Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?
Why all of a sudden tech companies are not being favorable to their users?
YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
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Cheap/free money has dried up.
That and market share. Between 2007 and now, a website could reliably grow as new people got connected to the internet and as internet usage naturally grew. Up till recently, a large proportion of people either didn't use the internet at all, or had the internet, but didn't use much. Prior to 2020 I knew lots of friends and family who simply did not own a home computer or maybe had like one laptop for the whole family (and a bunch of phones).
During that era, the attention was all on getting new users in the door. Make a good, cheap/free product, and people will come, if you make the best site, people will find you.
But NOW, most people already are using the internet like 14 hours a day and have become full netizens and companies are already gigantic monopolies (Youtube does't have a viable competitor, for example). If companies want to keep growing, they can't rely on new blood, they need to pivot to harvesting more from the people they already have.