- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
You must log in or register to comment.
It feels weird to want history to repeat itself, but I’m really hoping Reddit has to deal with the ironic situation of users migrating from the platform en masse due to awful management decisions.
I’ve said it (with a different wording) on some post on reddit, I’m saying it again here: I want history to repeat itself. Not because I have a sadistic need to see reddit fail, but because this will ultimately be better for the users.
All of these protests are a nice sentiment, but I can’t help but think the take I’ve read from some people is right: this is all a “door in the face” technique from Reddit to get people to accept a more reasonable compromise on pricing that they were going for all along, but without taking as much of a PR hit. So people will be relatively happy, and meanwhile reddit will have squeezed redditors just a little more, as they have been doing little by little in the last years. It’s a boiling frog scenario.
So this protest may well “reverse” this specific situation, but it won’t reverse the general trend on governance on Reddit that has been slowly going on for a few years already, mostly around the time that Victoria got canned.
So, to that end, I really want to stop using reddit regardless of the outcome of this debacle. Lemmy seems promising, although it does have its own set of problems. But it’s still on its infancy, I’m sure it’ll grow and at least some of these problems will be fixed.
I don’t want to sound like an elitist, but I guess I will regardless: the most important number of people simply don’t care.
I think it’s safe to say that the people who will be affected by the new API pricing and other decisions, as well as the people who want to protest at least some of it at least somehow (be it boycotting for a few days or migrating to fediverse in any capacity) are simply not the demographic that the Reddit board really cares about. Not necessarily because they’re evil, anti-privacy, Machiavellian moneybags (they still are), but because Reddit is a business, a big one, and big businesses care about money more than anything else.
I’m not really optimistic about the boycott and any other aftermath. I think the best we’ll see is influx of users on lemmy and other instances, which is good, but that’s about it, and I’m fine with it.
Part of me thinks that while a majority of folks will remain on reddit, the most active, engaged members will leave. …the mods, the people posting original content, the people posting the most replies.
Over time, the content on reddit could become even more stale, repetitive, and low quality.
agree here. it will be like bots talking to bots.
Kinda feels that way already, honestly.
Right? I felt like all the top comments were always the same on all the subs, usually lame jokes that have been done to death on the rest of the site.
Whatever your political leanings are…this is ridiculous:
It’s just easier to separate on the political subs. But imagine something like that right there pushed out in subs you don’t really think to look for it in, with a totally different message.
Big agree. Supposedly I was in the top 1% of reddit commenters last year. Now I’m here, dipping my toes in the Lemmy waters. I’m sure I’m not the only one. The comments section makes reddit for me, and if all the commenters and moderators leave it, then it will be an even bigger cesspool.
Oh, I agree with you. Whatever happens here, it won’t mean an exodus en masse from Reddit to Lemmy ( or to any other platform for that matter) on the immediate future. Reddit will bleed users, only in a long timescale.
I’m not as sure as you are about how things will play out exactly, so for now I’m just watching the situation with curiosity. But I’ll say this: while the majority of users don’t care, those who DO care I (want to) believe are also the ones that generally tend to generate higher-quality content, while those who don’t care (again, I want to believe) tend to be either lurkers or generate lower quality content, although the split here might be closer to 50/50 - we don’t know. But in that case, one likely scenario is that in one or a few years Reddit will have so much low-effort and low-quality content that it will just naturally lose any appeal, and people will move on to something else.
although the split here might be closer to 50/50 - we don’t know
I’m sure reddit knows where the majority of their content comes from(API pull or not) and they seem to think it’s worth losing them.
3rd Party mobile apps will make people think a bit. once moderation goes to crap and everything gets worse, that will make a dent, but a slower one.
I think the minute they get rid of old.reddit.com they will see a giant loss of people.
Then all thats left are the people who like reddit looking like facebook
One thing I’ve realized is that people use reddit in all sorts of different ways. I never look at the memes / pic subs, I 99% only care about conversation subs. And pretty specific ones at that, I guess /r/movies and /r/tv might be the most generic, followed by /r/anime - but I also don’t spend much time in those subs either.
The subs I spend a lot of time in I can either get the same elsewhere /r/news isn’t exactly special for a news feed lol…
And for like /r/askphotography or /r/photography there’s discord already, with some mastodon thrown in I guess (though I think thats more like /r/itap).
The ones I hope sort of migrate over are /r/sysadmin but somehow as a work thing I’ll just go there on old.reddit.com till that dies, at which point I’ll just do without. I expect by then either there’ll be other options I’ll re-find / find, or maybe GPT replaces it lol.
Yeah, reddit I see is different from the one other people see on /r/all since I have so much stuff blocked on my third party app and through RES on browser. Without it reddit is filled with memes or tiktok and twitter videos and content, which makes sense as the demographic has changed and stuff like following accounts started happening.
