In the elderly neighbor and shovel example, I don't see what's wrong, as long as it was communicated. It depends on the agreement really - for example, if the shovel guy was charging a little less for subscription than what it would otherwise cost the elderly in a regular year of snow. The elderly is getting the benefit of always having a shoveler ready and available, and the shoveler is getting the benefit of more predictable income.
I am as frustrated about everything turning into a subscription as the next person, but the solution is not to put the onus of cancellation on businesses. It is to prevent monopolies (so that there is a true free market) and dark patterns (i.e, cancellation should be easy and terms should be very clear when subscribing).
This is key. I've had software contacts where I was on retainer to provide service if needed. I wasn't needed, and got paid just for making myself available.
The shovel person's availability is reduced, they can't take another job that conflicts with this contract. They needed to buy a shovel, stock salt, maintain their car, etc. This seems like a pretty normal service retainer.
I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry insider could shed some light on what's wrong with this business.
1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally.
2. The core product is pretty mature.
3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make.
4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators.
5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to make his mark.
Twitch just announced a partnership with Nvidia at CES to allow streamers to encode multiple versions of their stream on their own PC and push them to Twitch. Previously, only partner/affiliate streams had transcoded streams at various levels of quality. That might cut back on the amount of transcoding Twitch has to do server side…
They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon which can help reduce bandwidth costs. They currently only support h264.
This is interesting, as I had an idea to do this when I was working on a competitor service during lockdown. Our idea was to use this to cut the cost on transcoded renditions, and for streamers that didn't have the ability to generate multiple renditions but still wanted them, we would offer it as a service in exchange for a higher cut of their revenue. That said, if anyone gets a benefit from lower quality renditions being distributed, it's Twitch.
If you think about it, the less bandwidth that Twitch consumes through their CDN network, the less money a stream costs per minute. A viewer still watches ads with the same CPM, a viewer still subscribes for the same amount per month per broadcaster, a viewer optionally pays the same for ad-free viewing (Turbo), and a viewer pays the same premium for bits, regardless of what quality they're watching at. So, interestingly enough, the economics of limiting transcoding are more about limited capacity and ensuring a positive cost per streamer. If a streamer does not become an affiliate or partnered broadcaster on the platform, the only revenue Twitch gets from the streamer is the ad money from its viewers. By virtue, they want as many casters on the platform as possible to become affiliates, as being able to get commissions from bit sales and subscriptions gives Twitch more revenue streams for the same content.
So, to your point, they definitely want to be able to support more efficient codecs that are not as patent encumbered as h.265 (which IIRC did have limited support in SE Asian markets), because at the end of the day, if streamers are generating the renditions for the ABR ladder, and ultimately, folks are using lower bitrates, then overall, this cuts costs for the same operational cost.
> They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon
You mean HEVC (x265)? I believe NVENC is just nvidia's hardware accelerated implementations of existing codecs.
Anyways, that sounds really interesting for both streamers who want more control over their streams' encoding, but obviously for Twitch, as it saves them compute power (though upping their intake bandwith?).
I wonder how feasible it would be for most streamers. Pushing one stream vs 3 or so is quite the difference.
I've always been entirely annoyed that there's no way for me to "encode what Google wants" for YouTube so it can be available directly, at least at highest bitrate.
>3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make.
Did he? Their revenue is way down, and they've had a lot of downtime. Unlike Netflix, they make most of their money on ads, not subscriptions, so more downtime is more money lost.
They're also on a huge hiring spree right now. Go look at how many roles they're hiring for. I don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy.
The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff, and I wouldn’t agree they’ve had “a lot” of downtime. Most of the drop in ad revenue is a consequence of content management decisions that seem to be a matter of principle for the company’s new owner.
It’s strange to see hiring as an indication that a company is doing poorly; regardless, obviously Twitter is in a position where they’ve needed to eliminate much of their headcount and replace much of the rest.
> The loss of ad revenue isn’t a consequence of downtime or losing staff
Firing the Trust and Safety team had a huge impact on advertising - that's why big brands find Xitter so toxic.
It is certainly also true that Musk's... emanations haven't helped relations with advertisers, but it is the lack of moderation that freaks them out, and also by-the-by chased off a noticeable fraction of the user base.
