• Ragerist@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

    • CumBroth@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Technotica@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Ragerist@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • Matdan@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.