Like many people I’m here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I’ve been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?
Im glad decentralized social media is picking up steam. No more of these major communication platform rug poolings for everyone. Now at worst individual instances can implode and everyone just has to move to a different instance or self-host, and still access communities on every other instance.
So first thing, Twitter is different than the rest. Elmo purchased it and he is doing some things to it that looks crazy.
Reddit CEO admitted that his API changes are inspired by Elmo’s Twitter changes, he likely wouldn’t double down if that didn’t happen to Twitter as well.
Anyway, to show inflation the government increased interest rates. Which made investors thinking, "why should I put my money in this risky business that doesn’t even generate money, when I could purchase government bonds and add long as government doesn’t default I will get 5%?
This actually put pressure on trash startups that don’t generate profits.
Ironically it is more like how much interest have been historically. It’s just that after we had recession it was lowered to not turn it into depression. Then it was kept at nearly 0% until now.
Side note: if your bank still offers still nearly 0% interest rate in your savings account, they are making killing on your money and they are counting you won’t notice, because people got used to those low interest rates.
For sure… Non-decentralized social media has value created by the immense number of connections and content created.
It also has the risk of abusing those connections and making the network less valuable by a centralized decision to clog it with paid content… Which alienates users and makes the experience less efficient.
Facebook did it, reddit is doing it, Twitter is trying to do it. The move is almost inevitable.
Decentralize it and it takes almost all potential greed out of the equation so the network stays most valuable to users.
This makes me wonder whether decentralized social media is actually immune to enshittification, or will it just take a different form we can’t even imagine at this moment in time.
The costs of the servers will crush a lot of instances. I can’t imagine the hosting costs the main kbin and lemmy instances have right now, and it’ll only go up as people join in. I think we’ll see server managers start asking for donations to cover the costs sooner and frequently. And when people don’t donate, they’ll have to resort to ads. And if an instance is really popular but barely afloat, some big fish comes along and offers to buy it from them for a decent price. Classic strategy.
Meta may say it wants to start its own instance, but just wait until they see how most instances have refused to federate with them and they’ll be sniffing around one of the popular instances trying to buy or offering a nice package to federate. By then, users will be established and not leave immediately.
IMO, all it takes is a company or companies willing to invest in their own large, stable instances that work in a way digestible to the masses. If they get large enough, they can choose to only federate with each other in an attempt to choke out smaller imstances, or only federate with instances that allow ads, etc.
With that said, people add “reddit” to their google search so they can get information from actual people, free of shilling. People find value in “ad free.” People value wikipedia. As services like lemmy continue to develop, I’m hoping the UX and on boarding become more palatable to the layuser, growing the population and getting people used to the whole concept and its value, so when the big money backed instances start up, they’ll notice the difference.
I think it’s orchestrated. I think it’s intentional. I think the internet is under attack in the capacity that we know it as. I know it makes me sound conspiratorial but ever since Musk overtook Twitter every big social CEO has praised is approach. Musk fucked the internet up as we know it and Rupert Murdock showed media moguls that they can push trash and make heaps of money. There’s no incentive to run quality content online and Musk started the downturn of that realization. I think we’re in for some troubling times.
Musk didn’t start shit. FB is far more to blame for the current web, than a few months of Elon running Twitter into the dirt.
@Silviecat44
Upvoted cause that’s honestly valid.
This is the enshittification of the Internet. Cory Doctorow wrote about it here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys and it explains why this was always going to happen.
Interesting read.
The likes of Spez were just not that intelligent enough to figure out how to make Reddit pay before the VCs called in the investments. Not that it’s an easy problem to solve, but if you’re going to take on money like Reddit did you sure as hell needed a better plan then leaving it up to later to figure out. Amazon had a plan clearly, Reddit did not.
Also, what Reddit is now doing mimics a little of what Facebook did too, the enshitification of your feeds (just look at the app). They’re just hoping Reddit is as addictive as Facebook is and you’ll stick around regardless. I wonder if they recent;y hired some new advisers that told them to make these recent changes too?
Here’s the play, charge a reasonable amount for API calls and people will either pay with money or with data, some will even do both.
Instead you and I are having this conversation on kbin.
After the way shithead acted and talked, well I waste less time on the internet, and yeah, it’s a little harder to find results on google, but that is just making me realize how much I relied on Reddit.
