6 WTF Reasons Websites Go From Being Awesome To Terrible

That tedious final step doesn't always come to fruition. For every Facebook that manages to turn its economic fortunes around, there's a Pets.com collapsing under the strain of its own "success." And dodging that bullet produces its own host of problems ...

See, there's a reason everyone's an Uber driver now, and it's not that it's fun to meet new people and then clean their vomit out of your backseat. Uber is a nice service, but it's also the beneficiary of a terrible economy -- 69 percent of its drivers have another job, and a lot of its customers can't afford a car. Same story with Airbnb: People aren't letting strangers into their homes out of the goodness of their hearts. They're doing it because if they don't let tourists poop in their toilets, they're going to get their water cut off entirely.

Same deal with Amazon self-publishers, most of whom make next to nothing. And for every random guy who makes millions screaming at video games on YouTube, countless more make a couple hundred or thousand, 45 percent of which is then taken by YouTube (and that's without counting their own production costs). As YouTube has grown more popular, the cost advertisers are willing to pay has gone down, because there are more advertising options -- if one fashion vlogger doesn't like your price, there's a nearly identical one who will.

It's the 21st-century equivalent of the gold rush. Everyone wanted to strike it rich, but only a few did, while the rest only wasted their time and money. The only people who truly took advantage were the ones selling the equipment. Surely, a system like that could never backfire in this day and age.

But now it's getting harder for Netflix to keep content, because they're not the only game in town anymore. There's Amazon Video, that YouTube service named after a porn site, Crackle, Hulu, and the three other streaming services with goofy names that launched since we began this sentence. There are other bidders for the complete run of Flavor Of Love now, which is why Netflix's licensing costs keep going up while revenue tops off. They're simply going to run out of potential subscribers -- everyone who wants Netflix will have it, and it will take a couple of decades for Netflix and chill sessions to produce the next generation of fans.

But hey, that's the way the market works, right? Unfortunately, this "be cheap, get screwed" logic manifests in more sinister ways in other online services. The advantage of Airbnb, for instance, is also its disadvantage. It's a hotel without the cost of a hotel, but also without any safety regulations. From owners pushing out less profitable lease-signing tenants to houses flat-out killing people with unsafe amenities, there's very much a "take the money and run" vibe. Airbnb does their best to filter out scams, but it's not like they can go to everyone's house and check their smoke detectors.

Uber, on the other hand, apparently runs weaker background checks than your childhood fort. Murderers, rapists, burglars ... they've all gotten through Uber's screening process. The recent spree shooting in Michigan? It started as a sadly typical "Uber driver from hell" story.

Then there's Reddit, which has been involved in more scandals than a soap opera. Whether it's mods taking bribes from spammers or banning websites they don't like from being linked, it turns out that, shockingly, completely unfiltered democracy has downsides. Take the charming saga of r/rape, which started as a subreddit for rape fetish porn before being turned into a support group for sexual assault survivors ... but it still gets lewd visits from people interested in the original function. Appropriateness aside, that kind of drama scares advertisers off faster than telling them you're trying to form a communist utopia. Who wants to advertise somewhere that can be flooded with slurs overnight?

Oh, and remember Napster? We barely do, and we just said the name, but their never-ending parade of legal troubles were a warning to the future. Because ...

From sketchy but successful to legitimate but forgotten -- it's a trend that's easy to spot. Remember Buzz, Google's failed social network? No, not Google Plus; they refuse to call that a failure. Or Google Wave, which was a failed "collaboration tool." Or Friend Connect, whi- OK, look, so Buzz was a social network that failed partially because of privacy concerns. Buzz searched your email and automatically added your contacts to your network, because obviously you want your mom, your boss, and your dominatrix to all have access to the exact same information. Google tried to address the flaws, but it didn't matter. It was like closing the barn doors after the horses had fled and been devoured by Hatrork, the Horse-Eating God.

Reddit's tried to clean up too, because advertisers aren't super keen on sites that openly allow more hate speech than the average dictatorship. Several subreddits were banned in 2015, most notably Fat People Hate, which allowed people who felt deeply awful about something in their own lives to take it out on pictures of random overweight people. The banning came as a shock to users who saw Reddit as a sacred bastion of free speech on the Internet, so naturally they proceeded to shit all over the website like little babies.

Airbnb and Uber have had restrictions forced on them as well. Seattle Uber drivers successfully formed a union, which is the latest defeat for a company that could face fewer legal problems if they got out of the ridesharing business and started robbing banks. Drivers want to be treated like employees, while the company wants to treat them like contractors (read: people whom they don't have to pay if something bad happens). And Airbnb is fighting various legal battles to avoid regulation, because if they're held to the same standards as hotels (read: no cockroaches in the bathroom, no landlords forcing tenants out and creating illegal sham hotels), then their costs will skyrocket. And on that note ...

They couldn't generate enough income from ad revenue, but they didn't want to start charging viewers. So it died. That's the downside of our first point on how amazing services are offered for far below their true cost -- if they can't dominate the market, they will go under. That's also why Netflix's been creating original content like House Of Cards, Bojack Horseman, and Wait, Our Focus Groups Want A Full House Sequel? Seriously? Well, All Right. Those licensing fees aren't going to stop creeping up.

But what do you do if you're a service, like Uber or Airbnb? If they raise prices, they lose customers, because their entire business is being the cheap alternative. Making Uber rides just a couple dollars more expensive would drive consumers to a competitor like Lyft or Ryckshaw! or Weeeeeeelbarr0w. And what if your service is free? A Facebook subscription fee would be the one thing that would make Google Plus popular, but users would rebel if there was much more advertising. Reddit faces the same problem. It's an unsustainable model. So ...

We'd all rebel at a Facebook subscription fee, and possibly then start snail-mailing pictures of our cats to each other. But what happens if you can't charge your customers for your product? You have to turn the customers into the product.

This is why Facebook's stance on privacy has evolved from "You're in total control of your information" to "You're in total control of your information, if you can figure out our arcane controls" to "Fuck you, it's our information now." Sure, you may not like Facebook profiting from that time you got drunk and confessed your crush on Princess Celestia, but what are you going to do about it? Sign up for Ello? Hahahaha.

Uber shares your information, too. If you connect your Uber account to a Starwood Preferred Guest account, you'll get bonus points in exchange for letting Starwood know everything about your driving habits. Forbes gave an example of how they profit from this -- if Uber routinely picks you up from a city's airport, you can bet you're going to start seeing lots of ads for Starwood hotels in that city.

Then there's Google, because having a slogan of "Don't Be Evil" doesn't stand up in the face of "Oh, We Need to Make Money." Gmail scans your email for keywords and targets appropriate ads at you. So that one time you ordered a horse dildo as a "joke" will haunt you forever. That's the price you pay for a free service. Gmail is extraordinarily useful, but they aren't offering it to be good citizens. Ask the privacy lawsuits they've faced as their terms of service grow more and more inscrutable. Hey, remember when Google gave a bunch of info to the NSA and we all stopped using their services in disgust? No?

Now go look at Reddit's new sister site Upvoted, which is essentially "Stuff posted on Reddit presented in magazine format so that we can generate ad money." That's just a different way of profiting from their users' information. Because that's what every site has to do in the end: convince their users to give them money, profit from their users, or die.

Except for Cracked, of course. We fully plan to be buried alive with you instead.

Mark has a story collection and is on Twitter, which also has a terrible business model.

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For more apocalyptic visions of the Internet, check out 5 Reasons The Internet Could Die At Any Moment and 4 Unhealthy Mentalities The Internet Turned Into Movements.

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