It's mostly about Bandcamp but it could indeed be about anything, as later parts of the article mention how MySpace and Twitter are ruined in much the same way.
Twitter's story is a bit different. The company was pretty conscientious of its community (as far as giant corporations go) and the magic they had accidentally bottled. It fell not because the owners sought to grow it unreasonably, but because a fool offered the owners far more money for it than it was worth, and they quite reasonably took it, and then the new owner immediately ripped it to shreds, apparently unintentionally, yet so effectively that conspiracy theories about it being intentional abound.
> It fell not because the owners sought to grow it unreasonably
Twitter was nicely profitable in 2018 and 2019[0], then went on an overzealous hiring/spending spree in 2020 and was in not-great financial shape by the time Musk happened. Maybe the previous owners could have turned it around, but we'll never know.
i don't see anything being "ripped to shreds". seems mostly the same to me as a casual user. still a toxic place that is still the best for current events. maybe a little more toxic, but it's not like it was great before
The brand value of the word "Twitter" was probably in the billions, and Musk just wiped it away. It was ruined so thoroughly that we can only intelligently talk about it by calling Twitter by its former name because its new name is confusing to even say in conversation.
Twitter's advertising revenue fell off a cliff almost overnight due in no small part to their owner's policy of loudly and publicly attacking individual Twitter advertisers for leaving Twitter.
Twitter had tens of thousands of the most famous celebrities in the world actively participating every day for free, and Musk managed to screw that up in myriad ways, not least of which by falsely labeling them as paid subscribers.
For some godforsaken reason, Twitter's opinion on who and was "notable" or not was a significant status symbol, and Twitter started selling that status symbol for $8/month.
Twitter had a truly impressive internal talent pool, and it's largely gone, ruining their ability to pivot at a time when the whole plan appears to be "wildly pivot."
Did anyone ever actually love Twitter? I can't remember ever getting meaningful value from it. I can't comment on MySpace as it seemed to come and go so quickly (yes, I've been online since before the web, so your dilation may vary).
When I saw a photo on Twitter of that plane that had just landed in the Hudson, posted by somebody who had evacuated the plane, I knew something dramatically new had arrived. I later saw that I could search news events and see opinions and perspectives that I'd never heard of in my life. Everybody was in the same room, we could tap into the zeitgeist.
Eventually it just caused my blood pressure to rise and I eventually decided to step away. But for a few years, there was something very interesting going on.
I loved Twitter. More than once I've read tweets thinking "this will be on mainstream media in a few days". It felt like the pulse of the world. For any event, I would check Twitter before any news site.
I also had something similar to a community on there for years.
There's no doubt that Twitter used to be the main platform for promotion of solopreneurs and technical content creators.
When Facebook started I sure loved it. For a college kid it was such great way to keep in touch with all the friends you made that transferred schools (or that you met abroad), share pictures, plan events, and give people a quick snapshot of your personality. It really felt like a magical use of the internet that refined myspace in to a useful tool.
This one is pretty good tbh. I still think fringe beliefs are tolerated so long as the post isn't inflammatory. That's a pretty hard thing to sustain. I think the mods put the right touch on it.
I consider it a message board more than a social network, it has no focus on social links between members and nothing fancy that web2.0 era introduced (ajax and such)
I never joined Twitter, but wasn't there a pretty great statistics Twitter at some point? Dudes like Larry Wasserman, Nate Silver, Hadley Wickham, Andrew Gelman all pretty active and collaborating in the open. I got the impression it had some nice topical communities like that, whereas the frontpage current events feed was pretty much always shit, but that seems like a universal truth of human commons, not something specific to web-based social media or Twitter.
Twitter used to be quite useful for breaking news stories. A couple of times a year I'd find out about something big currently happening via Reddit, and jump on Twitter to keep track of it as it was developing.
There was always plenty of misinformation, but you'd still find out about the facts an hour or more before it'd be reported on mainstream media. Of course, by the time it hit mainstream media Twitter would pretty much instantly become useless due to all the "thoughts and prayers" retweet pollution, and spammers hijacking the hashtags.
Bandcamp is widely reported to have been profitable since 2012, and it was still steadily growing. Contrary to MySpace and Twitter, its core business is actually selling stuff.
In other words, "Even if you make money, they will ruin your business".
Why is one supposed to read the first sentence? I am interested in Bandcamp but why would I go past the title of this article since it reads like a dramatic but cryptic facebook post by my retired uncle? There are a LOT of article posted on HN every day, I don't have time to go to every single article and read the first sentence.
My thesis about the inevitable demise of all good things is that each of us selects the services we love because they had a specific mix of UX and functionality. After 5, 10, maybe 15 years they change so much that they don't look and work anymore the way they did when we discovered them. We would not have picked them in their new shape, so we cry that they have been ruined. The chances that a service improves after our initial selection are slim. The chances that it gets worse are large.
It happened to me with the new UI of K9. I would never installed that app if I saw it in its current UI. I installed it precisely because it's old odd UI suited my needs. Given the U shape of their votes on the Play store I'd say that about half of their users share my point of view. I keep installing the last version before the new UI.