Are lots of websites really going downhill and/or closing or does it just seem like it to me?

Im glad decentralized social media is picking up steam. No more of these major communication platform rug poolings for everyone. Now at worst individual instances can implode and everyone just has to move to a different instance or self-host, and still access communities on every other instance.

This is the enshittification of the Internet. Cory Doctorow wrote about it here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys and it explains why this was always going to happen.

It's not just you, see this thread:

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/126183/What-s-with-social-media-companies-trying-to-destroy-themselves-recently

Unchecked corporate greed and no regards for users or communities that were built on these platforms. Hopefully the centralized ones will die from too many ads and user abandonment and the decentralized ones will rise and thrive.

Not just you. I don't know if anyone's made it official yet, but I call what's currently happening the "social media collapse." Corporations have been sinking their teeth into popular social networks, only to realize that they've never been profitable and that the people who use them don't want to live with advertising or restrictions. The annoying paradox of social networks is that by the time they're popular enough to be worth using, they're already too popular, and are doomed by the whims of a meddling executive.

There are larger macroeconomic issues at play here which are a big contributor to it. High inflation and an uncertain US economic situation has caused tech companies (as well as others) to lay off people and is making it harder for startups and smaller companies to raise capital to keep the lights on. So yes, there is something bigger going on that is indirectly causing all of this.

The tech bubble is starting to show signs of bursting. SVB alongside other large investent firms going down has shown companies that just being on the internet is not a sign of making money. Essentially the internet bubble is popping...again, as interest rates skyrocket and realized gains become smaller, internet-based companies seem to be scrambling to outpace the likes of Machine Learning and the new technological curve coming. Reddit going IPO, the Twitter shenanigans, etc.... Essentially they've all realized that their sites and business models are being made obsolete by the "new wave" of businesses/startups relying on newer technologies and novel revenue models.

Tldr; this is the cycle, new tech comes out, old tech dies. It happens all the time, just that this time it's not happening in our physical world but rather the virtual.

I personally can't wait to see it all burn. This last year especially has shown me how many people are just getting fucking sick and tired of centralized, corporate bullshit, even if they aren't consciously aware of why (things like issues listing items on Marketplace due to false auto-removals, no way to contact a human being for help with a business issue, spam, bots, unintentional bans/excessive moderation, etc.) At the end of the day, when the average person starts to complain about shitty UI and too many ads, you know a platform has peaked - and it's happening everywhere. Social media has had its time in the sun. I want it to fucking crumble now.

Well I didn't know about Gfycat shutting down but I do now. :/ Damn, not even it is safe.

VC’s are calling in their debts. We should expect to see more.

It's not even social media alone. The magazine National Geographic had the last of its staff fired last month. Now all of their articles are written by freelancers and there's no longer a physical copy being sold.

Ngl i think we’re finally seeing a lot of the social media bubble burst. Companies which have spent years in the red, now are being asked to make a profit, however they never had to before and never planned for it. If that sounds like they’ve spent the last 15 years thinking about growth over profits, it 100% is. Growth is important but growing a Losing venture is inherently unsustainable. They should’ve planned for this but most CEO’s have no idea how to plan for the future.
Just my 2¢

I think a lot of people have been weary of the current 20 year run of corporate social media, but didn't know where else to go. Now they do.

The web sucks honestly. everyone is either buying, selling, or being sold. The foundations of the web, open information sharing and interconnected servers, is collapsing behind paywalls and corporate greed. You can't even have a homepage or hobby site any more as the biggest indexer is drowning in a trash ocean of generated seo-honed content.

There are some beacons of hope to be found still, but mostly I'm disgusted to see how the larger ecosystem has evolved.

This is why a self-hosted WordPress blog is a good place to store all tour posts, media, etc. It can't get shut down because you can just move it. And WordPress is a sane company.

However, you really got to work to get traction from a blog post on social media. It can be done but does takes work.

The bigger problem, yeah, is most social media is walled silos and the companies are treating users like the enemy. I was really active in/tax, people thanked me for advice I gave. However, I'm done with Reddit. Let it rot.

I guess we need to create our own communities!

It's definitely frustrating. I've been finding myself really missing the internet of the 2000s/2010s, when new and interesting things were popping up and were worth talking about to friends. These days, it just feels like a chore to do anything online, like I'm just ticking off boxes on my to-do list but no longer having fun with the discovery process at all.

Hopefully this shake-up of some of the big tech giants brings some of that back.

As other people have said, we may very well be watching a bubble burst.

Many social media companies rely on VC money to get themselves started, to handle large initial costs, but the problem is many of them (Reddit included) have been suckling on that VC money for too long, and have been too lax on figuring out their monetisation.

