I’d exchange Reddit and X. The rate at which X is going downhill right now just cannot be beaten by anything.
Twitter(/X - such a bullshit crappy name) is the Kmart of web 2.0 companies. Just a husk of what it was and in a massive free fall decline.
It’s basically a matter of a branded domain name and Mastodon will take over.
Governments and entities like the New York MTA are going to want something they control, rather than something that falls to the whims of some billionaire.
The tech for Mastodon is there. You just needs orgs that care less about reach and who trust people to come to them (like the New York MTA).
Agreed. I mean I never expected Elon to be smart but good god is that dude an idiot. Everyone reading this could 100% do a better job in his shoes.
That’s assuming that his goal is to run a profitable social media company that people respect, enjoy, and that makes profit. However, he’s loaded af and can easily pay for the best consultants in the world. Considering that, I think it’s possible that he might be reaching his goals, they’re just not what we assume they are.
I’ve seen varying levels of this general idea that Musk somehow is still playing some 4d chess and the downfall of twitter is the plan, but it’s really not. Twitter was already a niche generally. I only know like 2 people IRL who were on twitter, compared to basically everyone on Facebook, for example, and you can check the stats, twitter commanded way more mindspace than it actually had.
And even if the master plan was to kill twitter - so what? This won’t stop anything. There is an argument to be made that all of the journalists and what not coalesced over there, but that’s just not going to stop happening. It’s like if someone wanted to kill instant messaging. “HA HA ICQ, this time I’ve got you!” Except, it’s not the platform that’s important, and it’s easily replaced.
Even if Elon’s plan is “let’s federate” it’s still an inane way to do it, but this seems like a more likely outcome.
Hanlon again for the win, simplest answer is he’s not nearly as smart as anyone pretends.
I feel like it’s unfair to include TikTok as it had a clear headstart by being a dumpster fire since the very start.
I mean, TikTok was already bad to begin with but what did they do to deserve a spot next to Twitter? Did I miss something? Surely they can’t do worse than trying to make their paid only, right?
Yeah TikTok is bad but it also works as expected.
Yeah it’s the worst algorithm ever, basically spyware, bans LGBT+ people, etc. But that’s quite frankly how it always worked.
Bans LGBT+ people
My fyp is full of bipoc LGBTQ+ people? Twitter on the other hand tries to feed me right wing news sources and disinformation all the time. There’s a spectrum here and TikTok is far on the other side.
Also to be frank the algorithm is by far the best out of any company with a “for you” algorithm. It blows pretty much anything else out of the water entirely.
Go watch a few truck or bbq tik toks and watch it backslide. Anything that is vaguely a “manly hobby.” You’ll be surprised how quickly Ben Shapiro winds up in front of you.
People rightfully call out TikTok as a spyware because of their ties with CCP, but how exactly are other social media giants and big tech any different as they too have ties with the CIA, FBI etc
Basically, most social media reads out everything that is openly accessible, like cookies, address books and contacts, etc.
TikTok goes deeper, it has been watched going into protected files, trying to break encryptions (sometimes being successful).
Why do you think it’s more spyware than any other big tech mobile app or social media?
And based on my experience getting hooked so fast into while I didn’t want to touch it, it seems it has the best algorithm. I’m off it now, like all other social media expect for fediverse, but I can testify on this
bans LGBT+ people
Source? because I follow a ton of LGBTQIA+ people without any issue.
Does this reflect how the platform is actually doing or do we just like the circlejerk of wishing they would fail? Because everything I’ve seen says Reddit has been completely unaffected by the changes made and they’re still getting more user signups, engagements and interaction/posts than ever.
Tik Tok also seems to be growing strong.
Twitter is a genuine laughing stalk and is pulling major shit…but everyone still seems to be using it regularly.
if you have been back to reddit, they might have growing numbers (probably due to shitty practices forcing you to use their app instead of mobile browser) etc. but the quality of discussions and the amount of bots just reposting the same comments skyrocketed.
I mean it’s a huge site, it won’t die, but if you look at it that way, Facebook is still alive, do you have a desire to spend time on that site though?
