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What's frustrating about all this is the resources wasted on growing businesses that were fundamentally unsustainable. I think a tougher economic climate would have been better for innovation long-term.
Honestly outside of the Youtube/Imgur I don't think these companies are unsustainable. The problem is the VCs are aiming for huge returns. Instead of focusing on their niche and running a lean but profitable business they are forced to chase trends and exponential growth. Who on Reddit wanted chat or live streams. Why is Facebook spending so much money on videos. does Uber really make any money off hellocopters rides…
Reddit was doing fine as a text-only forum supported by advertising and Reddit Gold. Then they went a billion dollars in debt building the redesign which is widely disliked by power users (who are responsible for most of Reddit’s actual activity thanks to volunteer moderation combined with the Pareto principle), and at the same time decided to add native image and video hosting and take on all the costs associated with that. Everything since then has really been chasing whatever’s popular. After Twitch got big, they added livestreams, which didn’t go anywhere. After Discord got big, they added chat, which didn’t go anywhere. During the NFT boom, they invested big in those, which wasted a lot of money and didn’t go anywhere. Now AI is the new hotness, and they’re following Elon’s lead by treating the site as a static text repository which more value being sold to people training AIs than any value that could be gained from just...running the site. This boom will end, either by way of hitting the peak of what’s currently possible, updates to copyright law or other regulations, or just by the AI companies remembering they can just download the Common Crawl database for free and get the exact same content without paying Twitter or Reddit (or even specific dumps of Twitter or Reddit content if that’s what they really want; those are widely available in places like the Internet Archive).
Imgur was never going to be sustainable on its own, since it’s basically impossible to monetize an image hotlinking service by definition. However, they brilliantly decided to pivot the site to being its own image sharing community (with all of the monetization opportunities that allows), while still supporting the original use case as a sort of “unintended” feature (while actually being the whole reason the site was originally made in the first place). Then they suddenly forgot that was the plan, probably after several managerial/executive swaps, and started shutting down everything that wasn’t part of the “community” system, even though the “community” was really created just to subsidize everything else.
Facebook’s adventures with video are probably the single most damaging thing to ever happen to the Internet. Basically, they saw that video ads were wildly more profitable than anything else they were doing, proceeded to inflate their video stats by counting anyone scrolling past an autoplaying video as a “view”, told the entire web that text was dead and video was the future (causing hundreds of major sites to shut down their writing departments in favor of mainly producing videos), used all of these manufactured stats to get massive investment in video ads, and then just kind of shrugged when everything eventually collapsed.
YouTube has been in a good place consistently since the mid-2010s, and just really likes pretending that they aren’t. Like I said with Facebook, video ads are really profitable when done right, and YouTube operates at a big enough scale that the bandwidth and storage costs of hosting all of humanity’s video content is offset by the number of people watching Mr. Beast eight seconds after he posts a new video. The problem is that they’re always trying to optimize for more revenue, leading to massive pushes for family-friendliness to keep advertisers happy, pushing whatever the latest “format” is (at the moment, Shorts) because that’s what advertisers are most interested in since it gets the most views, and just generally trying to hyper-optimize every aspect of the website to further improve their margins.
All of these sites could have simply continued with their original business models and maintained small but lean businesses, and they’d probably be able to even keep getting moderate growth thanks to network effects. But they wanted all the money and they wanted it right now, leading to extreme overextension into whatever else is currently popular, and it only ever leads to the core business collapsing because the people who were maintaining it are off selling NFTs or trying to build a video player.