I mean there’s Reddit ofc, as well as Twitter in its entirety, Discord is implementing some dumb updates, there are issues with Tumblr as well as everything to do with Meta, and I’m sure there are plenty more (and I haven’t even touched other digital media, for example the Sims). Why is it all happening in the span of about a couple months?
I think it’s more the exponential growth factor that tops sustainability. Short term gains over long term stability. Cooking books for Q1 profits by firing staff. It’s not inherently capitalism, it’s more the current model of profits over everything else. I’m not sure if the genie can be put back into the bottle though so maybe this is just semantics.
This wouldn’t happen if companies weren’t able to grow so fucking huge. Reddit for a long time didn’t have real direct competition, I’m not sure it has even now. Same goes for Amazon vs mom and pop shops, at the end of the day it’s at the hands of the consumers if regulators aren’t going to regulate.
That current model IS capitalism, the big companies are big precisely because they follow these profit > sustainability tactics, if they didn‘t follow these tactics they would stay small and potentially get gobbled up by the bigger companies. The company I work at is one of the biggest for it’s market worldwide and the tactic is basically buying up the competitors. So it‘s part of their regular business to buy out some cute small family business and enshittify it (ty lemmy for teaching me this word) by integrating it into their “business processes”. Which means often layoffs and hiring freezes and as they succinctly put it “making more product with less labor” (also raising prices to get more profit for less product).
I mean, I say all this knowing it‘s as pointless to do as trying to suck up a tornado with a vacuum cleaner, even if I managed to find the right words to convince you and some other readers of what I see here, we‘re still likely to perpetuate the system out of a lack of feasible alternatives until such a point where the planet can‘t bear it anymore.
Sorry, now I went completely off into my usual doom mindset. It‘s all good, maybe you are the correct one and some friendly people will overcome the greed and consolidation processes I see as inherent to the system and save us all by only allowing small companies or something.