Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
from Cory Doctorow’s article on ‘enshittification’, which has become mandatory reading.
Just to add, the concept of a bait and switch, where you lure a party in with something and then swap it out once they are committed, is not a new idea in the slightest. This is just a modernized, refined tech version.
Uber and Lyft are good examples. Drive out most of the competition with an aggressive early phase where you spend most of your capital to shore up a massively negative balance sheet. You are baiting the customers to you with very low prices.
Then once the competition is eliminated, you raise your prices on the captive consumers that rely on the service to recoup your costs and start making money.
If you, in a video game, have ever lured something in with ranged attacks and then switched to melee to kill it, by plan, you executed this same strategy.
Every single discounted trial period for a subscription is employing a riff on the same concept, where they hope you’re too lazy to cancel.
Fools been falling for the bait and switch since … oh dawn of civilization maybe? Awareness of it defeats it, people don’t take bait when they know it’s bait. It is not complicated though, and does not require complex understanding to grasp.
IIRC, it’s in the article, but what makes enshitification so prevalent in tech is that it mostly involves networks, wherein part of the value of using the application comes from the presence and concentration of other users and providers on it (network effect). Even Amazon, Netflix, and Uber, are subject to that effect because they capture providers, not just users you will interact with. It’s a somewhat uniq trait that really exacerbates the problem. This trend will probably continue untill interoperability is legislated.
Right before the pandemic I was trying to not use Amazon anymore (I said f it during the pandemic because it was so hard to get ANYTHING for the first six months, but I need to go back to it). There was some random thing I wanted to buy, so I hunted down the manufacturer’s website and ordered it from them directly.
The thing still arrived in an Amazon envelope from an Amazon fulfillment center in an Amazon delivery van, because the small manufacturer was using fulfilled-by-Amazon for all their logistics, even for stuff sold on their own website. So apparently I can’t even stop using Amazon if I want to!
I would still argue that it is possible to educate enough to dramatically reduce its prevalence, as it does require a very large number of consumers to function in any kind of way.
While I’ll grant this is unlikely and has little historical precedent, that is true for many things in the modern world. We should keep our eyes on what is possible, not simply what is likely.
Unless you’re at a poker table or something.
Your metaphor reminded me of killing vampires in Skyrim and it made me smile as I also feel a deep sorrow from the fact all major companies now are racing to the bottom while leaving their skidmarks on everything I used to love.
If you, in a video game, have ever lured something in with ranged attacks and then switched to melee to kill it, by plan, you executed this same strategy.
What is the real world equivalent of standing on a rock to abuse the NPC’s pathfinding and cheese them to death?
Probably something along the lines of a castle of some sort. Maybe with a little of the “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you…” thing to a younger sibling.
This can’t be true, Reddit said they cared about community /s
They do care about 1 very specific, very niche community. Their shareholders.
I had just copied the link to post this.
Read this for an actual answer.
That was a good read, the thing is that it seems that all of a sudden a lot of tech companies are getting more and more anti-consumer. I mean it’s not only the whole Reddit and Twitter thing, now Youtube is getting more aggressive with adblocking, Stackoverflow and their mod protest, Google dropping support for the open source diaper and messaging apps on Android…
Many companies are getting more aggressive against their customers, and in the end it feels like the internet as it used to be is really dying, and we might end up with the whole “dead internet theory” becoming reality. I don’t know it just feels very depressing.
If you haven’t already, I suggest reading Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media, a blog post by Catherynne M. Valent. (It’s actually referenced in the article above.)
It’s long, funny, and angry and damn, did it strike a chord with me. It was written in December, '22 so pre-Reddit meltdown but still very relevant to it.
Some highlights include:
Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters… It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.
Over and over again … I’ve joined online communities, found so much to love there, made friends and created unique spaces that truly felt special, felt like places worth protecting. And they’ve all, eventually, died. For the same reasons and through the same means, though machinations came from a parade of different bad actors. It never really mattered who exactly killed and ate these little worlds. The details. It’s all the same cycle, the same beasts, the same dark hungers.