Yes, technically, adopting a principled stance favoring freedom of expression implies laying off people whose job is to infringe upon freedom of expression, but it’s disingenuous to cast that as a staffing issue rather than a change in policy.
And I’m sure advertisers also really hate the fact that even the ads on the timeline can get community notes. But, well, I’ve seen what other platforms turn into under the foul influence of advertisers and I’m frankly not interested. If that means it has to be subsidized by an eccentric billionaire out of principle, so what? Other billionaires subsidize much more toxic outlets, the Washington Post for instance.
I'm not seeing his principled stance. In fact, it seems business as usual. He still bans content he doesn't agree with and doesn't follow through with anything he says.
Twitter is possibly the website most well known for downtime, and has been since literally the beginning. There's no real measure for whether it's true it's down more than usual lately, and sensationalist journalism and anecdotal reports from people with an axe to grind aren't really reliable.
The closest thing I can think of is looking at Google trends, which shows that "twitter down" is pretty consistent over the years:
There's a spike in Nov 2022 when the layoffs happened, but again that's not indicative that it's especially bad - just that people were especially whiny about it or anticipating it would be bad
This is what I find ... interesting about the engineering layoffs - was Musk right? Was there a large part of the engineering function at Twitter that was just existing on some mythology, and was in fact just not needed? If so, are the FAANG companies (and others) the same? Legions of engineering roles just bullshit wastes of $200K salaries plus share options and free pizza?
I utterly hate Musk, so firmly hope he was wrong. Just wish Xitter went down more.
> interesting about the engineering layoffs - was Musk right?
Yes and no. Twitter was started before so much of the common “web scale” Open Source projects existed. Cassandra, Kafka, Spark, Kubernetes, etc didn’t exist yet.
So versions of the aforementioned and then some were completely done from scratch at twitter, who has continued to maintain those projects despite them not being the premier open source offering in each of those categories. They also never achieved the scale of some of the largest tech companies where it makes economic sense to have say, a custom database or queue system.
Finally, Twitter has been using GCP for some of their new projects in the last few years, but they still had old legacy systems and teams to maintain that software, so they couldn’t fully reap the rewards of the cloud.
So, if you rebuilt twitter today you could likely do it for a fraction of the engineers they had at peak, by leveraging either cloud or popular existing OSS solutions. But that’s from scratch, not porting millions of lines of legacy code.
What Musk should have done was migrate various systems, then wind down teams. That probably would have worked, but been expensive in the short term.
So I think they cut too much, and I also think they honestly thought more engineers would be up for “hardcore twitter”, instead of quitting.
Musk forgot that all his very loyal Tesla employees may have also factored in their 10x RSU appreciation. It’s a lot easier to put up with insane working hours when your next years stock grant is 500k or million or something. Doesn’t apply at twitter.
Tl;DR: not a Musk hater at all, but he fucked up at Twitter.
If its anything like my corp, Twitch only gets a small discount, if any at all. It's expensive regardless. Network bandwidth alone is probably in the $20+ million a month range.
Well, that's sort of the problem here right; yes at AWS retail you are paying $20 million a month for traffic, but the cost to AWS isn't anywhere near that, in fact how AWS charges for traffic doesn't match to how it incurs costs at all. And in general having desirable services like Twitch and of course being ginormously huge means people want to peer with you and you have more leverage in those peerings, making them cheaper.
> think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think.
exactly. most people with good enough internet stream at 6 mbps CBR. A streamer with 1k viewers costs them several terabytes! egress for a quick 2 hour stream.
> Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make.
Every member of staff fired now has a beef with the company, and being a social media company those staff will probably be big social media users with quite a lot of influence. Some may set up competitors or just badmouth you and your product.
>... and being a social media company those staff will probably be big social media users with quite a lot of influence.
Genuinely curious to hear why you think this is the case. It's my anecdotal experience that the average social media company employee is just an average person like you and I, with an average number of followers.
There’s more employees than just SWEs. And you don’t need to be generally famous, you need influence in key niches.
Twitter has historically hired people with large Twitter followings into roles that are more external. Some of them have been interviewed by the news media (eg The Verge). I’d be surprised if it didn’t have an impact on advertisers.
