ive donated some money to cohost through cohost plus to keep this place afloat but im also a realist. no social media platform is profitable not twitter, not youtube, not tumblr, not cohost. even with invasive amounnts of ads and clickbait and data collection. discord is losing money thats why they keep revamping the site for investors and shilling out for a bunch of microtransactions and tried to graft themselves onto web3.0. its why kickstarter has begun trying to shift into web3.0 or hell why facebook turned into meta. the internet is a metaphorical post-scarcity utopia and that makes it a nightmare for social media companies. i’m sorry little gay bug app enjoyers, but if you can’t find an investor to lose thousands of dollars into this website, cohost is fucked in the long term.
the whole thing makes me insanely curious though, it sort of feels like web2.0 is facing the same dot com bubble that burst in the 90s. we built our entire internet around these messiah companies, and instead of cyberpunk dystopia, it feels like they’re all crumbling under their own weight desperately trying to find the next sucker to buy their debt back. the push to monetize EVERYTHING with web3.0 has failed spectacularly and now techghouls are scrambling to AI as if it will save them and cut the massive costs of labour and keeping systems running; as if running AI backends doesnt also cost a shit ton. and while this is scary for queer identities to not have an easy place to congregate, its not like we even super have that now. in the ideal scenario, the one i think people can push towards if we start getting our acts together is a sort of de-emphasizing of the internet and discourse, and a re-emphasizing of personal expression and connection through a revitalization of web1.0 as a sort of web1.5. if theres a lesson to be taken from this other than the internet age being the height of human folly.