All … gone. Dismantled for parts and sold off with zero understanding that the only thing of any value the site ever offered was the community, its content, its connection, its possibilities, its knowledge. And that can’t be sold with the office space and the codebase. These sites exist because of what we do there. But at any moment they can be sold out from under us, to no benefit or profit to the workers—yes, workers, goddammit—who built it into something other than a dot com address and a dusty login screen, yet to the great benefit and profit of those who, more often than not, use the money to make it more difficult for people to connect to and accept each other positively in the future.
It does end on a hopeful note, though.
Don’t ever stop talking to each other. It’s what the internet is really and truly for. Talk to each other and listen to each other. But don’t ever stop connecting. Be a prodigy of the new world. Stand up for the truth no matter how often they take our voices away and try to replace the idea of reality with fucking insane Lovecraftian shit. Don’t give up, don’t let them have this world.
Don’t get cynical. Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in. Us doesn’t have a web address. We are wherever we gather. Mastodon, Substack, Patreon, Dreamwidth, AO3, Tumblr, Discord, even the ruins of Twitter, even Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok, god help us all. Even Diaryland.
It doesn’t matter. They’re just names. It doesn’t matter who owns them. Because we own ourselves and our words and the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis. We make our place when we’re together. We make our magic when we connect, typing hands to typing hands.
Hello, world. Come in from the cold. This will be a good place. For awhile. And then we’ll make another one.
Stop buying things and start talking to each other. They’ve always known that was how they lose.
OMG those quotes mention so many of my early internet memories. Dreamwidth. And before that, Livejournal before it sucked. And Diaryland. And Diary-X. And egroups. I miss those days so much. Twitter and Reddit weren’t the first to jump the shark, by a long shot.
I cannot read that and feel how short-sighted it is. The death of online communities due to money sucks. But how about the actual death of physical people and their physical communities due to literally the exact same thing? It seems douchey to complain about capitalism killing message boards and not connect the idea at all to how it has been killing everything on earth since humans became a thing.
Here it is: good ol’ “Whataboutism”, I almost had hope that one discussion could survive without someone going “wait, what about this other thing that people know and probably care about, but is completely irrevelant to the current conversation at hand?” but ah well, today just wasn’t the day, I guess.
Seriously tho, to borrow your first sentence: I can’t help but read something like “But how about the actual death of physical people and their physical communities” and think…are people just incapable of caring about two seperate issues of different scales at the same time? I don’t know, maybe I’m weird because I don’t suddenly think of the all starving people around the world and bring them up when the topic of the closing of the food joint a couple of blocks down gets brought up by the regulars…
Interest rates. Money isn’t free anymore. It’s still not super expensive but it’s 5x more expensive than what it used to be since 2008.
This is the answer. The age of free money is over and now we are seeing the effect; rampant inflation and high interest rates. The chickens come home to roost, always.
As a result, the burn rate and runway is starting to be factors in all businesses that aren’t making a profit.
Yep, VCs are unwilling to just fund any old thing hoping they’ll hit the lottery right now when money is “expensive”.
Thank you for answering the “why now, and why so suddenly” part. I’ve been really confused by this, too. Expensive money makes a lot of sense.
2022-'23 really has been the year of enshitification
But I think it all started with Tumblr
A few companies open the floodgates and takes a lot of the blame, flak, and focus (see: Netflix, Twitter). Other companies can seize the moment and ride the wave to potentially increase profits with less blowback than they might otherwise receive.
I mean Netflix has the community and producers thing and all but starting charging money for shared accounts and offering a cheaper version with adds is not really enshittificstion to me.
The deliver a service I pay for. That’s ok.
I think you mean dialer.
Many companies are realizing they can screw their users over and turn a profit for their actual bosses, the shareholders. Whether that’s true only time will tell.
Many companies are getting more aggressive against their customers, and in the end it feels like the internet as it used to be is really dying, and we might end up with the whole “dead internet theory” becoming reality. I don’t know it just feels very depressing.
With all the distributed social networks getting popular only among tech-literate people it feels like we’re getting a reverse- Eternal September as well.
