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This has been a strange year.
This certainly has been a strange year. The reckoning for these big unprofitable sites was inevitable in retrospect, but it's wild how much is happening all at once.
I think it has a lot to do with Silicon Valley Bank failing. These companies were running on loans with the promise of "the profits will come, some day." Whether they meant to or not, many of our most relied upon services were being run as venture capital scams. Whether these companies turned profits or not didn't matter so much as long as the executives were getting paid salaries, and could show the investors graphs that showed something was happening to grow the company, it didn't matter if the service was bleeding investor money into the cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
And if we want to trace the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank back further, look no farther than Sam Bankman-Fried, Cara Ellison, and FTX. That one was very expressly a venture capital scam and a ponzi scheme rolled into one. I'm not going to say all cryptocoins are scamcoins, but I will happily say that enough of then are that the collapse of FTX has done permanent harm to the kinds of confidence people will be willing to put into digital fiat currencies. But what I more want to point out is that Sam Bankman-Fried was an intensified version of the kinds of people who have been showing growth charts and promising "profits, someday" while drawing massive salaries and bleeding investor money. He was playing video games on meetings and it was building his reputation, not harming it
The investors who knew SBF was playing games in meetings were the investors who backed Reddit and Gfycat. Now that their SVB money and their FTX money is never coming back, they need to withdraw money from other investments, while at the same time Reddit and Gfycat are no longer receiving their stream of money to pay their cloud bills. The result? Corporate web 2.0 is dead as of July 1st, 2023. Sure. There are still corporate web 2.0 services shambling across this earth, including Twitter and Reddit whose actions yesterday marked the end of corporate web 2.0, but they're zombies. Their hearts have stopped beating. They're dead ans they don't even know it.
Whether you call it small web, web0, or my personal choice, Web 2.0.1, we are currently experiencing a rise of user owned web services that are picking up the slack left by corporate web 2.0 while in many ways rejecting web 3.0 as not being ready, or outright being a scam. We have a critical opportunity right now. We have the chance to realize that Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Alexis Ohanian, Stephen Huffman, or Elon Musk don't have exclusive rights to enable us or empower us to interact online. They were holding a magic feather. We can use the tools of the fediverse to replace them. Its a little more work, yes, but so is everything when you take your own ownership of things. Making your own meals is more work than going to McDonalds, but its cheaper and healthier. Growing your own tomatoes is more work than going to the store, but you get the enjoyment of doing it and lesson your environmental impact. Owning your own home is more work than renting, but you get to keep the equity you build.
This federated internet experiment is worth the work. While we're still experiencing some reliance in the cloud providers, they're at least providing us with a service we might not have been able to figure out on our own. Twitter, Facebook, and reddit, though? Their value was a shared hallucination. They were useful to us because we collectively convinced ourselves they were useful. Now we just need to convince ourselves that the bug fix to web 2.0, web 2.0.1, removing the corporations, is worthwhile.
If you're reading this, it means you've taken a big first step. Now take the second: tell a friend
This was great to read, and reminds me of the joke that the stock market is just astrology for dudes.
Great read, and right on the nose. Louis Rossman has a good video discussing this issue, especially Reddit's role in all of it. Forgot the title, but its pretty recent.
The "golden days" of internet social media platforms are gone. It was fun while it lasted, but these companies were BLEEDING venture capitalist money, and at some point they have to show a profit. That time is now, and it's ugly.
Great reply. Thanks for the thoughtful write up. I think you are onto something here and I love your abilities for why we should adopt and further the fediverse.
Web 2.0 was a house of cards all this time I suppose
As a Web 1.0 survivor, I can tell you it's always been a house of cards. They keep trying to shoehorn a circular, communal, socialist invention (the Internet itself) into a square, capitalist hole. And it doesn't work.
Aron Swartz knew that, and maybe even Tom from MySpace. He knew when to get out and leave someone else holding the bag.
They’re all jumping to get their bad news out while there’s a lot of other drama going on, in the hopes it’ll go less noticed.
Its because credits got expensive. You cant get money that easily anymore.
Great simplification tbh.
Man, this really isn’t a good year for the internet
Or it could be a really fucking great year. It could mark the end of commercialised social media and the beginnings of truly widespread adoption of free and open alternatives.
You gave a hopeless soul some hope today. Thank you.
Just wait until the "targeted ad" bubble pops because people realize it's all a fraudulently inflated market with little to no true value.
There will be wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
Entirely speculation, but I think this might be why some of the dominoes are already falling?
Like maybe all the ads pulled out of Twitter and saw that it didn't impact the ad companies very much?
If so, it could be the true end to Web 2.0
Or maybe the best year?
They really were foolish to sell off Redgifs. Idk how they thought a normal gif hosting service was more profitable in the long run than their porn gifs site that caught on like wildfire. Everyone at the time was like 'wtf, sell the gify knockoff'
Typical corporate moralising. Tumblr blocked adult content to keep advertisers and it's corporate owners happy and the site died. Snapchat sold off the adult part of their Gif business even though - let's face it - what is Snapchat used for?
