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.

Or maybe the best year?

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.

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)

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 don't think gfycat had very much porn anymore. Most if not all went to redgifs.com

Web 2.0* is dying, and good riddance imo. I'm ready for the return of grassroots social media and decentralized communities.

No more VC free money + enshittification

Even if you don't have shareholders yet, gotta brown nose before hand to impress them.

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.

probably wasn't profitable enough to justify keeping it around