The reason that is a problem now is because we're not just feeling the effects of the pandemic monetarily, but there's all sorts of things pulling at the global economy right now including the Ukrainian war...

It's made VC money harder to come by, so these companies are having to figure out their monetisation strategy now or die, hence the sudden death and enshitification of many social media (and related) sites.

Though if anything, it gives us a chance to exist, so that's cool. Only problem is even on a small scale, I can't imagine these Admins have an easy time monetising either, so I suspect this won't last in it's current iteration either.

Ya also Pinterest has been accidentally banning people I know bc a friend (who I know even irl not just online) got suspended even tho she doesnt post anything and doesnt spam. And I keep getting emails from them about pins I made being taken down then put back up BUT I don't make any pins I only save them and I dont save innapropriate stuff so idk. Ive read this is something a lot of people are dealing with on Pinterest lately too.

Most sites that rely on user generated content are a huge black hole of investor cash (Meta and YouTube are the only ones I can think of that aren't) and have a natural lifespan where increasingly desperate attempts to extract value from it eventually kill the site. It seems like everything is going downhill at once because the web stopped innovating sometime around 2010 and the unprofitable experiments became pillars of the online experience. It's why I'm excited about the fediverse - a return to community-led projects at last.

Most web companies never turned a profit and have business models that wouldn't ever be profitable, endless growth propped up by venture capital was all they strived for. Then hope they get acquired or do an IPO and let somebody else hold the bag - basically a Ponzi scheme. Investors realised this doesn't really work anymore, so the free money ran out. Also, the AI gold rush means VCs have something else to throw their money at.

It should happened years ago. The fact that "free speech" has been gardened, moderated and owned by companies like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit is mad. Kbin, Lemmy and Mastodon gives individuals the tools needed to retake their power of expression, for good and for bad. Together with Pixelfed and Nextcloud all needs are met - except for server hosting, that is.

Things come and go in cycles. There was a time when Fark, Digg, MySpace, LiveJournal, etc. were all a big thing and then they slowly went away or declined as something new arose in its place. I think a lot of the more tech-savvy users of Reddit will migrate to various fediverse instances and that you'll see other microblogging platforms arise to fill the void of Twitter, a la Bluesky. You'll still have somewhere to go, it just may not be the place you were used to going to.

Why is gfycat shutting down?

I think this is the web bubble bursting again. Venture Capitalists have piled money on a bunch of sites and products, we've become used to good free services.

The economy has taken a down turn and there is a increased demand for instant profitability and more and more social media companies realize they have overestimated how many people are willing to become paying customers. So they are forced to cut the product in order to save money instead.

I've been on the internet since the mid-80s, so I've pretty much seen it all. The current era has been characterized by widespread corporate takeovers, relegating independent sites to the backwaters of the internet at best. Forums for public comment used to be common, particularly on news sites; now they're mostly gone, relegated to a few massive sites and services which are heavily censored, swarming with bots, and easily controlled.

Free speech was mostly the rule; now it's strictly forbidden, particularly speech against the interests of corporations and the ruling class. Even if you DO find a place online where you can speak against the oligarchy, it's guaranteed that you'll be speaking into a void.

You can have all the free speech you want, as long as no one ever hears you.

The process of enshittification rules the day. Search engines which used to provide useful results now produce nothing but advertising and bot-fodder; on a recent Google search for blog entries about a topic of public interest, I literally got no results other than advertising. Blogs have effectively been eliminated from general public view, unless you go specifically looking for one that you already know about.

Technologically, broadband is the sole province of massive corporations which provide the shittiest service possible at the highest prices. There used to be talk of setting up small internet networks that would be outside the control of corporations and the government (which are now, of course, the same thing); that's utterly forgotten now. Governments all over the world now have kill-switches for the internet that can be used at any time, and that very definitely includes the United States.

There was a time when it was hoped that the internet would finally give power to the people. Instead, it's being used to enslave us even more.

The closest thing I've seen to any sign of hope over the last several decades is the development of the Fediverse.

They just happen to be reaching a breaking point to you, because of how tendencies work, most people reach a breaking point at roughly the same time.

Analogous to this, think of how when you're in a shitty relationship, you don't break up for one red flag or another, eventually you reach a breaking point and decide to not deal with the bs anymore, but when you look back you realize you were in a sea of red flags and should've ended it a long time ago... Either that or you never reach your breaking point and just sink lower and lower and become more miserable. That's about how it goes with most things in the consumer world. It's a good thing that we reach these breaking points, otherwise things never improve.