Many companies are getting more aggressive against their customers
Oh no, they are getting more friendly to their customers. The thing is, you’re not the customer, the ad companies are the customers. You’re the product they’re selling. And they want to improve the product by controlling it more.
That was an excellent read and something I’ve observed many times but failed to describe so well. I really like the analogy of the big teddy bear.
Is it possible for Lemmy to become enshittified? If so, how? Given that it has federation at it’s core and it’s not owned by any one entity, wouldn’t the greater community just abandon the bad instance and self heal, like a lizard loses it’s tail?
I understand how federation could die, like what Google Talk did to XMPP, but not how Cory’s described process would affect Lemmy.
I think the exception is companies “too big to die.” They serve as the archangels of tech so ALL other goals lead to being bought by FAANG or dying.
This, just this
Capitalism. Monetise everything no matter the cost to the users
To expand on this, it’s not just capitalism - it’s greed.
Potato potato
@Nollij @breadsmasher
one in the same
money, power, greed - all part of capitalismWell,greed causes capitalism
I though it’s the other way around. Maybe it’s both and it’s closed circle
And capitalism causes greed!
I don’t think “greed” is quite the right word. “Greed” would be the right word if they were trying to make themselves more profitable. But they’re not: they’re trying to make themselves profitable at all. That’s not about greed, but about surviving. You can’t survive unless you stop hemorrhaging money at some point.
Maybe the question is “Why do investors invest so many hundred of billions of dollars into companies that cannot be profitable without becoming super-shitty? And why do users join them knowing that they’re going to become super-shitty one day?”
To expand on this, it’s not just capitalism - it’s greed.
No it’s just capitalism lol. Every company has to continue reaping in profits for capitalists or else it dies. This is just Reddit’s way of doing that.
do you think this move will be good for their business?
You ask on Lemmy…
Exactly – this is almost certainly bad for Reddit’s business at this point. The problem here isn’t necessarily capitalism so much as it is a egocentric CEO gone mad with power.
I don’t even think it’s a bad business decision.
Most people didn’t use 3rd party apps to begin with. I’d guess about 75% of the vocal minority who protested, will continue to use Reddit.
And a very small % of people will quit Reddit in favor of Lemmy.
I’d argue it is, because of the damage they’re doing to their brand.
I’ve said it in a couple other threads, but Reddit has other ways they can monetize their 3rd party app users, such as requiring subscriptions to use third party apps, or even by simply giving third party app devs a longer lead time to change to a paid model. Instead of doing either of those things, the CEO had a tantrum and alienated a bunch of people.
Again, I’m almost certain that the % of people who really care are very small.
I’m not trying to defend Reddit, I used Apollo and am part of that small % of people leaving.
It was pretty abrupt. One cannot help but wonder how much money the CEO has at stake, personally, in rushing things.
Cheers for being the very small %
Yea, I am not a capitalism enjoyer, but it’s comical watching people insert their favorite pet politics as the sole reason for everything that’s happening.
What’s good for making more money is not always or even often good for what we would think of as customer-friendly business. If you can wring more money out of a few whales at the expense of pissing off customers who don’t create as much revenue, then in our current system that’s what shareholders apparently want.
Reddit wants more users in their official app where they can target them for ads, sell NFTs, and whatever other bullshit they want to sell. It doesn’t matter if the experience is worse, and it probably doesn’t really matter if a couple thousand 3PA users split for good. As long as they can tell investors that the official app use is growing and that they can target a greater percentage of users with ads and data, they feel like they won.
I like how it’s already bad not only for Reddit, but for Google as search engine as well, as “reddit” is what many people put to thir phrases to find content. Now such search results are mostly useless.
In the short term? Maybe. Long term? Probably not.
But first be not as terrible to the users to attract them, then hope they’re lazy enough to not go anywhere when you treat them terribly later while they squeeze value from them
But first be not as terrible to the users to attract them, then hope they’re lazy enough to not go anywhere when you treat them terribly later while they squeeze value from them
In short: money.
Long story is that a lot of these tech companies started as startups funded by VCs.
Borrowing money was cheap so they got dumped buckets of money onto them to burn in an effort to try to get a foothold and/or kill off competition by undercutting them.Now that they’ve gained a foothold and in some cases have a near monopoly or duopoly and now that borrowing money isn’t cheap anymore, they need to start cutting cost if not outright turn a profit.