You answered your own question. Twitch is solid and well-built. It doesn't need an army of well-paid engineers to maintain it and isn't seeing a great ROI on new features. Some companies repurpose all, many or some engineers when the spreadsheet says to, others fire them wholesale.
Not many people realise this. Engineers build stuff. When your product is feature complete, you can get rid of most of them.
Big tech companies keeping tens of thousands of engineers on staff despite their core product not seeing substantial changes for years are just wasting money.
No growing company has a feature-complete product, as just load increases can make a product go from fine to inoperable. Sometimes it's not even more users, but more historical data: Something that used ot parse through 3 months of history is probably going to be unhappy with 5 years.
In big tech, having services without anyone having a semblance of maintenance responsibilities tends to lead to relatively quick failures. Even in boring enterprise companies, handing out maintenance to a 3rd party is still going to cost you, and is likely going to lower quality. I've seen way too many companies that ended up rewriting things after leaving a system mostly unmaintained for 5 years made it sop being fit to purpose.
If there's a lesson of software from the last decade is that undermaintained services become zombified software, and can eat your company's brains. That's why a place like google often would rather shut something down than claim it's finished.
No software product that has actual paying users can afford to stop development like that. It needs to constantly keep evolving with the environment, or someone else will fill their niche quickly or it will just atrophy. That may require fewer engineers though, so I agree with you partially.
With software, once you find PMF, it's not the building that's hard, but keeping the users paying and using your product. The entry barrier to building a copycat is very low. So you have to pile on resources to keep your software be the best available.
It's not a complete waste, every engineer you employ is one you don't have to compete with, which matters for big tech companies. Also, employed engineers can be mobilized to react to threats/emergencies. It's just a matter of time before they will be needed. If you are running a ghost ship, will you be able to scale up a response when needed? If the company is just being fleeced, then the answer is "who cares?" I guess.
Most tech products are not well engineered, they are riddled with tech debt as per typical advice. So when a product does succeed, it is usually limping along racing to add features and handle great load while being knee deep in (already) legacy code.
This is all fine and expected, you sacrifice engineering quality for development speed in the early days. Just expect to pay it back by keeping a large engineering team for many years to come, or see your entire tech explode in flames.
Those 'years' are finite however, Twitch has been mature for like a decade already. So finally the tech debt is all paid off, and given failure to develop major successful features, time to cut the staff.
When you're at scale, a .5% increase in performance or decrease in utilization pays for a team of engineers. Being able to have one less SaaS product bill as well. Maybe Twitch isn't at that scale, but some companies certainly are.
No company actually does this, they are just bloated because they have so much money and managers rank/value is determined by how many people they manage.
They explicitly did this in the 00's. Some circles of top companies over a decade ago were convicted for having anti-poaching agreements amongst each other.
May be a bit different now (as others said, free money is gone, so competition cropping up is much harder to do and much less a concern), but the tech boom of the 2000's very much worried about becoming the next MySpace to some startup's Facebook. That's why tech salaries became so high to begin with.
The anti-poaching thing was something completely different. That was preventing other companies from hiring people away from them because they were useful employees, not hiring people to prevent them from competing. Also, anti-poaching agreement kept salaries lower, it didn't inflate them.
It goes both ways. They can't collude woth hundreds of studios so they offer top salaries to out-compete the bulk of competition. Then for the remaining studios who can pay, they sign the agreements so they don't keep trying to one-up each other. Which would be bad for their business if they start trying to bid 300k for every worker (which may be what they deserve, but companies will always penny pinch).
>That was preventing other companies from hiring people away from them because they were useful employees, not hiring people to prevent them from competing.
Aren't these synonymous? You either entrap a necessary employee with contracts and/or absolute top compensation becsuse they are useful or even vital. No one's colluding to keep a janirot wage low (well, society is, but it's no one entity you can sue).
They have more competition than ever with youtube streaming actually somewhat catching on and tiktok streams becoming more popular. It seems weird to cut so many engineers when it’s probably most important now to innovate. Its not even just R&D that’s important, either. Their product is worse in some aspects than their competitors and a lot of the reason why they’re still dominant in their space is just the community of users on the website.
