[vinyl7]

It has really made me pessimistic about tech and products in general. There's the free and great stage, then the market is captured, then enshittification, then death.

I don't get excited about new products or new tech because I know the cycle. Hype then bust. New thing comes out and I'm just meh about it, because it'll bust soon enough so it's not worth getting invested in it. Or new version will come out next year and break what I was used to, or it'll be an implicit subscription of having to buy new thing every year. But it's not really going to fix itself because it seems like everyone else loves the dopamine rush from the hype cycle, and they don't really seem to care about how ephemeral everything is.

[lapcat]

> It has really made me pessimistic about tech and products in general. There's the free and great stage, then the market is captured, then enshittification, then death.

Mark Zuckerberg an hour ago: "Our approach will be the same as all our other products: make the product work well first, then see if we can get it on a clear path to 1 billion people, and only then think about monetization at that point." https://www.threads.net/t/CuW5-eWL34x

[wavemode]

lol it's so explicit

at this point he's the world's leading expert on the enshittification cycle

[mym1990]

The ironic thing is that he lists monetization last, but simply by uttering that sentiment he tells us that they are really thinking about monetization first, aka the end goal of the product.

[cableshaft]

Even if he didn't say it, it's implicit in who they are. Do you really think a massive social media corporation is going to launch another social media platform, just for funsies?

[praisewhitey]

They opened it up for brands days ahead of the general public. Of course they're thinking of monetization first.

[hobo_in_library]

I mean, did you think he was pouring money into this out of the goodness of his heart?

[mym1990]

No, no, just pointing out the blatant contradiction in the statement. Although I do wish an app intended for a billion people had a component of goodness to it!

[akhosravian]

I don't think he's ever suggested Facebook is anything but a for profit enterprise, but I think it is an extremely cynical take that "build a product a billion people would use before thinking about monetization" actually means "think about monetization first".

[username135]

The literal only goal of a public company is to make money for its shareholders; shareholder wealth maximization.

I think your altruism is misplaced because they most certainly are thinking of $$$ first and foremost.

[tarsinge]

> The literal only goal of a public company is to make money for its shareholders; shareholder wealth maximization.

No it’s only a theory that emerged in the 70’s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine).

[yummypaint]

Framing things this way suggests that the reason the metaverse is failing so hard is because facebook insists on jumping straight to enshitification without spending time on the stages users actually enjoy.

[Night_Thastus]

I think you've actually got it a bit backwards.

Meta did not spend enough time thinking about monetization in the long term, realized they were in a really rocky position due to Apple and Google owning the platforms Facebook ran on, and then desperately had to come up with a new platform they could monetize.

They've pushed it so hard now because they didn't think about monetization early.

[rchaud]

It will always be a fascinating piece of historical trivia that Zuckerberg was represented as an iconoclastic hacker in The Social Network, when he had already turned into a turgid adtech executive by the time the movie came out.

[flangola7]

It is so foreign to me, to choose greed as your personal identity. These individuals will gleefully stride onto a stage with a microphone and boast about ideas and actions that 1/100th of would fill my mind with such incalculable guilt and embarrassment that I would never sleep or show my face in public again.

[Given_47]

Love this. And it’s very disheartening how society fetishizes how much personal wealth one accrues, so much so that it’s natural for the youth to grow up idolizing that and not once step back and consider the larger effect it has on the community.

An interesting thought is how many people are inadvertently bad, simply as a byproduct of what I touched on above

[vitaflo]

I remember when the worst thing you could be called was a “sellout”. Now it’s a virtue.

[starbugs]

"We will figure out the business model later"

Meaning: Once we have hooked enough users, we'll make them the product.

Free lip piercing...

[at-fates-hands]

Corollary:

"We have a business model, its built on bullshit and blue skies."

Quote from my wise father about being careful when being recruited by a startup that sounds too good to be true.

[starbugs]

“We have been featured at TechCrunch. There’s basically no risk anymore.”

Your father could have saved me…

[0xParlay]

It's hard to overlook the role of institutional capital in shaping the landscape of nearly everything.

As a teen I grinded for a few months building a b2b SaaS. A competitor launched a better version for free. The founder had a Harvard MBA and used VC funds to build this marketing tool.

Growing a product organically puts you at a disadvantage to companies that can ignore market fundamentals for years at a time. And if you do manage to grow, acquisitions that amount to life changing generational wealth is hard to ignore - and it's not like the future of your product is guaranteed.

Wall street needs returns. Tech is just the first to adapt to the loot-box economy but it'll spread. Anything that can be turned into a subscription model will be. Air-bags to air conditioning. We will own nothing and like it.

[Buttons840]

A lot of people reject political ideas (i.e., regulations) because they have an idealized love for our free markets. Meanwhile small profitable companies are going out of business to larger unprofitable companies.