I think the new users of Reddit are happy with it, and it’s more the long time users who don’t make a majority of reddit that are starting to feel pushed out.
deleted by creator
But 3rd party app users are often content contributors or mods or the ones answering questions. I feel like reddit is about to use a chunk of real human active users
Me too honestly. The people who want (or prefer) a more centralized, commercialized web can stay on reddit, and those who don’t have lemmy, kbin, mastodon, bbs boards, and so on.
What would they be migrating to? Neither Lemmy nor Tildes seems to want to take on a mass exodus. Both have said they are not Reddit replacements and they don’t want to be either. I’ve been trying to figure out where people are actually headed to. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, outside?
Hard to say. I used “hoping” because I still have an irking feeling that this won’t ultimately result in much change. I think a small amount of reddit’s base will be upset and may migrate to a different platform (like lemmy, beehaw, kbin, etc.), but the vast majority of reddit’s base won’t actually understand or care about these changes. The group of users that does decide the leave the platform will have multiple options though and I don’t suspect the number of users to truely be unmanageable for any of these places. This is just my opinion though.
Really looking very “investor focused” 🤢
Alexis Ohanian, founder of rival site Reddit, said in an open letter to Rose (of Digg):
this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”
Time really is a flat circle.
Also I only made that top comment to test Lemmy/Mastodon interaction. Hi from Mastodon! The fediverse is cool!
I’d not say a flat circle.
Mark Twain has this wonderful quote - “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”
Yup, if you don’t learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it.
Sisko : [on the image of his dead wife] I don’t know if you can understand. I see her like this, every time I close my eyes. In the darkness, in the blink of an eye, I see her… like this.
Prophet : None of your past experiences helped prepare you for this consequence.
Sisko : And I have never figured out how to live without her.
Prophet : So, you choose to exist here.
[Sisko nods]
Prophet : It is not linear.
Sisko : [sobs] No. It’s not linear.
How are you commenting on a thread from mastodon?
@luna just paste a lemmy URL into the search bar of a Mastodon client! They all run on the same backend basically. That’s the magic of the Fediverse/ActivityPub
That is so, so cool, thank you!
VC meddling
In this case, Advance Publications is the group pulling the strings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
Rest in peace, Digg. We dug that shit.
The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok (not just about TikTok)
Part of Cory Doctorow’s point is that this pattern emerges with all kinds of companies, especially ones where investors are demanding an outrageous return on a hasty speculation.
All this has me wondering. Lemmy and other fediverse sites should be resistant to enshittification. But how could American corporations screw that up? Could they start their own servers and instances, and somehow make them dominant? Or would that not be worth it to them?
It seems to me that capitalism has pretty much been trying to take over everything, with a lot of success. So I find myself wondering if it could happen here.
Theoretically some large company could use the “embrace, extend, extinguish” model to take over “open” standards. Microsoft was famous back then for using this strategy. It would look something like this:
-
Embrace: large company creates a really stable and well moderated instance that federates with almost everything to attract users
-
Extend: large company adds custom features to the instance that are incompatible with other instances
-
Extinguish: people stop using other instances as incompatibilities start impacting user experience. Big instance might also stop federating with other instances, so users are forced to use their instance to see content. After this, big company starts making the platform shittier to make more money.
They should officially add a fourth “E” to that model - Enshittification.
deleted by creator
Could go the same way as Gmail. A lot of people just use Gmail. Gmail has a lot of control in the email space because of that. Even though “Email” is an open standard/protocol Gmail has control through the spam filter. Its really hard to setup your own email server without getting a lot of spam so it isn’t that open anymore. These are some challenges for open standards as well.
-
We’re kind of already seeing it with Mastodon. The official app strongly pushes people toward mastodon.social which is a radioactive dumpster fire. And this isn’t even corporate America, it’s just the folks who own the name.
Why is mastodon.social so bad?
The biggest issue is that they don’t really moderate, so hate speech and bigotry have a greater presence there. I specifically remember a situation where multiple people were reporting things and it took them days (maybe a week or more? I can’t remember, but certainly several days) to take it down. And this happens pretty regularly.
I was thinking about experimenting mastodon too. What server so you recommend?
I am not at all qualified to make a recommendation for an instance for you to join, I’m sorry! The server list on the Join Mastodon site has some good servers, some bad.
Thank you
Here is hoping lemmy is easier to moderate and doesnt end up like that.
There are several good mastodon instances, just not mastodon.social. Moderating is hard and you have to actually do it and not be afraid it’s censorship. Oh, and not being a fascist helps. I’m beginning to wonder about the mastodon.social admins.
deleted by creator
Your points are valid and you’re not wrong, but it’s exacerbated by the poor / lack of moderation as I commented elsethread. You can have a large number of users and still have a tolerable, even useful and pleasant, experience–r/askhistorians is my favorite example of internet moderation.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Apple’s iChat (precursor to Messages.app) used to do XMPP, too. I don’t think it federated, or if it did it was very short-lived, but all the big tech companies with chat services got their start with XMPP. It’s almost like it’s a great set of tools for communicating, which, sadly and ironically, open source tech seems to have moved on from. To be fair, I far prefer Matrix’s JSON to XMPP’s XML, but it’s a little disappointing that everyone forgets about XMPP.
deleted by creator
Many of the things that XMPP listed as extensions really should have been part of the core protocol, in my opinion.
deleted by creator
Perhaps a cartel of high traffic servers that block others.
