• Thrashy@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot…):

    • Give goods or services away for free
    • Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
    • ???
    • Profit!

    Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn't even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with "Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product." High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they're all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.