I think it has a lot to do with Silicon Valley Bank failing. These companies were running on loans with the promise of “the profits will come, some day.” Whether they meant to or not, many of our most relied upon services were being run as venture capital scams. Whether these companies turned profits or not didn’t matter so much as long as the executives were getting paid salaries, and could show the investors graphs that showed something was happening to grow the company, it didn’t matter if the service was bleeding investor money into the cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

And if we want to trace the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank back further, look no farther than Sam Bankman-Fried, Cara Ellison, and FTX. That one was very expressly a venture capital scam and a ponzi scheme rolled into one. I’m not going to say all cryptocoins are scamcoins, but I will happily say that enough of then are that the collapse of FTX has done permanent harm to the kinds of confidence people will be willing to put into digital fiat currencies. But what I more want to point out is that Sam Bankman-Fried was an intensified version of the kinds of people who have been showing growth charts and promising “profits, someday” while drawing massive salaries and bleeding investor money. He was playing video games on meetings and it was building his reputation, not harming it

The investors who knew SBF was playing games in meetings were the investors who backed Reddit and Gfycat. Now that their SVB money and their FTX money is never coming back, they need to withdraw money from other investments, while at the same time Reddit and Gfycat are no longer receiving their stream of money to pay their cloud bills. The result? Corporate web 2.0 is dead as of July 1st, 2023. Sure. There are still corporate web 2.0 services shambling across this earth, including Twitter and Reddit whose actions yesterday marked the end of corporate web 2.0, but they’re zombies. Their hearts have stopped beating. They’re dead ans they don’t even know it.

Whether you call it small web, web0, or my personal choice, Web 2.0.1, we are currently experiencing a rise of user owned web services that are picking up the slack left by corporate web 2.0 while in many ways rejecting web 3.0 as not being ready, or outright being a scam. We have a critical opportunity right now. We have the chance to realize that Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Alexis Ohanian, Stephen Huffman, or Elon Musk don’t have exclusive rights to enable us or empower us to interact online. They were holding a magic feather. We can use the tools of the fediverse to replace them. Its a little more work, yes, but so is everything when you take your own ownership of things. Making your own meals is more work than going to McDonalds, but its cheaper and healthier. Growing your own tomatoes is more work than going to the store, but you get the enjoyment of doing it and lesson your environmental impact. Owning your own home is more work than renting, but you get to keep the equity you build.

This federated internet experiment is worth the work. While we’re still experiencing some reliance in the cloud providers, they’re at least providing us with a service we might not have been able to figure out on our own. Twitter, Facebook, and reddit, though? Their value was a shared hallucination. They were useful to us because we collectively convinced ourselves they were useful. Now we just need to convince ourselves that the bug fix to web 2.0, web 2.0.1, removing the corporations, is worthwhile.

If you’re reading this, it means you’ve taken a big first step. Now take the second: tell a friend

Web 2.0 was a house of cards all this time I suppose

Yet another step toward end game capitalism where nothing’s free/affordable anymore and only way to consume basic entertainment is either through a paid service or absolutely ridiculous ads everywhere. Where CEOs are squeezed by shareholders for every last extra % in their returns and in turn makes their product as anti consumer as possible except for the top 1% that can afford it.

Tech CEOs: Turns out the cloud costs money. Who knew? What next, credits are going to send me bills, lol? I already spent that money.

Bonds are a really good deal right now, which makes more people want to loan the government money than each other. This leads to less people overleveraging, which most companies depend on for growth.

All of the businesses you mentioned were overleveraged, so it’s understandable that they’d crack under the pressure

(Note: The bonds market is referring to the US, but the effects are global)

Or it could be a really fucking great year. It could mark the end of commercialised social media and the beginnings of truly widespread adoption of free and open alternatives.

Just wait until the “targeted ad” bubble pops because people realize it’s all a fraudulently inflated market with little to no true value.

There will be wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

No more VC free money + enshittification

Good point, and this raises an interesting topic: is there much value to old data from a link aggregator like Reddit when so many services are no longer available and the old links go nowhere?

Services like Facebook or Twitter are seemingly not as exposed to that type of issue since they’re less reliant on external content.

All the VC money is being dumped into AI right now.

Tech companies of yesteryear are starting to have to prove themselves in order to get funding, instead of relying on the wishy washy promises of old.

We can already see with Lemmy, that this phenomenon is giving breathing room to FOSS services.

I think it’s awesome, even if we’ll have to deal with growing pains for a while.

What even was their business plan? I never understood how’d they make money. I guess advertising is always the answer but how…

I hope that subreddit has a foothold at lemmy.

Typical corporate moralising. Tumblr blocked adult content to keep advertisers and it’s corporate owners happy and the site died. Snapchat sold off the adult part of their Gif business even though - let’s face it - what is Snapchat used for?

There seems to be a lack of acceptance in business that adults will be adults and you can’t sanatise the Internet to make it acceptable for advertisers or to impose the morals of minority religious groups on the majority.

Gfycat is presumably very difficult to monetise. We’re in another wave of the history of dotcoms where companies and investors realise being an Internet based country is not a license to print money.

Its not clear though how to make a free alternative to something like Gfycat. Someone has to pay for the hosting and bandwidth. Are we moving to a subscription based model for the Internet? For example the fediverse but with premium fast servers for those who pay and slow advertiser funded servers for this who don’t? Or Wikipedia like foundations for image hosting? Who knows.