Basing ‘peak’ of a streaming service on a time when people were forced to be indoor seems like a bad metric. They (probably/hopefully) won’t see that rate of growth organically, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the peak.
I personally switched to youtube* for the streams I watch, since twitch's ads can be really disruptive. Not to mention they used to be ad-free for prime members, while at the same time the ad rolls became longer and longer.
Every streaming platform seems to be converting to adding ads on top to cover the costs. Disney+ just did it for my paid membership - which I cancelled
People need to stop paying for a service and then also paying with their time via ads. Desperate moves like this make me wonder if these companies are regular greedy/shitty or if they're reading from the playbooks of cable TV early 1990s.
Twitch will run preroll ads on your stream unless you elect to run at least 3 minutes of ads per hour. These preroll ads have a huge effect on viewership because new viewers who tune in to an immediate ad will typically just leave. So, these "elective" ads are not very optional. But, this is a lose-lose situation, because these elective ads are very disruptive to viewers too. They are often implemented as a 90 second ad every 30 minutes. If this doesn't sound bad, remember that this is live content. If you're watching an ad, you're missing out on content, and when the ad is over, there's no way to wind it back to see what you missed.
Besides the ad policies, the Twitch revenue split for subscriptions has been changing over time. Historically it defaulted to 50/50 and most streamers of any decent size audience would have a contract to be granted 70/30 split. However, the 70/30 split has been phased out and today nearly no streamer on the platform has it anymore. This is a huge difference for streamers. The CEO of Twitch was handing out 70/30 split "coupons" as a prize in a live event[1], it's a big deal.
Besides subscription revenue, Twitch is constantly battling to reduce other sources of income, like branded sponsorships. Last year they announced significant restrictions on streamers displaying branded content with sponsors.[2] While these rules were soon reverted, it suggests Twitch is in a fight for its life. All indications point that this is going to continue to be a problem in the future. In short, streamers need to deal with the ads because their revenue from other sources is constantly at threat.
And here’s the other thing: why doesn’t an Amazon prime subscription remove ads? Is there even a way to buy an ad-free experience?
I’m not a heavy Twitch user so maybe I’m wrong but I’m struggling to think of a killer feature of Twitch or an aspect of the overall experience that’s better than YouTube Live videos.
At least with YouTube I can watch ad-free with a Premium plan.
> why doesn’t an Amazon prime subscription remove ads? Is there even a way to buy an ad-free experience?
First of all, an Amazon Prime subscription soon won't even remove ads from Amazon Video, so why would it be any different for Twitch?
Second of all, a channel subscription (through Amazon Prime or otherwise) removes ads from that channel. If you want an ad free experience across the whole site, Twitch Turbo is $11.99 USD.
Prime USED to remove ads site-wide, but that was shuttered. Turbo will probably go away sometime in the future as well, as it's mostly there to offer a product for developing markets where Prime doesn't exist yet.
I don't subscribe to any channels because Turbo exists; they probably don't like that.
> I’m wrong but I’m struggling to think of a killer feature of Twitch or an aspect of the overall experience that’s better than YouTube Live videos.
Discoverability, content creators and community.
Live streaming is a second class citizen on youtube, and as such it is hidden under dropdowns, the live streams aren't always on the top of your followers, live recommendations are worse than useless and the big creators that move to youtube do like Ninja with Mixer, with a big fat paycheck to justify the loss of viewership and community.
You can't show female-presenting cleavage, for one. They change their "attire policy" on a near-weekly basis.
Is it exploitative? Empowering? Toxic? Who knows! Everyone argues about everything.
Twitch is ban happy with anything even remotely controversial. Things that can be suggestive or comments that can be interpreted as offensive will garner a ban. And they hate anything even remotely sex-related.
Honestly, this stuff needs to move P2P. Platforms are indecisive and fickle. Just a month ago, they flip-flopped on their policy in just two days [1]. And it happens time and time again.
I don't blame the ad networks (after all Twitter had all of the world government and news orgs plus sex and nudity). I blame the Twitch leadership.
If you follow Twitch, the entire leadership is embroiled in the kind of drama you'd expect in a middle or high school.