And so the enshittification begins.
Specifically for Twitter, Musk needs to cut cost because he bought Twitter at a severe premium and has made it less valuable by the minute ever since he took over. This to the point that he is leaving bills unpaid.
Specifically for Reddit, they’ve burned through all that VC money and have been eying a juicy exit in the form of an IPO. An IPO would be a payday for everyone who initially invested into Reddit because now they can sell their shares for more than what they invested (or at least that’s their hope). In order to get a good price once they go public they want to cut cost and increase revenue to seem as valuable as possible.
Specifically for YouTube, the ad game has been generating less and less revenue over time and advertisers have been burned in the past by having their ads placed next to objectionable content.
So the knee-jerk reaction is to severely tighten the rules for content, lest they be demonetized.
This however made creators realize that their livelihood in the form of the pittance that’s called AdSense payout is very fragile, so they started moving to doing sponsorships, soliciting Patreon donations and partnering with Nebula.Now YouTube is missing out on those revenue streams and often ad revenue as well as creators often turn off ads on their video when they have sponsor deals etc. So what does YouTube do? They started monetizing videos of creators who are not eligible for their partner program (i.e. place ads on videos and not share it with creators) and not give those creators the option to turn off ads, they started severely increasing the amount of ads on videos that do run ads, they started severely pushing YouTube Premium and now they’re cracking down on adblockers.
Yeah man, it sucks. We won’t miss Twitter because there are alternatives, i think the fediverse has the potential to be less predatory and more stable over time while facing its own issues; but for YouTube, i got nothing. Video hosting is expensive, there’s no way around it, whether it’s for centralized servers or enthusiasts running their own instance.
There is PeerTube, which is kind of the Fediverse’s answer to YouTube.
It doesn’t really fit to YouTube the same way Mastodon fits Twitter and Lemmy fits Reddit, but it’s relatively well used outside of the West, due to local governments blocking YouTube etc.
They’re aiming to maximize profit
Their profit centers are advertising and selling api access to content libraries
So they don’t want you to see posts with long narratives, extensive image galleries, long videos, etc. there are some exceptions to this of course like YouTube and other streaming services that embed the ads and as a result want long videos that engage the user. But Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, Insta, etc want page views. Once you take venture capital you’re fucked, they demand a return on their (typically massive) investment and will insist you sell your soul to advertising ghouls. All the socials did that long ago
That way they get maximum impressions and can serve you the most ads. They also get more data on you quickly and can use analytics to develop a profile for more targeted advertising which is more lucrative. The dream is that you view a post for 10-30 seconds, react quickly (like or upvote or whatever) then move on to the next one. This is also why they tweak their algorithms to promote garbage content. They want content that grabs an audience. R/stupidfood, fightporn, diwhy, conservative, politicalcompassmemes, etc plus the spattering of news where people react to headlines without readings are the dream to them. Why do you think they let the_donald fester when it was obviously breaking sitewide rules every single day? Because it drove engagement through ragebait. “Oh did you see what they did now?”. These are Reddit centric but the other networks are largely the same, a push to prioritize content that is ugly and rage inducing to drive engagement. They completely disregard the potential social impacts of this. Maybe it makes people more angry and more irritable, more impulsive, less empathic, more divisive, etc. but they’ll hide behind “we are giving the people what they want” because they have a complete disregard for ethics and no regulatory oversight at all.
Wrt Reddit specifically at the same time they do want some engagement with commentary because they want their cake and to eat it too. But they want this for the benefit of being able to add an additional revenue stream with selling API access to commercial clients. The biggest example is LLM stuff like chatgpt. If you need to train your AI language model you needs tons of naturalistic colloquial writing. Reddit is a perfect place for this. I mention chatgpt because they were using Reddit for this already and Reddit had mentioned them numerous times to the point that they’re clearly pissed about it. They think chatgpt owes them money as part of their success. They realize they missed that boat so this is likely another driving force in the api changes.
