosted the server, I had a domain name, I was online and could access my site from other computers solely through the internet; but it never came up on Yahoo or Dogpile and I didn’t know why. The first time I ever found my own site on a search engine, it was using a hosting site like Geocities. And that was after Google came out and I was getting archived versions of the first website I ever made.
Sadly public self hosting comes with a lot of legalities. And sure, I can hide behind cloudflare ( and I do) but that still puts all of my eggs into Cloudflare’s basket
it really does feel like a return to the older decentralized web
Been wondering how they detect how many videos you’ve watched without being logged in.
Cookies can be cleared, IPs can be changed, and if we all use something like the Mullvad Browser fingerprinting will be far more difficult.
I just spin up new virtual machines, with different flavors of linux. They’re all fairly interchangable at this point.
So at the current moment, is there a way to use TOR browser and route it through Mullvad since TOR Browser would most likely be more anonymous having a larger, more common fingerprint?
Do you mean Mullvad VPN or the browser?
Sorry, I meant TOR Browser, as using TOR Browser + Mullvad VPN and default Mullvad DNS with exit and entry nodes in two different countries and cities + anti quantum computer algorithm to prevent MITM and other attacks alongside obfuscation alongside the Wireguard (IPV6 if you can, not every one can) has to be about the most secure setup I can conceive of possibly (only using TAILS could possibly further protect you). Probably overkill, but I like optimizing for the future when attacks become more prevalent in cyber security.
I recommend every one tries Mullvad Browser, but i don’t think it’s the best idea for me and so I went back to TOR Browser.
I was able to get Mullvad and TOR to play nicely together, I couldn’t at first until a reboot I hadn’t noticed I had forgotten to reboot at the time.
I was able to get Mullvad and TOR to play nicely together, I couldn’t at first until a reboot I hadn’t noticed I had forgotten to reboot at the time.
Are you routing your Mullvad Browser traffic through TOR?
I expect adblockers will find a way around that. If nothing else, AdNauseam should work, as it tells the site that you clicked all of the ads it’s blocking (making it much harder for them to build a profile on you).
I don’t really understand AdNauseam. Can’t they also not build a profile with a normal ad blocker, but you also completely avoid interacting with the trackers (so better for performance, data usage, etc)?
Yes and no. It’s harder, but even with an adblocker, your internet signature (things like browser size, are you blocking ads, did you send a “do not track” header, etc) is enough to identify you in a lot of cases. AdNauseam goes the opposite direction, instead of hiding your data, it fills their data collection with so much garbage that they’ll have a hard time figuring anything out about you. From what I understand, it doesn’t actually load the ads, just sees where the ad points to, and tells the ad provider that you clicked it while at the same time blocking it. So it would be very slightly worse in terms of performance and data usage compared to uBlock Origin, but not in any noticeable way, since the stuff it sends is much smaller than any actual content.
You mean popped again? It has already popped back in 2002 with the dot-com bubble bursting. Seems investors never learn.
Tumblr was just ahead of its time
Wait what’s happening with imgur?
Removing porn and all images not uploaded from an imgur account
But why the porn?
There’s just too damn much of it, and the people accessing it generally aren’t stopping to be advertised to. That’s a lot of storage and bandwidth costs with very little ability to make money back.
If everyone would just stop clicking on ads, this whole “the customer is the product” business model across the internet would stop within a week.
I hear you and I’m with you. I don’t even look at ads, I don’t permit my software on my hardware to offend me with them.
What would they switch to, though?
That and the desire to make money while being at the mercy of two card processors who set the rules. If you want MasterCard or Visa support then remove porn.
Nsfw images can’t be monitised with ads.
I sure hope my trusty ShareX program isn’t affected…
The best way to destroy the establishment is from within. The sleeper cells have been activated, ushering us into the new uncensorable decentralized era.
Wait what’s going on with Imgur? I’m aware of all the others. Also, you can add Stack Overflow to the list.
The times, they are a changin’…
I’ve watched the internet evolve since I first logged on to CompuServe in 1990. I don’t think I have seen such a dramatic and fast change since the beginning of the WWW over crap like CompuServ.
How did you get that bitchin username graphic?
Googled “fancy text generator” and picked one at random lol
I see you fixed the “I” so it doesn’t read like a “|”
The color was bugging me more than anything lol
Test test
Test test
Test test
What the hell is going on?