I need to find another search engine too, I rely too much on too few providers.
They got us one convenience at a time.
It’s a failure of a business mind all of this.
- Failure to understand the users
- Failure to realise who actually makes and owns the content
- Failure to control costs
- Failure to adapt and change how they charge
- Failure to use the community to improve the product
I had a reddit account for 16 years, and as soon as Apollo stopped working a few days ago, I logged out everywhere and not going back
A better option might be to require third party developers to use a Reddit based advertising API with the benefit of free API usage and revenue sharing. Everyone’s happy. Third party developers would get paid for ads, they can show more ads and use other ad providers along side Reddit if they want to, the API gets paid for by advertising revenue for all of the third party apps, Reddit gets to track it’s users by requiring API Ad calls to send a user id, etc., etc…
Some search engine options aside from Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo:
https://search.brave.com/ (Brave also has their own browser; I’ve been using both and liking them)
If anyone knows of and likes any other search engines, please post a reply here and/or tag me!
I dunno. If the general trend is to move toward the fediverse then things might actually get better.
Meta has already expressed interest in the fediverse. It’s going to be up to everyone who likes it to defederate from every corporate instance.
There are no good corporate actors
I don’t know it off the top of my head, but I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere that over on Mastodon, a large number of instances have banded together to collectively block all Meta owned instances, and publish a list of them and so on.
I think convenient-to-add, publicly viewable blocklists will be a thing on here sooner rather than later.
Mistifying / Mistification works if you like Anglo-German puns. Emmerdification for an Anglo-French equivalent.
If you’re against anything to do with faeces at all, I’m not sure there’s as short and easy a neologism that as fully captures the meaning and, importantly, disdain without being a mouthful.
You need an en- of some sort because it’s clear that something is changing and then the action is the attempt to squeeze as much profit out of an enterprise with the expectation that nothing much will, er, change. This inevitably ruins or destroys the nature of the enterprise from the users’ point of view.
Then the CEO immediately has cognitive dissonance between their own ego and self-belief of infallibility versus the fact the enterprise isn’t working or has changed far more than their expectations. Their ego, and desire for profit, inevitably wins.
Much like badly managed corporate take-overs, all the smart people leave as soon as they can assuming they haven’t already been fired and replaced by an inferior of some sort.
Thus, the whole thing turns to… well. Is there a better word?
It’s not just you, see this thread:
Unchecked corporate greed and no regards for users or communities that were built on these platforms. Hopefully the centralized ones will die from too many ads and user abandonment and the decentralized ones will rise and thrive.
Exactly this. The money tap has dried up post pandemic and they are seeking new revenue streams while also slashing costs. The hunger for perpetual growth to sate the investor class and their matyroshka nesting yachts is driving these decisions.
enshittification
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification
Yeah, someone else said that the other day on another discussion - we’re seeing the bubble bursting for social media. The VC money is drying up, so these websites with massive bloat and overhead suddenly need to come up with new ways to generate cash. So they turn to what they “think” works - charge the visitors for the privilege to use their website without ever considering that maybe people will simply migrate and go elsewhere, as they always have.
Just like when most people left Myspace, then left digg, then left twitter, and left facebook, and left reddit. There’s always stragglers that will keep the sites afloat. But they are a shell of the sites they once were.
Look at Facebook - back in 2005 it was an amazing site where all your friends were socially active and engaged. Now it’s a ghost town - out of hundreds of friends and family, I only see a few posts from friends/family and a ton of ads and posts from groups I follow.
Not just you. I don’t know if anyone’s made it official yet, but I call what’s currently happening the “social media collapse.” Corporations have been sinking their teeth into popular social networks, only to realize that they’ve never been profitable and that the people who use them don’t want to live with advertising or restrictions. The annoying paradox of social networks is that by the time they’re popular enough to be worth using, they’re already too popular, and are doomed by the whims of a meddling executive.
Exactly, the venture capital is finally drying up and the services can’t figure out how to sell anything to enough people to recoup their investments. Why reddit has to pull out third party apps and shove ads and reddit gold down our throat, why Elon has to shill Twitter blue and cap our view counts. Facebook and Google services exist because their business model is selling ads foundationally and not selling services. It doesn’t matter that their socials are losing money because it’s always been a branch of their advertising business and not the other way around.