The community is moving to mostly Kick [2] and somewhat to YouTube Gaming.
> You can't show female-presenting cleavage, for one. They change their "attire policy" on a near-weekly basis…. And they hate anything even remotely sex-related.
It seems incomplete to complain about this without also noting that Twitch (along with almost every other social media platform) has increasingly turned into a lead generation platform for OnlyFans. The rules keep changing because the OnlyFans streamers will find whatever line is drawn and absolutely spam the platform with whatever drives traffic to OF.
Which suggests that a less prudish content policy at Twitch might have kept OnlyFans from ever being created in the first place. They literally drove those consumers away to other platforms, squandering their early and dominant position in the market.
During this past Christmas Twitch "meta" I could not even link clips to friends because it would bring up "related" popular clips of what was basically soft core porn. It goes beyond what we want to watch. It affects how I can use and interact with the service to other people.
Much easier said than done. A million camgirls all trying to boost their engagement are going to find ways to game your algorithm faster than you are going to find ways to de-boost them. It’s the same fundamental reason Google is overrun with SEO spam and content farms that they can’t simply “de-boost”.
Camgirl sites already existed before Twitch, let alone OF. It’s hard to see how turning Twitch into another camgirl site would have been a better strategy than creating a streaming platform for watching people play video games, which was an entirely new niche. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to complain when platforms that were never meant for porn get relentlessly spammed by camgirls.
I think this kind of thing is far far overblown, for the vast majority of streamers these kinds of "internet discourse" dramas don't affect them in any meaningful way. Internet drama is just fuel for the blogspam.
It's all money anything else is rage baiting, kick's pull is the revenue split they'll never be able to maintain if they reach critical mass and the policies that get streamers to leave are the ad/revenue split changes.
Hate anything remotely sex-related? Are we talking about Twitch? They have changed their policy a billion times because they seem hell-bent on avoiding censoring sexual content as much as the possibly can. It’s the users that inevitably find a way to push the boundaries so far that they are forced do something, that is usually so half-assed that it doesn’t change much. At this point Twitch is getting closer to a cam site that funnels people to OnlyFans than it is to its gaming roots.
Kick allows sexual content and gambling content. Both of those are worth quite a bit for the content creators, the first of which is monetized by driving people to OnlyFans, and the second of which is monetized through incentives and partnerships with gambling sites.
Not to say that you are off, but what people here seem to be glossing over if not wholly overlooking is that Kick is entirely backed by founders of an online casino (quick searching will turn up very quickly who).
"partnerships" and "intertwined" that I'm seeing on this submission feel like they are understating it: Kick is owned by a casino.
A Harris Heller clip of a pretty thoughtful take, IMO:
It is more tricky to do p2p because not all viewers use stationary PCs nowadays.
There are mobiles or wifi users, who cannot be the rebroadcaster nodes. Bittorenty style delivery maybe will work, just with higher delays.
Most of their cost will be infrastructure. Encoding and serving multiple streams per channel to different devices with a low buffer must be expensive.
On the other hand: they host everything on AWS. Which Amazon owns. So while Twitch might make a loss the parent company might be perfectly happy making up the difference in AWS profits.
It's happening at every tech company, over and over again, quietly and loudly.
Unfortunately tech is probably the ur-contrarian and ur-isolated field, and from the reactions I see to this, I worry there will never be a systemic response by employees.
When twitch was acquired by Amazon the rumor was that they were the single biggest AWS customer and they were going to go out of business because they didn’t have the cash to pay the bills. It would have been bad for AWS and Amazon was investing in games. If you read between the lines that’s basically said in this article from that time. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/26/6067085/amazon-twitch-tv-video...
I'm surprised they don't have a 'choose your own revshare' setting, allowing the creator choose how much to pay twitch.
Obviously twitch will recommend more profitable creators, so you get a kind of 'race to the top', with creators offering twitch a larger and larger revshare, knowing that unless they do, their audience size will dwindle.
It also encourages creators to come in from other platforms - if you already have an audience and just want to extract money from them, then you don't need to be in twitches recommendations and can choose a low revshare to milk the subscribers.
I think subscribers are sticky enough that this would pretty quickly drive revshare down.