Additionally the content drives traffic. Reddit specifically shows up organically in tons of twitter searches and this is because of the massive amount of content they have. Other social networks have this content but they don’t make it as accessible and searchable so they’re not as concerned here.
The solution is to continue to decentralize. Imo lemmy/kbin are good but as an old head I think we need a return to the late 90s/early 2000s internet where communities were completely decentralized from each other. If the administration of your community goes to shit then only your community is fucked. This whole thing where a “platform” for communities lowers the bar which is nice but if the administration fucks up a lot of people get fucked over and a lot of communities get wrecked
Tldr advertising is cancer that will do anything for a few more dollars even if it’s destructive, the us government does basically nothing to regulate them, and we actively tolerate and invite it to our lives so expect it to get worse
What’s funny about the LLM stuff is Reddit must know where those API calls are coming from. This is RiF’s calls. This is Apollo’s. They could have ring fenced every app easily. They could have then introduced a ‘If you’re not in the Genuine API list, you have to resubmit your application or you pay at this higher tier’.
I think most would not have cared if OpenAPI would have faced these costs. They’d likely have cheered Reddit on for taking a chunk back from Microsoft.
Accessibility apps could have been pre-approved too. Instead, they tried to have their cake and eat it and have all the ingredients left over at the end. They could be sitting high with a new revenue stream for high-call low-community impact API calls. But, tried to eat all of that cake at the same time.
think we need a return to the late 90s/early 2000s internet where communities were completely decentralized from each other. If the administration of your community goes to shit then only your community is fucked. This whole thing where a “platform” for communities lowers the bar which is nice but if the administration fucks up a lot of people get fucked over and a lot of communities get wrecked
I don’t know what you mean. If one instance falls there’s a million fallback communities. If the developers of the software itself fuck up instances just won’t use that new fucked version.
It’s definitely a lot better but like if lemmy.world goes down it takes a lot of communities with it scrambling to find homes on new instances. Maybe if each instance itself was a community? That would probably be a nightmare though in terms of building up a user base.
Or maybe I’m just misunderstanding it, I’m kind of new to lemmy
Capitalism. The incentive for any large, profit-motivated firm will always be to get the most people to pay as much as possible for as little as possible.
- Startup releases nice product
- Product is cheap or free
- Startup gains huge customer base while burning through money
- Investors are interested
- When initial money runs out, startup either asks for VC money or goes public
- Now investors want more growth
- Product goes through enshitification to extract more money out of customers
- Product loses customers as it loses its original charm
A tale as old as time
In the tech world I’ve heard it called enshitification. Basically what you layed out but with a little nuanced difference.
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The growth of online advertising revenue slowed in 2022 for the first time since 2009.It still grew, just slower.
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Interest rates went up.
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With the collapse of crypto and Silicon Valley Bank (which was overleveraged in crypto), VC money isn’t as free flowing. There really wasn’t that much institutional money in crypto, but it’s still a destablizing force and has had a ripple effect.
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AI is making more people aware of bots. This is related to point #1. A huge, unknown percentage of of FAANG revenue is selling online ads to bots instead of real eyeballs and once the word gets out, ad revenue will slow even more for any service depending on online ads (eg reddit).
One correction, SVB was not over-leveraged in crypto, they had too many government bonds when the interest rates went up, devaluing them.
That makes a lot more sense. Thank you.
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The interest rate hike in the USA by the federal government caused this. The companies can’t borrow money for nearly free any more. All the entities who would have been offering these loans are now able to buy government bonds with a much more guaranteed return on investment. This means the corporations must squeeze more profit out of their products to pay back loans. There are an enormous amount of large money transactions like this used to run a large business. They do not operate on cash reserves all the time. They have assets and are always evolving to stay relevant. Most businesses have enormous asset holdings but limited liquidity.
This best answers the OPs question. We know why it happens in general, but this is why everything is doing it in overdrive right now.
I also think Spez is trying to rush into an IPO before the bottom truly drops out and the company folds.
There’s also a clampdown on venture capital happening now. Investors are getting tired of waiting indefinitely for returns on over-valued media companies. For any running in the red, things are going to get tight. That means layoffs that result in lower quality service and more burden on users for revenue. Social media has never been a profitable and sustainable corporate enterprise.
