This is the only response required. I’m quickly becoming exhausted of reading everyone’s epiphany on “enshittification” as if it’s some natural eventuality. Yes the money must eventually come, but not always at the expense of platform quality. If anything the results we see from “enshittification” are due to the fact that most businesses fail eventually due to poor leadership.

Just to echo what you have already said, money today is simply more expensive than it used to be. We even see the impacts of macro monetary decisions on households.

Buying a house or a car on loan is far more expensive than it would have been a year and half ago. A $500,000 house in 2021 would cost $2,000 a month at 2.75% interest and 20% down. Today same that payment is $2,800 or 40% more expensive at 7.75% interest.

Modern companies live on revolving debt, so if their suddenly gets 40% more expensive and that same amount of money is also less valuable at the same time (inflation), then they need to make up the difference somehow.

Corporations are trying to find the balance between squeezing more revenue to pay their ever increasing debt bills while also not destroying the environment that attracted the users (their products) in the first place. Twitter and Reddit are just going about it horrifically because of poor business leadership and decision making. Netflix’s approach appears to be sustainable, and there is no doubt that YouTube will be fine in the long run.

This is not meant to be apologetic to the decisions made by Twitter and Reddit. They’ve made their bed through their own horrible decisions, and now they’ve got to sleep in it.