Especially when I imagine a sizable portion of revenue comes from the very biggest streamers, who may not need discovery from twitch at all and would then default to the lowest value. Like, this model has sort of flipped setup from what I'd think you want; the more successful you are the lower twitches cut.
I suppose they could just make the minimum value 50% (iiuc this is the current value). But I'm still not sure how much it would help.
I can see 35% of the workforce at a company with a mature product like Twitch doing nothing, or working on random extra features that no longer make sense when interest rates go up. Idk if you'd call it fundamentally wrong, it made sense at a different time.
Its modern jargon that refers to multinational, corporate focused, globalized markets. Its gone through a few definitions over the last century, but most recently its been used by the anti-work movement to deride a culture that has all but abandoned individual people in favor of the ultra wealthy. A culture where greed and money are the only virtues and all choices are driven by the bottom line.
You'd have to be brainwashed to think the world would be better without the industrial revolution. That's Unabomber territory. Ignorance alone wouldn't suffice... would it?
Would the world be better if there were incentives to promote skilled crafts instead of racing to the bottom to produce cheap shit at scale?
I'm not saying to go back to the stone ages, but ultimately there have been movements to buy local and preserve traditional ways of crafting that are push back against industrialization.
While yes, so called "anti-work"[0] movement (or if you're from the early 2000s, the occupy wall street movement would be of similar philosphical values, for example) uses this term rather often, it derives from the work of the Ernest Mandel[1][2] based on his work in which he used the term to describe the latter stages of capitalism post WWII as he saw it, and how it inevitably would end up in deep inequality and power concentration, to paraphrase the thesis.
As far as "its always been that way" goes, I can't speak for all of the past, but there are clear models in the present that show it doesn't have to be that way. Norway & Sweden come to mind, for example.
[0]: Orewellian term at its best. The movement isn't actually anti work, much like luddites weren't anti technology. This label is attached by and large to people who are centered around ideas related to equitable wealth distribution in society & more worker rights, namely. They don't actually profess to be against work, as far as the movement goes. Individuals may vary. Never the less, its clear doublespeak.
The anti work subreddit was founded by people who were truly anti work. It was then co-opted by people in low and middle wage jobs venting about poor working conditions exacerbated by the pandemic. Its a great example of how moderates sanewash extremist ideas to something a bit more palatable, similar to defund the police. While most people probably want a demilitarization of police forces, some people truly want a policefree state.
Originally, it's the idea that capitalism will have a terminal crisis (i.e. die off) and we are in this final crisis because it will hit a state where productivity cannot be increased and so profit will be too difficult to increase.
In practice, technology and some major events have prevented this from happening. The modern left-wing view is that we have run out of new frontiers to exploit, so the capital class will (has) return to reducing labor costs with more extreme measures among other tactics.
With recent events like a major labor shortage (or future one due to declining population) in the developed world, climate change, a stagnation in productivity per person, gig economy emergence, and widespread privatization being viewed as very destructive; this idea has gotten more popular. Part of this is driven by some companies, especially in tech, having manic levels of optimism about frivolous things.
Personally, it kind of sounds like Malthus. But it is hard to deny that we are in a slump of sorts and that startups that sound like scams appeared to be more common for a while.
You'll get a lot of answers, but I think The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall[1] is key.
Capitalism means competition. Competitors mean reduced profits. As we get into the later stages of the game, that pesky competition aspect comes into play and firms do whatever they can to worm their way out of its consequences.
As profits inevitably fall, firms flail around doing whatever they can to maintain them and cause all sorts of misery for employees, customers, and the world at large. Increasingly brutal exploitation of workers, rotting product quality, all sorts of shenanigans with regulatory capture and rent-seeking as firms try to avoid competition and the need to sell a quality product at a competitive price.
Basically, it's the theory that capitalist economies demand continually increasing growth, even increasing rates of growth, in order to remain stable enough to stay hegemonic. The industrial revolution, through most of the 20th century, exhibited this growth, driving capitalism to be the dominant (eventually only) economic system on earth.
