Date created: Sep 29, 2024 #webSocial sites destined to fail
In about a day cohost is going read only so I wanted to talk about sites, specifically social media websites that are destined to collapse and die off in a year. Contrary to the stereotype of the terminally online website making people loving to use these shitty knock off twitters and tumblrs, I actually kind of hate how all these social media sites keep getting made. I cant see how the solution to twitter doing shitty things like deleting accounts after they are become inactive, deleting billions of tweets is creating a new site that will just end up another black hole for content as it eventually gets shut down.
The main reason these sites fail is due to not having enough money (shocker I know), but they don't make enough money because they somehow believe that a social media site without ads could sustain itself, that will never work. I will cut off a finger the day I see a social media sustain itself without selling their users data or showing them copious amounts of ads. The only way that will work is if in the distant future storage costs like a dollar per terabyte (which I'm pretty sure it does when you buy 1000 tons of cards at once like Google but regardless). For an example how how much it costs to run one of these social medias here is cohosts net profit from the past four months:
| Month | Net Income | % Change |
|---|---|---|
| May | -$24,650 | 26.15% |
| June | -$38,937 | 57.96% |
| July | -$12,647 | 67.52% |
| August | -$25,297 | 100.3% |
(I made sure to color it red so you know it's bad). Props to them for showing their financial reports, and I'm aware most businesses start up with a loss but when you lose money for two years and by the sounds of it only have one guy investing to keep you running it doesn't take a genius to figure out they aren't going to last. It's not even cohost either, there are probably hundreds more of these, some of the ones I've seen are bitview (a youtube knockoff) and bluesky (a twitter knockoff). My hopes for these both are 0, especially bluesky as while bitview is very small bluesky seems significantly larger and has 0 money making methods. I'd give bluesky two years max. Bitview might not go broke as like two people use it but I reckon its going to shutdown due to burnout by whoever made it, I'm a fortune teller I'd know.
If you want a new twitter just use mastodon, that's the only one that I reckon is actually here to stay as even if one server goes down someone else can just run a new one leading to the cost being spread out instead of some college student getting charged 20k a month.
