There are lots of reasons. One of them I've seen is that monetizing a thing like a website or online community without bleeding it to death is hard and presents unique challenges. But the CEOs of the world are trying to do it with the same skillset they used to become regular CEOs. It is the issue behind a great deal of problems... our society winnows down business leaders to one type of person for efficiencies sake, but then that type of person is rarely capable of non-exploitative or long term thinking.

Greed.

My theory? It's Musk.

He's going around saying he only lost bots and scammers, that he's made Twitter profitable, and that advertisers are back and happier than ever

He isn't showing his numbers and there's no way his claims are true, but he's saying what they all want to hear. "Don't worry guys, you can squeeze your users for cash hard as you want, and they might grumble about it but they'll soon come crawling back"

There's also increased pressure to become profitable ASAP, much of it is likely due to the economy, but Musk lying through his teeth is probably getting to the other billionaires. It's worth mentioning, if you're a billionaire the only reason to still care about money is for bragging rights

Companies in general are just designed to make more profit, that‘s it. All their decisions make sense from a business perspective, they are just shitty for us from a human perspective. This is why we need decentralised platforms which aren‘t inherently profit seeking.

Funny also how every time someone criticises capitalism someone shows up attributing all technological advances to capitalism. No. It‘s the people, under any economic system there will be inventions, it is small minded to think people only innovate or work out of greed, if that were so the entire open source just wouldn‘t exist and volunteering wouldn‘t exist.

its the eshitification of the internet....it's inevitable

$

Low effort guess, VC's cashing out before society collapses.

I think the main problem with these companies and the startup/tech bro culture (mostly in the US) is that they are growing for the sake of just growth itself, because they want to get their own. The original idea is to grow as big as they can, IPO, then sell it off. They weren't designing things to be profitable from the start. So eventually they all reach a stage where they are hemorrhaging money too much, and that is where all the enshittification happens (investors come in, they try to make it a real business now, but it wasn't really feasible to be a business to begin with).

Because nobody can make a platform and just leave it alone, it always has to grow and make profit. All of the apps we use to communicate should be a public service but that's totally utopic.

@VoidCrow https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/enshittification

Capitalism. Companies go public (or already were public) and then they can no longer be happy with what they had and need to acheive infinite profit growth. That's partially why companies like Valve, that are still luckily entirely private, can make seemingly consumer-focused decisions and not just chase infinite profits. That's how they've been able to invest so heavily in Linux with such little short term gains. Valve still makes shitty decisions sometimes but it would be 10x worse if they decided to go public.

It's nothing new. It's becoming more spectacular as the people doing it are richer and richer. Geocities sold to Yahoo, who promptly murdered it. LiveJournal sold itself to a Russian banker, which caused most non-Russian users to abandon it. Tom sold MySpace to Rupert Murdoch for like 500 million and bowed out, and MySpace was driven into the ground. The buyers are getting bigger an bigger but the results of trying to squelch users has always been the same - the platform is abandoned.

It's a general trend of vulture capitalism, or more accurately locust capitalism, over the last several years.

Investors want extreme ROI(Return on Investement, aka their money back and some extra), so they'll cut every single corner and monetize everything, and even run companies into the ground to make it happen faster. And then just move on to another company and to the same thing, with absolutely zero interest in long term income, customer retention, etc.

It's corporate greed. They're just trying to get (more) money out of their users pockets. They're starting not to design their products in a way that the most people use it, but in a way that they get the most money, time and useful, valuable data from their users. That's less people but more profit.

Netflix is showing similar behaviour at the moment.

It' simple: Greed is the reason.

https://medium.com/@mikegrindle/reddit-and-the-enshittification-of-social-media-659d41b5ab73

Twitter is sui generis because they were acquired impulsively by a maniac. But for the others, I think it’s just that interest rates were super low for a long time and now they’ve gone back up to a more historically normal level.