Sponge. But epic.
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.
I mean regardless of whether it’s greed or not it’s happening because they need to generate a profit period lol.
“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?”
David Harvey has been ringing the bell on this for at least a decade lol. Effectively capitalism runs out of profitable investments when you need continued YoY growth. Like finding trillions of new investment opportunities a year is just not realistic. So capitalists fund bullshit projects and flow their money into markets where the perceived value is significantly greater than any of the actual socially necessary value. And that distance grows greater over time, until people realize ‘what the fuck are we funding’ (like what happened with crypto, or the metaverse), and then that gap immediately shrinks and the unlucky capitalists lose their money. And that will continue happening.
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.
Users actually run a lot of larger instances on the Fediverse off of donations! I run a larger Mastodon server and we get literally double our monthly costs in donations. For every month we stay open, that is two months longer we stay open. Absolutely wild. We have about 1.5k users, with about 20-30 of them donating maybe $5-10 monthly. That’s 2%-ish of the user base donating. Lemmy is LEAGUES easier to host given that it’s written in Rust and is incredibly resource efficient. So I can only imagine it’ll be even cheaper to host on donations.
There’s a great example right in the quoted article regarding Reddit’s iOS app, for example - the upvote/downvote buttons there need to be labelled with alt text.
Good lord I didn’t realize how bad the app was. This is like… basic stuff I feel like lol.
One of the easiest things to do is honestly just to learn how to use something like VoiceOver and fix stuff that feels broken. Broke my wrist a while back and had to rely on Talon Voice for getting around my computer cause I couldn’t type, was a huuuuuuge eye opener and made it much easier to write accessible software lol.
This is what’s so hard to convey about the Fediverse lol. Mastodon is obviously not everybody’s cup of tea, but when I made my account it was kinda shocking to me how I communicated with actual people. No ads in the feed. Took time to find good content but it was there.
Is this a fucking joke