Pleased to say I haven’t been back to Reddit (except to scrub my entire history there to nuke my account). Reddit quality going completely down the toilet is something seen long before these changes were made. It’s really sad to see that companies aren’t forced to make better products because people will put time and money into these shit platforms regardless.
I have been back to reddit to check things out from time to time. The quality has definitely degraded, and their changes to not seeing NSFW stuff without logging in or using their app has me visiting less and less.
The comment section is still nice, but I just don’t see the quality it once had.
We can take a look at the comment count on major subreddits over time. Using the top 5 most commented listed on Subreddit Stats, and then using Social Rise to see comments per day (go down to “Graph of” and click “comments”).
- https://social-rise.com/subreddit-analysis/askreddit
- https://social-rise.com/subreddit-analysis/AmItheAsshole
- https://social-rise.com/subreddit-analysis/Starfield
- https://social-rise.com/subreddit-analysis/AITAH
- https://social-rise.com/subreddit-analysis/NoStupidQuestions
All except Starfield show comments cratering at the beginning of July, and they’re not coming back. Obviously, Starfield is a special case given the release of the game. AITAH was also just starting to pick up and then had its jugular cut out. Across the board, there looks to be a 3 or 4 times reduction in comment rates.
Now, perhaps the site is still OK among the more niche subreddits. That’d take a lot longer to analyze. But it’s clear the big traffic drivers are not pulling people in anymore.
While I overall agree this seems to be the case at first glance, I do notice that august there’s a huge drop that correlates with school starting up again. Probably need to compare to previous summers.
Edit: looks like it’s still pretty huge even accounting for that
The graphs there go back to 2018. There aren’t drops anywhere close to what we’re seeing.
Only a good 0.1% of reddit actually “creates content” with the rest having only engagement via comments. A good 99% of those also don’t do anything but lurk.
The people that make the content are also the ones more likely to switch to alternatives.
It’s an engagement loop so while the amount of signups and accounts is unchanged, there is simply less content to keep people around and to monetize.
the burden of proof lays in the eye of the beholder or whatever the quote is. i’m not a lawyer.
I don’t save sources in case of future need for references. I haven’t written a thesis on the matter. It came up in a few articles in my tech news RSS feeds. You’re welcome to not believe me and I would readily consider contrary information anyone else offers it.
Reddit is driven by search traffic and the results got a lot worse since a lot of good posters quit. They lost the content but not the users yet, I think it’s just going to take a long time before they truly see the damage in their traffic statistics!
Yeah Reddit just became more like Facebook which is disappointing, but not a dumpster fire.
Twitter is a radioactive dumpster fire that’s spawning mutant fire rats. There’s really no comparison.
No, but we are on lemmy so we obviously don’t care how well billion dollar companies are doing profit wise.
Put Unity somewhere up there for their recent debacle
Unity is hors-concours, they’ve already won this race. None of these social networks have managed to fuck up so badly as to fully destroy their reputations like Unity did.
I don’t know. Twitter running rampant as a nazi platform and safe harbor under Elon’s tenure/stewardship has been something else. That platform was always a mess/ bad but not to the degree Elon has cranked it up to. It’s full blown mania/ hysteria on that platform.
Edit: I miss the days of Twitter when I could’ve used it as my own personal news ticker/ use it to follow sports and my favorite sports reporters. It’s shocking but there are actual uses and use cases for Twitter. It used to not be social media trash.
An I the only one who thinks this is exactly what he wanted? Hated seeing the western social media trying to block disinformation, so he buys it and let’s the right wing extremists have free rein
They tried to apply a per install fee and make it retroactive for all games using the Unity Runtime. Meaning games made with Unity even a few years ago who didn’t agree to this would be charged each time someone uninstalls and reinstalls the game.
This is the second time they have tried to make retroactive changes, by the way, and they even deleted the part of the TOS that prevented retroactive changes.
It’s really just one of many things they have done in the last few years
To list out a lot of the many things: They’ve done forced RTO which is pretty internally disliked, fired a ton of people lately, a bit ago the CEO publicly said anyone who doesn’t prioritize monetization are “the biggest fucking idiots”, they bought an ad company known for making malware, and they keep getting in bed with military contracts including Lockheed. Oh and they cancelled their example project game Gigaya which I’m still bitter over
