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?
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As discussed here:
Honestly they do it so consistently that i’m starting to wonder if they have a choice.
A common way to do things for tech startups is that they get venture capital funds, use them to run the business at a loss hoping to acquire market dominance, and then use market dominance to turn a profit. I think a lot of tech startups that we know are currently in phase 2, meaning they’ve thrown money out the window for years and are now trying to recoup their investments.
Also, Reddit wants to go public and Twitter already is. This is relevant because investors are animals, all they see is short-term profit, and they use their voting power to make the company behave that way.
There’s a common thread between both my theories: it’s shareholder capitalism. I say this as a lifelong shareholder myself, shareholders ruin everything.
If interest rates are high, I'm sure they're hard up for capital. The free money they've grown to depend on is drying up and they need to make money themselves asap.
Yup, tech bro culture is wasting someone's else money to play with computers. No money, no game time for baby. Silicon Valley is in a panic because the infinite spout of money suddenly stopped, and there's a line of pissed people asking for their money back. They promised the world, now it's time to deliver and turns out they have nothing of value.
I was in the Tech game back in the late 1990s and in the Tech Startup game recently and this time around it's not techies that are Startup Founders, it's people from Sales, Marketing and Finance.
The whole "making something cool" ethos of Tech has been replaced by "Find a market niche that you can grow in until you have an exit strategy (IPO or sale to a larger company)" or in other words, make a company that looks like an infinite growth venture and sell it to some suckers for a ton of money.
As it so happens I was in Investment Banking in between those two periods in the Tech industry and immediatelly recognized the same spirit as in Investment Banking when I went into Startups in the late 2010.
At least the previous generation was driven by the "play with computers" drive. This one is all about borderline fraud (often outright fraud - just think Theranos or all the "coin" "tech startups") in the pursuit of personal upside maximization.
Tech bro is a derogatory term for a reason. It's still just a bro. Generally a cis genedered heteronormative affluent white male. With all the worse parts of MBA culture. Certainly they're sales, marketing and finance types. But they want to be tech adjacent to disrupt the market. They like to portray themselves as techies but are actually about get rich quick schemes. Their one and only interest on NFTs, crypto, AI and all tech in general is how can it enable them to exploit others into making them billionaires.
I heard the same about the movie industry: it used to be run by movie people, now it's run by finance people. The greedy producers of old came from the industry and understood the business; today's greedy producers don't understand anything about movies, so if you're pitching them a project, you need to speak their language: here's a market niche, here's similar projects that have been profitable, here's the return on investment we can expect.
I wish i knew how true that is, but it does seem to explain a lot of what we see from Hollywood these days.
What I find interesting is that I'm starting to hear this same story (in different words) from very different sources.
Lefty bloggers are saying, *"The hype economy is over, and vaporware companies used to never delivering are suddenly gasping for air in an economy that requires them to actually provide value." *And at the same time, mainstream financial podcasts are reporting that "Outlooks for 2023 anticipate a hostile market environment for disruptive innovators as they attempt to leverage their brands to monetize large user bases with low profitability. Meanwhile, the market is being buoyed by legacy firms with reliable cashflow from existing sales and services."
It shocked me when I noticed how different people are seeing the same thing, and it seems overdue.
Great point that shareholders ruin everything. I invest but I’ll avoid certain companies or industries that don’t align with my values, even if those stocks have the most potential profitability. But this seems to be a very uncommon habit in the investing world.