A lot of the value was thought to be in LLM’s but with the meta weights leaked, and the open source ability to patch the weights without refactoring the base, or even becoming a detriment, controlling all the data holds less value.
Money was basically free until now, making promises of infinite growth to investors possible. Not anymore.
This is the best answer. For a long time, VCs were willing to load up all sorts of startups and growth-stage companies with cash. But that changed last year. Suddenly, some investors found it made more sense to park their money in less risky, less time-consuming opportunities. That included stuff like bonds. Higher interest rates and an economy in crunch mode made the need to make money now more important than before.
$$$ M O N E Y $$$
– Mr Krabs
The meme became real life
Interest rates go up. Quantitative Easing go down.
They might have to play with real money lol
This is it. For nearly 15 years money was basically free for tech companies. Banks don’t pay anything, bonds don’t pay anything, the stock market is overheated and investors are still looking for return. So if your tech company was already public you could borrow in the form of bank loans or bonds for dirt cheap and if it was still privately held you can get money from individual and corporate investors.
Now that the free money era is over a lot of companies have had to finally think about making a profit so that they can keep the lights on. This is why there have been tens of thousands laid off in the tech sector in the last year or so.
As far as Reddit goes I have no idea what they’ve been thinking. It seems like they’ve been spending money developing features nobody wants or needs: locally hosted images and video which have to cost a fortune, live chat, and NFTs, to name a few. They’ve got the ~20th most popular website in the world with millions of daily active users and they can’t figure out how to make it profitable?
The API the third party applications used doesn’t serve ads. All they had to do for a bump in revenue is to insert ads and require third party applications to display them or risk losing their API access. Users would grumble but it’s a pretty reasonable ask. The fact that they didn’t do this demonstrates to me that they don’t think the money is in serving ads, they think it’s in data mining and they can only get the data they want from the official app.
Great read, thank you.
That actually explains it, really, a good read.
Excellent article - thanks for sharing
Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”
Snailed it.
Billionaires are circlejerking all push backs against wealth redistribution mechanisms. They want to use the fallout of any apparent mechanism shutdown as swag within billionaire soundbite circles. The ultimate tool is a flamethrower, or something similar. It’s all a flex!
Sycophants, cronies, and useful idiots will be doing shout outs on handouts, commies, vox populi, failures, freaks, basket cases, lay offs, recessions, leftists, parasites, leaners, blah, blah, blah – weird ass rich people lickboot enshittifications.
deleted by creator
They are trying to squeeze as much money out of their platforms as possible, regardless of the fact that it’s at the expense of users and will downgrade users experiences.
Honestly they do it so consistently that i’m starting to wonder if they have a choice.
A common way to do things for tech startups is that they get venture capital funds, use them to run the business at a loss hoping to acquire market dominance, and then use market dominance to turn a profit. I think a lot of tech startups that we know are currently in phase 2, meaning they’ve thrown money out the window for years and are now trying to recoup their investments.
Also, Reddit wants to go public and Twitter already is. This is relevant because investors are animals, all they see is short-term profit, and they use their voting power to make the company behave that way.
There’s a common thread between both my theories: it’s shareholder capitalism. I say this as a lifelong shareholder myself, shareholders ruin everything.
Twitter ist public? I thought it’s Elon’s private property now, no public trading any more.
I think Elon just bought majority, like 51% of shares or something. I don’t really remember it’s been a while
No.
Musk, who posted a tweet saying “the bird is freed” in reference to his ownership of the micro-blogging site, owns all the shares in the site once payments to shareholders was finalized. Trading in the shares on the New York Stock Exchange has been suspended, meaning no new purchases of the stock can be made.
He bought ALL the shares?? Why?
That’s the only way to take a public company private. It was a terrible idea, but he did it.
Are those kinds of numbers publically available? Im guessing no but they would be interesting to see.
Can’t fight the class war if they have us either fighting the culture war, or not talking to each other intelligently.
Probably enshitification!
Look it up.
I hate that word. Crapification or Shitification would have done fine