It begs the question, how did the larger unprofitable company become large in the first place? It wasn't by delivering goods and services at a fair price, it was by currying favor with those already in power. The romantic view that to succeed in a free market you sell goods and services at a fair price doesn't hold.

[chmod600]

“A lot of people reject political ideas (i.e., regulations) because they have an idealized love for our free markets.”

No, it’s that regulation is often used as a political tool to wield power over the players in the market.

Free markets are far from ideal. But they do make it a bit more difficult to game the system because there are fewer ways for a third party to interject itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it doesn’t happen or even that it’s rare. Just more rare than if you turn politicians loose on the system.

I’m always amazed that people implicitly trust politicians, as though they’re unbiased referees trying to keep the game fair. Nope. The reasonable regulation you pass today will turn into some bizarre fiefdom in 10 years.

[leereeves]

I've come to believe this is just the latest version of a very old (and illegal) tactic: predatory pricing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

[konschubert]

I think the way to do it is by growing inside a niche that is sufficiently narrow that it isn't interesting for a big competitor.

[tarsinge]

I have a small agency and a product in a niche market and even there big consulting and IT services companies are starting spin offs to address these niches, and even bidding at a loss (especially when you take into account pre sales investments) to displace remaining niche actors like us.

[pawelmurias]

Loot-box is gambling not subscriptions.

[flyinghamster]

> then death

...or a perpetual zombie state as a "brand" that has absolutely nothing to do with its original owner. Trusted names from my youth (GE, Westinghouse, Frigidaire, Maytag, Zenith, etc.) mean nothing these days. Packard Bell has been resurrected twice now.

[JohnFen]

I count that as being the same as death. The name may live on, but the company is long gone and the name is meaningless.

[TRiG_Ireland]

The British transport YouTubers I follow, particularly Jago Hazard, every time they mention the Great Western Railway, are careful to remind us that it has no relation to the original company of that name.

[sebastos]

I get exactly what you mean, and I've felt the same thing: this pervasive stormcloud over my head as I wonder "is EVERYthing doomed to an eternal september?!"

However, I think this depressing outlook is an artifact of how much technology is fixated on social capture in a digital space. In that medium, yes, it's all just ebbs and flows. The article put it beautifully: we kept thinking that usenet or AOL or myspace or facebook were going to win, but it has taken a few decades for us to realize that in actuality they are just fashion trends that happen to require some very technical people to knit.

However, that doesn't mean that _technology_ is this way. And in fact, this speaks to the odd word mangling we've all adopted in which "tech" has started to mean "social web oriented silicon valley startups or juggernauts". Technology is so much bigger than that, and true innovation stands on its own and persists through time. An actual _invention_ doesn't need to win hearts and minds, and it doesn't need to set trends. A wheelbarrow is a wheelbarrow, and once somebody conceives it, it will always be useful whenever you need wheelbarrow-like functionality. Its utility will be obvious and non-controversial. It is still possible to use our intellects to think of pure pareto improvement arrangements of atoms and bits that do a useful job. I think the engineering profession and the world has gotten a bit distracted from that truth. Uncharitably, you could blame it on a greedy obsession with taking over the world, which comes at the expense of doing well-defined and prosaically useful things for the world.

[krooj]

The way you get around this type of crap is by diving deep, and when you think you've gotten deep enough, go further. Academia, for all it's faults, is a fantastic way around the bullshit you get with industry hype, by mere virtue of open peer scrutiny. You want to understand whether the current "AI" hype will last? Research and understand the theory and academics behind it - therein lies your truth, and if it doesn't align with what you see in industry, you know it's grift. Hint: it's usually grift.

[Buttons840]

Once you've identified the grift you can rest easy knowing that eventually it will collapse and the grifters will be left with nothing but society-warping amounts of money.

[fullshark]

And you get to grind away until death but rest easy knowing that you're virtuous based on your own internalized definition of virtuous.

[klabb3]

> It has really made me pessimistic about tech and products in general. There's the free and great stage, then the market is captured, then enshittification, then death.

This is an accurate summary. And it’s completely normal to not be excited about this. I love tech, but this isn’t tech. The tech is just bait to achieve market dominance. The new age vultures do everything in their power to eliminate competition, the very fuel that makes markets work. So it’s not even business in the traditional sense either, it’s more similar to political power games.

[rtkwe]

The big wrinkle is they're mainly free while they're burning VC money on user acquisition trying to 'win' some niche they can exploit to justify a crazy evaluation. The free money fueling that early golden age directly requires the eventual enshittification in the current model because the VC doesn't want a stable profitable enterprise they're all swinging for the unicorn fences.

[esafak]

You are older so this cycle is relatively brief for you. For a young person, a ten year run is like forever.

[plagiarist]

I try to avoid all products with vendor lock-in specifically because it is so predictable.