I’m currently trying out Lemmy because reddit is killing the Old Reddit interface and I refuse to use their shitty app or new interface website. Plus after using it I think it’s kind of fun to have reddit but smaller and more curated. It’s like Reddit used to be back in like 2012.

Here’s the thing -they always were. For any free service, the users are the product and the customers are the advertisers. It’s just that for most of the lives of these companies, interest rates were at historic lows and their profit requirements weren’t as high as a result. Businesses are constantly borrowing money and spending it to expand, and interest rates determine how much money they need to make to make those investments worthwhile. If you get a loan to start a business at 3% interest, you can afford to make less money on that business than if your loan was at 7%. As interest rates have gone up, so have the pressures for making more money on investments.