Popular animated gifs hosting service gfycat.com is shutting down on September 1, 2023 and all hosted content will no longer be accessible at that point.
Google is dropping Reddit and Twitter from their searches.
Twitter is throttling Tweets and you have to signin to view anything. Which would be crazy antivaxxer radicals, so not missing anything. No more free API use.
YouTube is blocking you after 3 videos if you use an adblocker.
Reddit has killed all 3rd party apps among API changes
Now Gfycat is going, man that’s like most of the sites I used since a kid. Imgur seems to be around still at least.
Imgur doesn’t even load for me on Firefox Mobile + uBlockOrigin. It also tries to redirect me to their broken front end if I just want the .jpg file. I absolutely hate them and wish people would stop using it.
Our new Terms of Service will go into effect on May 15, 2023. We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content. You will need to download/save any images that you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms. Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content.
Huh. I didn’t know they were keeping the active ones. Though one has to wonder how they define active.
Kinda crazy that they didn’t run a garbage collection routine on their data stores to begin with. One of the first things I ever did at my new job was write a python daemon that runs on our jump host and cleans up data older than a year.
There’s been a lot of talk about this, but I’ve yet to see it. It’s either being A/B tested and not fully rolled out, or whatever way they’re detecting adblock isn’t catching me.
There’s plenty of pictures online though of people getting the message.
Unless content creators get paid there’s never gonna be a critical shift to a fediverse platform from YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok. Users may switch but they’ll be straight back if there’s no content.
Personally, I think that’s better. Let people have their favored platforms. Have accounts on several. Use them as much or as little as you want. Advertising might be a deal breaker for you, but some are willing to put up with it. Some are happy paying for premium.
It doesn’t stop federated platforms from existing. If anything, it helps deal with the volume of users. These closed platforms with VC money can barely afford to keep the lights on - self hosted servers can not handle that kind of traffic.
Sadly, Twitter is similar to Youtube. It may not have as many ADU as other platforms but the news media is heavily dependent on it. You’d need essentially every significant US politician to migrate to a new platform to see a critical shift away from Twitter.
After 2008, interest rates were set to zero and basically stayed there for the next 15 years. What that meant was that investing your money in literally anything was better than putting it in a savings account or loaning it to the government (bonds). What thatmeant is that any company with a dream and a product found themselves swimming in piles and piles of venture capital fund funds. And all that money meant that customers were getting a lot of stuff at or below cost from companies that had lots of cash to spend, and no real concern about making it back. Now the free ride is over and everyone is trying to cash in, only to find that’s not as easy as they made it sound to their investors.
Enshittification is a sexy concept and I understand why everyone has glommed on to it. Unfortunately, the interest rate explanation is the much more complete and correct one.
What the hell is going on?
Everything is falling down:
Do ya remember photobucket? … Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Oh damn that YouTube bit is news to me. Mostly I just watch on my phone or ipad on my break at work, but always use an ad blocker at home.
Imgur doesn’t even load for me on Firefox Mobile + uBlockOrigin. It also tries to redirect me to their broken front end if I just want the .jpg file. I absolutely hate them and wish people would stop using it.
Facebook is looking might well run these days.
And imgur banned porn and removed all posts not linked to a user account!
Sorry but that’s not accurate, they’re removing inactive images from unregistered users.
Our new Terms of Service will go into effect on May 15, 2023. We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account from our platform as well as nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content. You will need to download/save any images that you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms. Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content.
Huh. I didn’t know they were keeping the active ones. Though one has to wonder how they define active.
Kinda crazy that they didn’t run a garbage collection routine on their data stores to begin with. One of the first things I ever did at my new job was write a python daemon that runs on our jump host and cleans up data older than a year.
Please don’t start working at archive.org
Removed by mod
There’s been a lot of talk about this, but I’ve yet to see it. It’s either being A/B tested and not fully rolled out, or whatever way they’re detecting adblock isn’t catching me.
There’s plenty of pictures online though of people getting the message.
Who is YouTube’s competitor ?
Alternatives to YouTube include Vimeo and the fediverse’s Peertube, but I am not sure they qualify as competitors.
Actually, the peer-sharing nature of Peertube makes me wonder if it could handle a sudden surge of users better than the rest of the fediverse.
Unless content creators get paid there’s never gonna be a critical shift to a fediverse platform from YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok. Users may switch but they’ll be straight back if there’s no content.
Personally, I think that’s better. Let people have their favored platforms. Have accounts on several. Use them as much or as little as you want. Advertising might be a deal breaker for you, but some are willing to put up with it. Some are happy paying for premium.
It doesn’t stop federated platforms from existing. If anything, it helps deal with the volume of users. These closed platforms with VC money can barely afford to keep the lights on - self hosted servers can not handle that kind of traffic.
Sadly, Twitter is similar to Youtube. It may not have as many ADU as other platforms but the news media is heavily dependent on it. You’d need essentially every significant US politician to migrate to a new platform to see a critical shift away from Twitter.
After 2008, interest rates were set to zero and basically stayed there for the next 15 years. What that meant was that investing your money in literally anything was better than putting it in a savings account or loaning it to the government (bonds). What thatmeant is that any company with a dream and a product found themselves swimming in piles and piles of venture capital fund funds. And all that money meant that customers were getting a lot of stuff at or below cost from companies that had lots of cash to spend, and no real concern about making it back. Now the free ride is over and everyone is trying to cash in, only to find that’s not as easy as they made it sound to their investors.
Enshittification is a sexy concept and I understand why everyone has glommed on to it. Unfortunately, the interest rate explanation is the much more complete and correct one.