Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?
YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
Everyone’s rushing to implement/improve AI. AI needs a ton of data, Reddit/Twitter are good available sources. Reddit/Twitter would prefer to sell this data as opposed to having it gathered from under them by bots, for free.
I think that’s why Twitter and Reddit are rushing to restrict access (directly or through the API).
Youtube are just aggressively serving you ads, and limiting ways for you to circumvent ads. I think that’s just what they do as they have the market sewn up
Google Mail does not scan the content of your emails for the purpose of showing you ads. However, Google Mail does use some information about your emails, such as your email address and the sender and recipient addresses, to improve its spam and phishing filters.
You can control how much information Google Mail collects about your emails by adjusting your privacy settings. For example, you can choose to have Gmail not scan your email attachments for viruses.
It’s happening in other areas like entertainment (see Netflix pricing, Paramount + renewing then cancelling shows etc)
One thing is that this sort of behaviour leads to an opportunity for competitors. Look at Twitter, a few years ago only a small non-profit would have thought to challenge them. But now as Twitter slowly disintegrates even Meta are getting in on the act.
The same thing is happening with Reddit and we’re seeing the very start of similar challengers to YouTube that don’t have the issues of e.g. Odysee
Correct me if I’m wrong but this is baked into capitalism. Stocks are attractive to investors because they want to sell them for a higher price later on, and stock prices increase when the company grows.
You’re right, thats a requirement for investing into a stocks value. A company can make a healthy flat profit every quarter and its direct benificiaries (investors, stock-holders, directors, owners) will be appropriately accomodated financially via dividends. It doesn’t need to be 30% growth year in year out. You start to add stock price, inflation, etc. and it gets complicated. I don’t understand it from then on.
My understanding is a little shaky too. I suppose companies are incentivized to target infinite growth so they can get the most money out of the stocks they hold, but this is a culture and greed thing, not a hard requirement.
Kind of, because those sectors are widely known to not be growth-oriented. There is only so much demand for electricity for example.
At one point that was probably a growth sector, but now it is ubiquitous. Perhaps someday some tech stocks could be focused on dividends rather than infinite growth.
Most of the aspects have already been covered but I would want to add one:
This was always the plan, it just wasn’t as highly prioritised as growth.
I work as a developer at a big tech company. We (the company) had our roadmap and it was mostly about getting more users. The more users you have the day the economy turns - the better off you are (… If you manage to turn an profit).
So when the economy went to shit and we (and other tech companies) no longer can loan money for free to cover our running expenses - the priorities shift. Working towards attracting more users is only going to increase your costs at the point and you don’t want to run out of money. So all roadmaps changed and cost saving efforts became the highest prio all of the sudden.
Gain a monopoly, get users addicted and reliant, then change the rules of the game and hope they stick with you. It’s happening now because of the economy for sure, but it’s not like it’s surprising.
Money is tighter since the inflation affects VC and stupid money flowing in. Stock prices are not going up, people have no money to play with (see the death of NFTs at the same time, the definition of a stupid investment).
There are a lot of reasons for this general trend, but let me add my two cents to make a case for the sudden influx of user-opposed changes:
I don’t have a source for this, but I remember that Linus spoke about this on the LTT WAN-Show. Basically, abunch of big silicon valley investors are pulling out of all of the big platforms, therefore leaving them with a huge hole in their profitability. This means, that right now a lot of them are scrambling to scrape together more money over time, so all of those platforms are sustainable.
Obviously this has to observed in conjunction with all of those are trends that are already mentioned by other comments, but this gives more basis as to why now, and why to this extent.
If someone else knows what I’m talking about please add quotes and sources because I don’t like the good old ‘dude trust me’ guarantee one bit.
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