I do think they will essentially die. They will morph into completely different websites, but I think they will be around for a long time, and I think their userbase won’t shrink even a bit.
Big websites are slowly adopting the facebook model: All the content is hidden and requires you login to view it. Creating an account requires some sort of personally identifying information like a phone number, photo of ID, mailing address, etc.
The old model simply turned out to be unprofitable. It was always done under the motto of “bring the people and the money will come” and so they made it as easy as possible to build up a large user base, but it turns out that motto is false on the internet, and investors have finally realized it. There is no point in having a massive user base if they don’t actually generate a profit for you. Anonymous internet users do not do this. They are indistinguishable from bots. If they don’t use adblock, they don’t click on ads. They don’t donate money. Yet they use up the majority of the server resources.
It used to be that you at least needed anonymous users to generate content for you, but (in part thanks to facebok) non-anonymous usage of the internet has become normalized. If anything the best content will come from someone who has their real name, and profile picture attached to the content they submit. The anonymous nobody is much less likely to post anything valuable.
I think the internet as we know it is dead, and tbh I don’t even blame big corporations for this. I blame mass tech illiteracy, and people’s willingness to sacrifice their privacy for some dopamine hits.
I agree with you for Reddit.
For Twitter, it will burn under Musk’s leadership
The difference is in obscurity and vanity. Everyone online knows who Musk is, people outside Reddit (and even those on Reddit, some of them) don’t know who Spez is. The scale is different, and so are the severity and publicness of the negative changes. Like hell, a total site rebrand is a pretty noticeable thing.
EDIT: Case in point, everyone refers to him as Spez instead of his name, Steve Huffman.
Yup, even Digg is still around. Like you, I think reddit will be around for many more years. The content quality, which is already bad, will continue to get worse.
I didn’t migrate to Lemmy to help kill reddit. I’m here to help Lemmy grow. It’s already a better experience in some ways. Rough around the edges, and needs some features and fixes, but I feel like the user base is already much better than reddit is.
Yup, even Digg is still around. Like you, I think reddit will be around for many more years. The content quality, which is already bad, will continue to get worse.
Digg?
Hell Fark is still there. And for that matter, Craigslist discussion forums are too.
Here’s some fun history/background on Hi5-
Hi5 was bought by Tagged which was bought by The Meet Group (MeetMe).
I worked at Tagged when the acquisition happened, but was not in the team that made the technical changes necessary to migrate the product.
Tagged and Hi5 are now essentially the same site with barely-different skins - the current site is an evolution of Tagged. I believe the Hi5 codebase was scrapped, for the most part.
A few years later, The Meet Group bought Tagged (which had rebranded its company - not the products - as “if(we)” by that point).
This is tangential, but I feel compelled to share: I started my job at Tagged due to another acquisition, when Tagged bought Digsby (company: dotSyntax), a multi protocol instant messenger, social network, and email desktop app which me and some friends built from nothing. We were the first 3rd party client for Facebook messenger, and I believe MySpace IM as well :)
I doubt anyone cares about these properties anymore, but if anyone has questions I’m happy to answer what I can.
Fark is where I was going to when reddit was enshittifying but I hadn’t heard of lemmy yet. That and hackernews.
Usenet is still around.
It’s not a site but an actual system and predates (by quite a lot) the Web.
It’s was the social media equivalent back in the old days of the early 90s Internet (before AOL linked to it, before the WWW, even before Gopher).
After that came IRC (which funnilly enough is also still around, along with modern clones of it such as Discord) as well as online forums (which themselves are the descendants of the old BBSs, minus the whole modem comms part).
So far in my experience, the only tech that “dies” (well, there often is a handful of people who still do it for fun) is that which is tied to specific hardware (i.e. you don’t really have BBSs anymore because people don’t use modems to connect to a central systems via the phone line anymore) as pure software can live forever on top of emulators or just be reimplemented whilst preserving core features.
Next year you will see, some will change name and you never know what is what. No one cares and when someone do is fooled by using the first things he got offert. There eat this “threats” is yummy, here some other shit, who cares, billionares who plays with nothing.
I don’t think most people actually think that these sites will literally die (well, actually Twitter/X literally dying at some point wouldn’t surprise me all that much), it’s more just hyperbole for jumping the shark.
myspace.com is still a website you can visit, but no one does. facebook is going down that path once their userbase ages out of living. the artist formerly known as twitter is going to go bankrupt and a very salty elon musk will sell it for a fraction of what we bought it for and who tf knows what happens to it after that.
It will be interesting to see, whether Meta manages to stay afloat even without Facebook.
Buying Instagram was one of their best business moves and kept them connected with the younglings for a while. They couldn’t replicate that with TikTok or the likes.
Over time, Facebook will become irrelevant, but Meta might actually manage to buy apps left and right hoping to hit the new unicorn.
I feel like these mainstream platform have provided us with the framework of what we want the internet to be. But they’re business with the goal of profit, and that’s ok. Just not ok for us because that’s not what we want/need. I’d like to believe that the fediverse is the future. A decentralised, true social media that actually match the name. The fediverse is the media for social interaction that are of the people, by the people and for the people of the internet.
I feel like these mainstream platform have provided us with the framework of what we want the internet to be. But they’re business with the goal of profit, and that’s ok. Just not ok for us because that’s not what we want/need.
Part of that is my issue with a lot of platforms; they try to be everything at once. I don’t want every social media platform to have featured articles, stories, a messaging function, and disappearing messages.
If Snapchat stayed the way it originally was I’d probably still be using it today.
The problem isn’t just profit, but maximizing short profit by any means necessary.
They are not content with providing a good product and making a bit of profit. They always have to press ultra hard to squeeze the last drop of profit out of the product. And they don’t care that it worsens the product and ultimately will kill it and its business end. But that’s more than two quarters away, so they don’t care.
Reddit is only the most dramatic example of this.
