I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. “Don’t attribute to malice what could be explained by incompetence.”

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just capitalism, which is worse.

Spez is trying to tie up what he thinks are loose financial ends to make (what he thinks) is an appealing IPO.

Elon is feeling the pinch as Twitter continues to bleed advertising partners and users and it becomes more apparent it will not make back either his purchase cost or Twitter’s existing debt. He’s the spoiled son of a rich mine boss and has no idea what he is doing. He is used to having far more capable people running his companies for him.

So conspiracy probably isn’t the right term, although there are common factors that are causing - or at least influencing - a lot of these trends.

With inflation being a major issue, central banks are reacting by increasing interest rates. These rate hikes have the effect of making credit and borrowing more expensive.

This is significant because central rates had been low (nearly 0%) since basically 2008, with quantitative easing (cash printing) pumping billions of additional dollars into the stock markets in particular.

The effect of loaned cash being effectively free is an explosion of activity from investor hedge funds who were willing to take huge risks on speculative projects. This fuelled the massive boom in tech startups across the 00s.

The trouble is, many of those startups weren’t profitable, they were ‘potentially profitable’ and fuelled by credit. Or they had the underpants gnome model of profit where the means and mechanism of the ‘???’ stage would be figured out later (WeWork).

Investors were happy to fund those losses to create products that controlled markets (Uber) or amassed huge userbases that could be flipped from potential to profit in the future (Reddit).

Only now the rates have gone up, and credit is suddenly expensive. Business models that rely on running at a loss suddenly aren’t viable, and those startup investors that owns chunks of those businesses are now insisting on actual returns on their investments.

You can see the effects all over social media and tech, but Reddit (urgently need to get profitable for a stock launch, need the stock launch for funding) and Twitter (basketcase debt load at the worst possible time for debt) are the most obvious examples.

Techbro austerity means worse products for consumers or aggressive monetization policies which users will likely dislike. So not a conspiracy, but decades of reckless investment by hedge funds that have been caught with their pants down by interest risk.

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy as much as it is the natural consequences of extreme wealth and narcissism, fueled by the necessity of continual quarterly increases in profit.
The idiocy of the ultra wealthy creates a feedback loop because they’re convinced that their wealth is proof of their brilliance and so they copy each others terrible ideas.
It isn’t the forgivable stupidity from lack of education, but from being surrounded by sycophants and profiteers coupled with a profound alienation from the rest of humanity.
Unfortunately, all of that is harder to fix than prosecuting a conspiracy.

Spez said in an interview he admires Musk. If you haven’t noticed yet, the corporate world is just 1 giant game of follow the leader.

“Oh X laid 13% of their staff off? I’m gonna do that too even though I don’t really need to”

“Oh Twitter charged ridiculous amounts for their API and didn’t crumble? Me too”

Remember when Google was doing those dumbass interviews where you have to figure out how many manhole covers in NYC or whatever? Every tech company and their mom was OBSESSED with those types of questions even long after Google figured out how useless they were.

Remember when you paid outright for things and everything wasn’t a subscription model?

Thankfully Twitter is actively dying now, but if they somehow manage to turn it around we are all fucked. If they show people will stay around while you strongarm them into paying AND having limits to save server costs that is going to be adopted by basically everyone.

Twitter, Reddit, Meta, YouTube, et al. - these platforms have one singular goal, and that is to serve you ads and generate income off of your harvested personal data. If there exists a conspiracy, its goal is to remove all barriers to that end.

It really just might be idiots with too much money. Musk makes changes willy nilly without much peer review in the similar way the Titanic sub rich guys did before it imploded.

Then Steve Huffman was like, “Hey, I wanna get investors and money! Screw the people, the whole site is mine to play with like Elon does.”

Money corrupts, man. It’s overly worshipped by society because of its necessity and now here we are. It’s a whole other system for the rich vs the poor.

But to go along your route of thinking, I’d still say no because powerful social media is even powerful when the people who use it are heavily propagandized. (especially by Russia) So when communities fracture into safer sites, propaganda loses its grip and has to work harder to spread influence.

A sinister conspiracy is certainly… much easier to believe in than the existence of two rich idiots.

It’s the standard narcissistic downward spiral more likely.

One of the sadly interchangeable bozos who inherited a lot of money and/or lucked his way into a fortune can keep the spastic ego weasels in their heads in control for a while. Or has a team of people to both manage their companies and public presence.

But as one starts to bridle under all of this undue control from outside forces, the madness comes to fore. They begin to lash out at the perceived slights, which ironically were always for them and their company’s protection, and it all snowballs from there. Worse, seeing another such oligarch do the mad jig seems to encourage the others that THEY shouldn’t be shackled either!

Musk was always a giant pile of shit. He was just well managed and in control of his inner demons enough to present a ‘pleasing’ facade. And being forced to buy twitter completely unmoored him from reality.

Zuckbot is an odd case… he’s an unmitigated monster, but seems to be enough in control that the downward slide hasn’t started. Yet.

Bezos was fine until Amazon became mega profitable and he got to live out his corrupt CEO dreams. Look at not only the legions of shattered humans left in the wake of Amazon, from drivers all the way to corporate, but what he did to William Shatner. While Shatner has been a weapons grade asshole for much of his life, seeing him humbled to the point of tears from finally going to ‘space’ only for Bezos to frat bro it up to make sure that HE was in the limelight was grotesque.

Spez has always wanted a seat at the big boy table. And has a long, long, long history of douchebaggery.

Trump isn’t even worth mentioning. I was an teen when he came to prominence in the 80s and even then it was absolutely fucking obvious that he was large mouth, larger ego all wrapped in an empty suit.