Everything is falling down:
- Google is dropping Reddit and Twitter from their searches.
- Twitter is throttling Tweets and you have to signin to view anything. Which would be crazy antivaxxer radicals, so not missing anything. No more free API use.
- YouTube is blocking you after 3 videos if you use an adblocker.
- Reddit has killed all 3rd party apps among API changes
- Now Gfycat is going, man that’s like most of the sites I used since a kid. Imgur seems to be around still at least.
Do ya remember photobucket? … Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Pepperidge farm remembers pepperidge farm these days
And imgur banned porn and removed all posts not linked to a user account!
Sorry but that’s not accurate, they’re removing inactive images from unregistered users.
Our new Terms of Service will go into effect on May 15, 2023. We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content. You will need to download/save any images that you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms. Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content.
Huh. I didn’t know they were keeping the active ones. Though one has to wonder how they define active.
Kinda crazy that they didn’t run a garbage collection routine on their data stores to begin with. One of the first things I ever did at my new job was write a python daemon that runs on our jump host and cleans up data older than a year.
Please don’t start working at archive.org
- Imgur banned and purged NSFW images
Damn. Imgur was so awesome when it first came around. I remember the creator doing an AMA when he made it. It mainly served as a image hosting site, just for Reddit… Then it gradually went to shit
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There’s been a lot of talk about this, but I’ve yet to see it. It’s either being A/B tested and not fully rolled out, or whatever way they’re detecting adblock isn’t catching me.
There’s plenty of pictures online though of people getting the message.
Who is YouTube’s competitor ?
Rumble. I mean, you didn’t asked for a good competitor.
There’s also LBRY, but it’s more niche
Alternatives to YouTube include Vimeo and the fediverse’s Peertube, but I am not sure they qualify as competitors.
Actually, the peer-sharing nature of Peertube makes me wonder if it could handle a sudden surge of users better than the rest of the fediverse.
Unless content creators get paid there’s never gonna be a critical shift to a fediverse platform from YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok. Users may switch but they’ll be straight back if there’s no content.
Personally, I think that’s better. Let people have their favored platforms. Have accounts on several. Use them as much or as little as you want. Advertising might be a deal breaker for you, but some are willing to put up with it. Some are happy paying for premium.
It doesn’t stop federated platforms from existing. If anything, it helps deal with the volume of users. These closed platforms with VC money can barely afford to keep the lights on - self hosted servers can not handle that kind of traffic.
Sadly, Twitter is similar to Youtube. It may not have as many ADU as other platforms but the news media is heavily dependent on it. You’d need essentially every significant US politician to migrate to a new platform to see a critical shift away from Twitter.
That’s an extremely good point: youtube actually does pay out to creators in a way that most other sites do not. Sure, they will often supplement this income with kofi or patreon, but if that youtube income stream dries up, a lot of the youtubers will simply call it quits instead of migrating to other platforms.
If YouTube does go entirely the route they are going, peertube may as well become a competitor. We need people to start downloading and storing YouTube videos to host on these servers. It just sucks, the legal hoops people will need it fly through… It’s almost as if people are going to need to start moving to the darkweb as well.
Facebook is looking might well run these days.
That’s because the only thing anyone uses it for is the marketplace, event listings and as a messenger
Imgur seems to be around still at least.
For now
Hanging on by a thread
Oh damn that YouTube bit is news to me. Mostly I just watch on my phone or ipad on my break at work, but always use an ad blocker at home.
Honestly, you don’t even really need an ad blocker for YouTube. I just report every ad immediately and it skips through them.
Imgur doesn’t even load for me on Firefox Mobile + uBlockOrigin. It also tries to redirect me to their broken front end if I just want the .jpg file. I absolutely hate them and wish people would stop using it.
After 2008, interest rates were set to zero and basically stayed there for the next 15 years. What that meant was that investing your money in literally anything was better than putting it in a savings account or loaning it to the government (bonds). What thatmeant is that any company with a dream and a product found themselves swimming in piles and piles of venture capital fund funds. And all that money meant that customers were getting a lot of stuff at or below cost from companies that had lots of cash to spend, and no real concern about making it back. Now the free ride is over and everyone is trying to cash in, only to find that’s not as easy as they made it sound to their investors.