Unfortunately, growth is hard, and it slows down. Over time, providing meaningful improvements to the lives of the participants in the economic system fails to keep up with the demands of growth, and you start to see the system going full ouroboros, consuming all the positive impact its created in the lives of its participants in a downward spiral of exploitation and value extraction until there's nothing left. The period of time after the inversion from "making people's lives better" to "making people's lives worse" is "late-stage capitalism", equivocating it to cancer or other terminal diseases.
Personally, I'm more of a "threshold events" theorist, and that enshittification is just reversion to the mean, but that's the pitch.
I’ve never been the target audience for this, so sharing anecdata with a sample size of 1 (well, 2 kids). But as I type this my kids are watching some streamer play minecraft on our TV. They’re watching it via YouTube though. I don’t know the last time they used Twitch, and I suspect the youngest doesn’t even know how to get there.
I guess Twitch is probably not in an area of profitable business given the infrastructure cost of video streaming services, especially in that it cannot enjoy all the cost optimization like Netflix/YouTube due to its nature of live streaming.
My experience was different. I was able to learn enough Spanish to survive in Peru for a month with just 6-7 hours in Duolingo. Different people may have different learning styles. When you're comparing to classroom, are you normalizing the number of hours spent? Of course live interaction will be several times more effective, but it's not something everyone can afford to do. It's also about goals. Duolingo isn't for you if you really want to become a proficient native speaker or be able to understand books. But it's great to learn a language casually enough to converse with locals.
I am so tired of these patterns. Google Photos also does not allow any easy or good way to clean up junk. Why would they? They want you to run out of space so you can pay for their cloud storage. They also have low incentive to keep photo/video storage space-efficient for the same reason.
How is "firing people" more clear in intent than "Reduction in force"? Reduction in force/cutting costs is usually the intent. People getting fired is a side effect. "Firing people" is a more vivid picture, which is exactly why it is not the right term - it's too personal a term for something that usually is not personal. Performance-based layoffs = Firing. Cost/business-outlook-based layoffs = RIFs.
"most accepted theory of physics is that the universe started from a single point": This is not true. The most accepted theory is that the universe was extremely dense, but it is not accepted that it was literally a "point" of zero volume. Our laws of physics are thought to break down beyond a certain density of matter, so we don't have any reliable predictions about it. The "dense" universe could still have been infinite even back then. Just super dense and infinite in all directions - and now all of it has expanded and it's still infinite (a bigger infinity?).
Not only at very high temperatures and densities we cannot be certain about the properties of matter, but there exists absolutely no evidence that can justify the extrapolation of the evolution of the universe towards such temperatures and densities.
The properties of the observable universe are consistent with an initial state where the temperature was so high that the protons and neutrons were free, not bound in atomic nuclei, like today.
This means that the temperature corresponded to a kinetic energy of several tens of MeV per particle. At such a temperature, the state of the matter is a plasma composed only of protons, neutrons, electrons, positrons, photons and neutrinos.
At this temperature, the matter has the simplest possible composition. At lower temperatures the particles become bound in nuclei, atoms and molecules, which become more and more complex with decreasing temperatures. At increasing temperatures, the higher the temperature is, more and more mesons, baryons and heavy leptons are generated and the plasma composition becomes more and more complex.
However, at that temperature where the matter has the simplest composition, any traces of its former evolution have been practically erased and we do not have any rational reason for making suppositions about it. Perhaps the matter was indeed even denser and even hotter, but there is no basis for this extrapolation except some philosophical belief that is not based on any scientific observation.
An extrapolation towards greater temperatures and densities could be justified only if we knew boundary conditions around the universe, which we do not know.
In conclusion, what can be known with reasonable certainty about the Big Bang starts from a moment in time when the temperature corresponded to a kinetic energy of several tens of MeV per particle, and all extrapolations to times before that moment are hypotheses that are not based on any experimental data, so they can be neither verified nor falsified.
The supposition that the Universe may have started from a single point is something that has nothing to do with science, but it may be a valid religious belief.
But if it was dense and infinite in all directions, why do so many people use language like “it was the size of an apple”? This is the interesting contradiction. An apple is only a certain number of atoms, far fewer than the 10^80 we have today.
I think that's supposed to refer to the currently observable bit being the size of an apple; though given how bad newspaper analogies are, this may all derive from misunderstandings one hungry physicist 60 years ago and subsequently all quoting each other.