This isn’t all to say that there isn’t a conspiracy to destroy these services. Only that the more logical takeaway is that these awful men have always wanted to be the garbage fire they’ve become… and it was just a matter of time.

Maybe there’s a conspiracy? Maybe there isn’t. There isn’t much I can do outside of weening off my use of them, ultimately deleting my content there, and using and encouraging alternatives. Past that, I’ve come to find out it isn’t worth the trouble for me to give that kind of thing too much airtime in my head if I can help it. If I wake up one day to learn that there’s A Whole Thing going on, though, frankly it wouldn’t surprise me all that much.

If I had to give it an absolute Yes or No based on what I know and figure, however, I’d say there isn’t a conspiracy. I’d wager that it’s just the likes of ignorance and capitalist business practices.
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I’ve heard that the economic landscape in the past decade-ish allowed certain sorts of companies and people to do business in a way that likely wasn’t as sustainable as they thought. 2020 comes around, the economic landscape changes for intersecting Reasons, and I’d figure that the companies and people operating the least sustainably realize they have to change it up if they want to rake in the dough. Some of these businesses were social media platforms, and some of those platforms are lead partially or entirely by people like Musk or Huffman, who make some Less Than Thrilling decisions because they think it’s a sound bet to get a lot of cash. That’s not to say their decisions are sound bets, let alone good in sum, but I’m inclined to give the benefit of the doubt and say they weren’t decisions made in a vacuum.

As much as we may use platforms like Reddit or Twitter to connect with one another or find and do something besides consuming and entertainment, we have to remember that these places established themselves as capitalist businesses. They are for-profit companies that ultimately answer only to the likes of a board, their shareholders, or their leadership. I think it’s reasonable to say that the end game for a lot of these businesses is to make money. A lot of it. The consumer’s most important purpose in this approach is to serve as a means to that money. There might be exceptions here and there that are given various labels, both inside and outside of a capitalist lens, but Twitter and Reddit certainly don’t read like exceptions. Ill-advised or not, if the right people at Twitter and Reddit genuinely think their recent decisions will make them more money, it doesn’t surprise me that they’ll do it. The trouble is that there’s typically more to life than a dollar—actions tend to have consequences outside of their intended ones, especially at this scale. Even if Twitter and Reddit didn’t mean for this to put a dent in the ability to organize (or even to just be like, a Shitty user experience,) it can, and will, have that effect.

Writing it out, it’s kinda funny. I still don’t think there’s a conspiracy per se, but the effects of these business practices create the sorta symptoms you’re talking about, anyway. How does the saying go? “The system is working as intended”? Whether that’s better or worse than a literal social and class conspiracy I’d say is up to the individual.
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As an aside, this is why I think projects like Lemmy and Mastodon are a big deal. Actually making the platform has got to be one of the hardest hurdles to get a social media network started. For all their faults, stuff like this is ready to slap onto a server and run, and it’s free and open source. That lowers the barrier of entry drastically to let people try and make this kind of thing work in a non-profit format.

Don’t feel it is a conspiracy as such, in that I don’t think it is coordinated between different social media companies, but it is true that damaging the ability to inform very large numbers of people about what’s going on is incredibly useful to right-wing interests.

So though there’s still a lot of organising & educating online, now people need to seek out information to find it - they’re far less likely to accidentally stumble upon it whilst learning about their hobbies, following a band they’re into, or seeking advice for some personal situation.

In the absence of robust networks for persuading people to back right-wing ideas, disrupting everything else is the next best thing.

But, I also suspect that many of these companies have not been as profitable as anticipated, that there aren’t good ways to make them so, and that they cannot see how to remain functional in the face of imminent developments, so they’re wildly scrambling to wring out some profit, slash costs, and flog off infrastructure before the whole thing comes crashing down & they’re left holding useless, expensive messes.

It’s not a conspiracy, just a coincidence.

And from what I can tell, much of it comes down to all of these sites being VC funded back when loans were cheap, and those VCs wanting their money back now they’re not. Suddenly Reddit has to actually make money with a product that’s not really equipped to do so.

I think there are a lot of moving parts, there are tech investors who want their money, there are machine learning companies that are hungry for data, and there are certainly fecal matter stains who want more control of the discourse.

We’re no longer in the era of free money (when interest rates on loans were lower than inflation) so companies and investors can’t just take out more loans to pay for the growth of a company that will figure out how to make money eventually.

Additionally that “eventually” has come, a lot of people just retired at a much faster rate (we went from about a million people retiring a year to five million retiring a year in the US)

Everyone who is retired needs their investments to start paying out now, that means all the bankers, money managers and VC goons need ti start getting their money back form the tech companies they’ve been lavishing investment on the past two decades.

They poured money in to capturing the internet and now they’re locking everything down to make their money back, that means cracking down on ad blockers, herding users in to walled gardens where they can be price gouged, and halting the free scraping of data through free API

Machine learning systems are apparently the next hotness that’s going to gush profits, and the raw input for that is data off the internet to train programs, so the social media sites are locking down their data so that they can charge machine learning companies to train on it.

Combine all this and you get the anti-user crap storm we’re currently in. Ad blockers need to go, free and open API needs to go, the profit must flow and if it doesn’t a lot of people in the upper echelons will find their preverbal knee caps smashed in.

This has happened with other online platforms constantly over the course of the internet’s history. It’s why there is an enshittification meme that everyone is learning about.

This time it happened after some years where a critical mass of society has coagulated on those platforms, so the effect is more dire.