There seems to be a lack of acceptance in business that adults will be adults and you can't sanatise the Internet to make it acceptable for advertisers or to impose the morals of minority religious groups on the majority.
Gfycat is presumably very difficult to monetise. We're in another wave of the history of dotcoms where companies and investors realise being an Internet based country is not a license to print money.
Its not clear though how to make a free alternative to something like Gfycat. Someone has to pay for the hosting and bandwidth. Are we moving to a subscription based model for the Internet? For example the fediverse but with premium fast servers for those who pay and slow advertiser funded servers for this who don't? Or Wikipedia like foundations for image hosting? Who knows.
let's face it - what is Snapchat used for?
Mainly for chatting with friends. Who watches porn on Snapchat?
I hope that subreddit has a foothold at lemmy.
Man this year has just been a total collapse of everything:
character,ai filtrations
GPT slowly being neutered thanks to societal concerns
Twitter being fucked by Mr. Elon "I know everything" Musk
Imgur cleaning house for no reason
Reddit dropping a nuke on 3rd Party apps
Netflix killing password sharing
Youtube feeling in to kill adblockers
-and now gfycat is about to collapse entirely.
What the actual fuck?
Yet another step toward end game capitalism where nothing's free/affordable anymore and only way to consume basic entertainment is either through a paid service or absolutely ridiculous ads everywhere. Where CEOs are squeezed by shareholders for every last extra % in their returns and in turn makes their product as anti consumer as possible except for the top 1% that can afford it.
Tech CEOs: Turns out the cloud costs money. Who knew? What next, credits are going to send me bills, lol? I already spent that money.
Bonds are a really good deal right now, which makes more people want to loan the government money than each other. This leads to less people overleveraging, which most companies depend on for growth.
All of the businesses you mentioned were overleveraged, so it's understandable that they'd crack under the pressure
(Note: The bonds market is referring to the US, but the effects are global)
Probably couldn’t make money and the VC funds dried up….
All the VC money is being dumped into AI right now.
Tech companies of yesteryear are starting to have to prove themselves in order to get funding, instead of relying on the wishy washy promises of old.
We can already see with Lemmy, that this phenomenon is giving breathing room to FOSS services.
I think it's awesome, even if we'll have to deal with growing pains for a while.
What even was their business plan? I never understood how'd they make money. I guess advertising is always the answer but how...
Business plan... That was the problem, the business plan was just a bunch of cat pics in a binder. Cute, but not so profitable.
No idea. It was likely privately funded so we’ll never know what advertising was likely the method
No idea. It was likely privately funded so we’ll never know what advertising was likely the method
So much porn, gone, reduced to ashes.
I don't think gfycat had very much porn anymore. Most if not all went to redgifs.com
The internet is dying. Federated is the last stand.
Web 2.0* is dying, and good riddance imo. I'm ready for the return of grassroots social media and decentralized communities.
I started out on usenet and shitty ezboard web forums. Web 2.0 collapsing is just another inflection point, there's always a replacement
The way things have been going I keep expecting to hear BBS's are coming back.
I've never heard of gyfcat. Or so I thought. I opened the website and immediately went "oh! I know this site! I love this site! Oh wait... Aw man...." What a rollercoaster
What the fuck is happening with everything?
No more VC free money + enshittification
The theme this year is that anything that doesn’t fit the IPO mold goes out the window I guess.
Even if you don't have shareholders yet, gotta brown nose before hand to impress them.
Gfycat was innovative for its time. Rest in peace...
So Reddit now becomes even more useless. Collection of DNS not resolving
Good point, and this raises an interesting topic: is there much value to old data from a link aggregator like Reddit when so many services are no longer available and the old links go nowhere?
Services like Facebook or Twitter are seemingly not as exposed to that type of issue since they’re less reliant on external content.
Nope, not really. I can't tell you how many times I've found a really old reddit thread with links I wanna check out only for them to be dead. With the services reddit rely on for content going down, this is only going to accelerate.
Man, that’s a shame.
Hey wait I’ve seen this one before!
“ The dotcom bubble burst when capital began to dry up. In the years preceding the bubble, record-low interest rates, the adoption of the Internet, and interest in technology companies allowed capital to flow freely, especially to startup companies that had no track record of success.”
I feel like I've said "that's wild" every other comment since joining lemmy, but damn that's wild. The Internet is straight up dying.
Why Snapchat discontinued gfycat?
probably wasn't profitable enough to justify keeping it around
The Internet really is trying to delete itself.
I am so happy that I learned to build a habit of saving everything I wanted to keep from the internet over the last couple years. I can't imagine what it would be like if I hadn't saved my history and all these websites started going pop even though they were big names in their day.
I hated this website though, it replaced all of the good gift images that support for software viewing on my phone for tiny short videos which were an absolute pain in the ass to view in line with my other content.
Would be great if every service didn’t make it as difficult as possible to download content
Yet another one didn't make it. Well damn, fuck this year for sure.