Enshittification is a sexy concept and I understand why everyone has glommed on to it. Unfortunately, the interest rate explanation is the much more complete and correct one.
Gfycat was the only good gif hoster. The rest, tenor, giphy, etc, are all corporate buzzfeed slop, that were primarily used by dimwits to decorate their shitty blog posts with (remember the various reddit admin feature announcements that had like 300 stupid gifs in them?)
Yeah but giphy usually lets me drop shit at work that is HR appropriate :)
It’s like the enshitification cycle somehow synced! https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Not a coincidence. End of cheap money era.
Yeah, no - it’s definitely not a coincidence, that was said tongue in cheek https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/04/07/vc_funding_falls/
On Baconreader it wouldn’t show a gif, it would just be link, which was pretty good.
His name was Bacon Reader… His name was Bacon Reader…
That’s crazy. Things are moving fast these days. It seems every private company owning a big website is trying to squeeze money out of user or closing.
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I sure hope it’ll make people realise how these business are not on their side.
Many people are giving everything to them because “this is Google and this is safe”. Well it might be safe but the company doesn’t care about you or your experience. Not anymore at least.
Had no idea this was even at risk of shutting down…
Was there an agreement somewhere that I don’t know about to kill off half of the internet in July?
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The other comment already mentioned that Discord uses Tenor, but you’re probably thinking of Giphy, which is another service similar to Tenor. Gfycat is a bit different, and was more like Imgur.
Pretty sure Gboard uses GIFY, so stock Android should be okay
I don’t think so. I think Discord uses tenor gifs
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That uses Giphy iirc which is a different service
undefined> was
Giphy is owned by Meta now I believe.
Meta owned it for a brief moment, but was forced to sell it. It’s now owned by Shutterstock.
Ahh, TIL. Thanks.
so do we also know why they’re shutting down?
Money. Always.
Gfycat had the excellent business model of hosting a load of high bandwidth content and not making any money from anyone
You forgot the excellent idea of being highly integratable to the point end users don’t even know the gifs they’re seeing are from gfycat
Really though. On Reddit at least, how often did you actually go to gfycat instead of just viewing on Reddit’s webpage or a third party app?
When I wanted to hear the audio, I would click through to get the video interface. Usually for pr0n.
how is shutting down a website profitable
The service is likely a money sink
Extinguished by Snap(chat), as it’s a competitor
How is a gif hosters main competitior a app mainly used by teenagers for sexting?
I genuinely don’t understand this either. On a surface level I’d say they’re not even remotely related so I’d like an explanation here.
@ChrisFhey @L4s @stebo02 @dedido @Alexmitter
Snap(chat) is Gfycat’s parent company. The short version is they’re hemorrhaging money and have been for years so they’re cutting this as part of cost saving measures.
Yea me too i am a bit wondering why. People kept saying this was the reason, but idk if they really mean that or if its just ‘saying what sounds possible as a half joke’ (like when people answer any question about any shady business or very expensive auctions as “its money laundering” even tho there may be other explanations. I think ppl say it half jokinly?) Idk what reason snap would do this tho? Maybe theyre planning to make a gif hosting thingy by theirself?
Gfycat is owned by Snapchat.
I think the idea is that with things you could use snapchat for, people are using gfycat instead and users using snapchat are more profitable.
They’ve never found a viable business model.
This is insane. I wonder what other relatively large internet service will go down.
Apparently PornHub already lost 80% of their traffic due to age verification laws. I’ll add the source when I’ll get back to it.
Edit: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/3/23782776/pornhub-blocks-mississippi-virginia-age-verification-laws
Edit 2: Maybe I misunderstood, see below comments
Reading the article would make me believe it’s 80% of traffic from Louisiana and not overall. So they will be fine lol.
I feel like that can’t be true, I imagine a huge amount of pornhubs users are international
It’s a poorly written sentence (not surprising as it’s The Verge lol) but I think they mean they lost 80% of traffic from Louisiana when they started enforcing age verification in that state which is why they now just block access entirely to states that enact these laws instead of bothering with the age verification.
Still Though, when Pornhub falls, that’s when we know were in trouble.
I feel like that can’t be true, I imagine a huge amount of pornhubs users are international
Damn, and end of an era…
Nippy. Kind. Langur.
