The tech space is intrinsically tied to the capitalist infinite growth mindset, that's why

an innovative new spoon with special new spoon features

Please do tell me more about that new spoon.

Short term profit mate. It's all they care at this point in my opinion.

Preach brother!

What kind of get-off-my-lawn take is that?

Of course because that's where a lot of the fun is in tech, inventing, learning about, using and talking about new stuff. Newness can make mundane things interesting and entertaining for a while, just look at a child figuring out new things for the first time.

Because more money.

In theory it's easy to monetise - allow some targeted ads to communities and/or occasional relevant boosted posts, or paid awards like Reddit, etc.

The issue is greed / growth. They always need more and more - so you end up with more irrelevant ads, political ads, more boosted posts than natural ones, etc. - most companies aren't happy to just do one thing well with a skeleton crew maintaining it and keeping costs low - they need constant growth.

Just look at Reddit and Twitter for example.

conde nast, the same company that is a major investor in reddit owns them. You may also be familiar with several of their other publications, Vogue, Golf Digest and The New Yorker, to name but a few.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cond%C3%A9_Nast

America makes a lot more sense when you think of it as a corporation with nukes rather than a country with functional government.

I'm not sure when or how it happened, but Americans seem to have decided that everything has to be privately owned for profit, and making those private services into government services (health care for example) it's "socialism" and people would rather pay 5x as much for less care than our European cousins get with their taxes by default.

Where is the Bell Labs? The Skunk Works?

Social media is having its quarter-life crisis, if a quarter-life crisis is a thing, if we can even put a lifespan on social media, which might in fact play a role in our society from now until the end of time. After 25 years of status updates, news feeds, clever tweets, performative photos, and endless scrolls, the US social media companies that have commandeered our attention and monetized it so successfully have run out of fresh ideas and are looking to reinvent themselves.

Lucky us?

Some 18 months ago, 3D immersion via face computers was going to reinvigorate our online social experience. Facebook believed in this vision so firmly that it changed its name to Meta to reflect it. Having determined more recently that something a little simpler might jack up engagement, Meta launched Threads—basically, Twitter for Instagram.

Now the video app TikTok is introducing a way to compose text-based posts—its own version of the Create feature found in Instagram Stories. Accessed through the app’s camera, where users typically go to post videos or photos, the new text option is billed by TikTok as “the latest addition to options for content creation, allowing creators to share their stories, poems, recipes, and other written content on TikTok.” Text: It’s the future. This comes right on the heels of Twitter rebranding itself as X, part of the company’s broader strategy for becoming an everything-app, like China’s WeChat.

TikTok’s new text feature, which feels mostly additive, and Twitter’s brand pivot, which feels mostly superfluous, are not by themselves causes for existential angst. But they’re part of an evolution in the social media landscape, where the polite “borrowing” of features has turned into a full-fledged land grab for our frayed attention spans. Whether through subscriptions, shopping, payments, or AI-infused products, social media companies are throwing everything at the wall to counter both an unpredictable ad market and people’s limited capacity for using a dozen different social apps.

“If we evaluate these apps from the legacy technology-innovation lens, then yes—they’re copying each other and there are no new ideas,” says Chris Messina, a software product designer who is credited with introducing the hashtag to Twitter. “But the better way to understand it is that social media is now a fashion industry, so as a product manager, you’re evaluating success based on engagement and retention, not innovation.”

Messina also adds that he believes X (née Twitter) is now “incredibly vulnerable, and the most competitive teams, like Meta and TikTok, aren’t going to sit idly by if they can carve up Twitter’s former advertising base.”

Meta’s early success with Instagram Threads—over 100 million sign-ups in under a week—has largely been credited to its platform advantage; over a billion people already use Instagram, and porting one’s Instagram identity over to Threads is frictionless. But that’s success in metrics only—quantitative, not qualitative. (In any case, daily active users on Threads have reportedly fallen off.) Threads still doesn’t have a web or desktop app, hasn’t yet rolled out its promised chronological feed, and doesn’t yet support a more open-source protocol that the company has said it will support.

https://archive.vn/VV4Mn