When looking at the recent history of many popular and highly successful online sites, there tends to be a certain trend they’re all following: rampant corporate greed butting heads with its original core mission and its user base, all of which eventually leads to major issues for the site.
Several sites in question — Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr — all share that same fate, despite having very different purposes and suffering through a dissimilar series of events that led to their downfall or tipping point. And, they’re proof that most businesses will eventually hit a point in which management will decide to push profit margins and use bizarre and brutal methods to squeeze money out of it. The horrors of capitalism.
And unfortunately, online platforms, social media, and websites have shown time and again that they aren’t immune to the far-reaching consequences of such money-grubbing tactics. There are plenty of sites that have already met their end by following such a trajectory, and here are four others that are currently on that same path.
Tumblr
Originally founded as a simple blogging site, Tumblr quickly grew and became a hub for fandom and LGBT+ users, as well as plenty of adult content including sexual art. Infamously, mismanagement by former site owner Yahoo caused Tumblr’s value to depreciate from $1 billion in 2013 when Yahoo purchased it to a mere $3 million when it sold from Verizon (after Yahoo sold it in 2017) to WordPress owner Automattic Inc. in 2019.
Like many other online sites, it also became a hub for extremely toxic and illegal content, notorious for the rampant presence of child pornography — such to the extent that Apple took the app off its App Store back in 2018. Instead of directly fixing this issue through proper human moderation efforts, Tumblr instead made the absolutely terrible decision of banning all explicit content from the site. This meant purging the site of all adult blogs and decades of artwork without warning, as well as chasing off sex workers.
As a result, Tumblr lost roughly one-third of its user base almost overnight as many adult artists and sex workers fled to other social media platforms such as Twitter. Since then, Tumblr has been trying to recover profits by hosting increasingly invasive ads on its desktop site and app, creating an ad-free subscription for app users to avoid said ads, rapidly downgrading functionality to promote profit-making and making it more social media friendly, and selling merchandise based on popular Tumblr posts and memes.
Twitter was first created in 2006 and had amassed more than 330 million active users by 2019. It certainly wasn’t a perfect social media platform. Valid criticism was lobbed at it for purposely promoting controversial posts in order to drum up engagement while having an inconsistent reporting system. However, it was a technically impressive site nonetheless, able to handle its millions of users and daily search queries with little issue, even during massive events that strained other sites.
All this changed when, in 2022, Twitter agreed to a $44 billion buyout by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. After months of rough patches and several obvious attempts at backtracking on Musk’s end, the deal went through. Musk, desperate to cover the massive costs of the site purchase, enacted extreme changes like attaching two-factor authentication and account verification to a subscription service.
Massive layoffs and resignations that saw staff reduction by over 70% have made Twitter unstable. That’s not even mentioning reduced and inconsistent moderation, dramatically increased hate speech and right-wing content, security issues, charging developers for access to the platform’s API, and multiple lawsuits due to law violations in various countries.
Discord
Starting in 2015, Discord was originally meant as a voice chat platform for gamers to interact while playing games entirely without or with only limited in-game chat. However, it quickly grew and eventually became an all-purpose communication and chat client with a server template implemented for this purpose. Changes it made benefited its growing user base and helped it evolve into a much more inclusive application. By 2021, it had 350 million registered users and over 150 million monthly active users
However, in 2021 Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron shared a tweet hinting at NFT and crypto integration on the platform. Though he later stated that he wasn’t considering it, plenty of evidence mounted to the contrary that the application had been extensively researching just that and only backed off after major backlash. Then in 2023, Discord got pulled into another controversy after announcing planned AI integration into the platform, while stripping its privacy policy of important statements regarding user data. After more backlash, it clarified its position while adding back those statements.
Since then, Discord has been implementing small but noticeable changes to its application, including another controversial change to how usernames work. Basically, Discord usernames came with a four-digit number called a number discriminator at the end. This not only meant that anyone could pick what username they wanted without adding random numbers or symbols, but it was also much harder to become a victim of data stealing bots since that discriminator was necessary to send friend requests and private DMs.
Now that discriminators are being removed, users have numerous safety concerns to worry about including data mining and bot accounts having much easier access to accounts. And still, they have to add numbers to their usernames to keep the same ones. There are also tons more concerns regarding this change, which have been outlined in this massive Discord support thread.
Reddit, founded in 2005, has been considered one of the final bastions of pre-web 2.0. It functions as an old-school forum rather than a social media site, complete with tons of subreddits focused on both niche and popular topics, as well as self-moderation of those subreddits unrelated to site ownership. As of February 2023, Reddit ranked as the 10th most-visited website in the world.
In early June, it was revealed by popular third-party app Apollo creator iamthatis that Reddit is planning on charging developers for access to the platform’s API starting on June 19, 2023, just as Twitter planned beforehand. The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
To protest this, over 90% of subreddits went dark for 48 hours, meaning that they’ve become completely private and inaccessible to anyone who was not a logged-in member. This caused a massive dip in traffic and utility, even outside of Reddit, especially since Google relies on Reddit for a lot of its search content. Though some subreddits came back online after 48 hours, other major ones like r/funny, r/aww, and r/music are still dark, thanks to a leaked memo as well as a recent interview that both show Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has no plans of backing down.
Final thoughts
These four sites are some of the most high-profile examples of corporate greed ruining a great thing, but there are plenty more examples to be found. Vine, once an extremely popular video-based site, was purchased by pre-Elon Musk Twitter and then promptly ran into the ground and eventually shut down.
YouTube is currently going through the process of TikTokfication with YouTube shorts, as aggressive algorithms push far-right content and dangerous videos while suppressing black and LGBT+ content.
Facebook destroyed websites that followed its ‘pivot to video’ only to be hung out to dry when the social media giant pivoted a different way. Not to mention, Facebook faced legal action after evidence surfaced that it spread misinformation during the US 2016 presidential election.
I've witnessed each of these websites' ongoing or near-destruction, with entire facets of online culture and history completely erased and massive ramifications in real life, and it hurts every time to see it. Millions and even billions of people rely on the internet for a near infinite amount of reasons, including myself and loved ones, and corporations taking advantage of that to drive profits at any cost is a horrible trend that needs to be stopped.