- today’s observable universe is roughly 13.8B years. By the time you travel to the edge of that universe, others stuff has travel from that edge to even further position at various speed including faster than you do. Therefore you never get to that edge, making it infinite.
- before/at big bang universe is a single point. You are within this single point but can’t go outside because time does not exist and traveling need time.
- when the big band happened, it grew in size very, very fast, close to speed of light. During that enlargement phase it grew to the size of an Apple and if you were within it and try to look in any direction, the further think you can see is the Apple skin. That’s the observable universe. But to see the skin you need to go there or wait for particule to come to you (eg photon). By that time the universe has already dilated and grown a lot wider. Some particules from the skin are already far away. You’ll never be able to see them : by the time needed for information to come to you, other information goes in the opposite direction.
> today’s observable universe is roughly 13.8B years. By the time you travel to the edge of that universe
Careful. That's the age of the observable universe, not the size. The radius of the observable universe is 47B light years, which is larger because of inflation.
> Therefore you never get to that edge, making it infinite.
FWIW, I disagree with the conclusion. Finite but expanding fast is not infinite (disclaimer: mathematician not a physicist).
> today’s observable universe is roughly 13.8B years. By the time you travel to the edge of that universe, others stuff has travel from that edge to even further position at various speed including faster than you do.
This is true but it's not what astronomers mean when they say the universe may be infinite. They're talking about the whole universe, not the just the observable part, and they really do mean actually infinite in extent.
> before/at big bang universe is a single point.
Unlikely. We know that what is now the observable universe was very very very very very dense. Predictions of a literal singular point are the result of extrapolating past the point where we know for a fact that our best physical theories break down.
The article does not touch upon this, but there is a fascinating theory that life on earth originated in deep sea vents. Highly recommend reading the very accessible "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane for more on this.
I was with you until "It is just customers in US are richer and are ok to pay more for the same service." How did you reach that conclusion? The other reason (which seems more likely to me) is that it is because the free market is not functioning because of monopoly/duopoly created by regulatory capture.
Let me explain. If a Russian mobile provider would ask customers to pay $45 starting next month, then majority of users would say: "No thanks, I don't really need mobile data that much. Also by law you must provide us with free access to VK (social network) anyway so it makes no sense to pay you $45 for this". But is US, customers are paying and do not complain, because for them it is not that big price. This is what I meant by "customers are ok".
Yes, mobile providers market is not a free market, as there are small number of companies both in US and in Russia. But the price they charge customers is different in these countries despite they use similar equipment which probably has the same cost. So the difference in prices can be explained by what people in different countries consider "cheap" and "expensive". The provider charges as much as possible, but less than a customer would consider "too expensive".
And the same thing is about housing prices, they do not really correlate with expenses to build them. It takes the same amount of money to build an apartment in Moscow and in a small city in Siberia, but the price for the buyer will be very different.
Also, regarding houses and land prices, there is no monopoly, but the prices are extremely high in large cities. So "it is a monopoly" doesn't sound like an explanation, but "charge the buyer as much as they can afford and a bit on top of that" is more realistic. And as for education, there seems to be no monopoly too.
Interesting way to put it, but is it particularly insightful? You're happy when you're doing things you think you should be doing, and what you think you should be doing is of course determined by evolution, modulo random mutations. I don't see how this helps me in any constructive way though. It is an intriguing thought exercise though.
i think it is a good start, but the conclusion is not going far enough.
many people aren't happy. and the problem is figuring out why. are they not doing what they think they should be doing? if so, why aren't they? is something getting in the way? is their idea of what they should be doing different from what society thinks they should be doing?
as a society i think we don't have the right idea of what makes people happy. we think we can tell them what they should be doing, but i think part of the answer is selfdetermination. we need to give people the freedom (and the ability to exercise that freedom) to make their own choices, and not force them to conform to our ideas and standards.
I am as frustrated about everything turning into a subscription as the next person, but the solution is not to put the onus of cancellation on businesses. It is to prevent monopolies (so that there is a true free market) and dark patterns (i.e, cancellation should be easy and terms should be very clear when subscribing).