It could absolutely happen here! But the nice part is that people can choose to engage with it. Whereas with reddit, you’re forced to engage with capitalism. Don’t want ads here? Switch servers and donate to a smaller one.
Go go capitalism!
I’m hopeful that lemmy reaches critical mass because of Reddit’s absurd policies.
It’s getting there… The Reddit wave should be enough to get us there if the servers hold up semidecently
Even if the servers don’t. I’d rather deal with downtime (aka forced detox😅) than the ads, the negative trolls, the dumb UI that constantly pushes their app, and so on. Reddit only works because it has so much fresh content. If that breaks down than so will it.
I just came in from Reddit. Much easier than going from Twitter to Mastodon.
If I could figure out how to participate from my existing fediverse account…that would be the true magic.
Ahh here it comes. Expect more - IPO layoffs (from personal experience) are definitely a thing
May I ask what the whole “IPO” thing is?
Initial Public Offer. Basically, the company going public on the stock market. They tend to try and look “shiny” before going public to make them attractive to buyers who want to make money from investing into the company.
In my experience (from working a place that has done this) they will do some waves of layoffs and make some operational budget cuts, as well as sometimes freeze some capex spending so the books look juicier. This includes things that may cause long-term harm, for short ish (under a year) gain.
Script is pretty similar with most companies that do this in tech, with predictable results.
Firstly I want to really thank you for taking time to write up this response.
Anyways it definitely makes sense what reddit it doing, although it’s no excuse for being such a little bitch. So in other words, let them burn lol
To be fair, most tech companies had layoffs in the last six months and it seems that most were bigger cuts. Also, my best guess is that Reddit has been unprofitable/burning cash from the beginning (~18 years) - that can’t and won’t last forever.
Honestly, I never really figured how something like reddit (or most social media) was going to be profitable to begin with. At least in a long term sense. They’re entirely dependent on ads, but ads don’t make a lot of money unless you’re running the network. So you end up being an ad business, not a social media business. But of course, no one wants to watch an ad before / after every post - yet that seems to about be where reddit is coming to. And these people don’t want to pay to be on social media, or else things like “The Well” would have been much bigger than they are (how many people are clamoring to pay $15 a month lol).
I just also think, if you haven’t found a way to make money in 18 years, it seems like a foolish bet that you’ll be able to keep running the same kind of business and now find a way.
This is also very true. Tech sector has been doing layoffs and admittingly these ones are pretty tiny in comparison to some other places, which is another factor why I think there will be more. And burning cash is quite true, which is part of why their investors are probably pushing hard for them to be ready for an IPO.
The only thing I ask myself right now is: Do they get rid of porn subs before IPO or shortly after?
Probably restrict them more before IPO would be my guess
The real questions
Agreed. I think the post-IPO layoffs will be aggressive in Reddit’s case.
It’s not clear to me how reddit could possibly “grow”. They’ve hit peek influence, and ad-revenues haven’t really been a growth factor that has excited investors. They’re not really a technology powerhouse like Facebook or Google - all they have is their central product. So, when the IPO drops, all I can see for reddit is a future of aggressive layoffs and strong enshittification of Reddit as they seek capitalistic eternal increasing growth.
Yeah Reddit would make an excellent private company with the right owner and likely some re-structuring, but as a public company ooh boy.
Outside some niche subs I’m not on there more than once a day just to see if my lemmy subs missed something, and it’s my last form of social media outside discord/matrix, so if lemmy does take off enough I’ll probably only be there for the odd technical search, which I suspect lemmy will take care of in time.
🍿 let it burn 🔥
Probably because I just deleted my account over there and deleted all posts and comments I ever made
Boy, things are going GREAT over there huh
Yeah things are going soooo well
Oh no! Anyway…
Unfortunately the responsible for the shitshow aren’t in the 5% who will have their lives upended.
Sympathies to them, yes.
Ah yes pre-IPO wallstreet pleasing. If I remember correctly wework also pulled this, and so did a few others.
The way things are going, they will be laying off many more soon.
Totally a sign of an ultra-successful IPO!
The fucked up thing is that it kind of is…layoffs of this kind almost always have a positive impact on stock prices, which is why they do them. Gotta love capitalism!
Disgusting, this is is why this system needs to die, infinite growth is unsustainable, like a cancer, fucking over people is seen as a good thing for “business”, how infuriating.
Yeah, upon reflection you are right… this looks to be Reddit saying “notice me, potential shareholders, I’m so efficient!”
Some people have been saying a 2-day blackout isn’t going to do much. But if they’re struggling financially it will most likely really hurt them.
They’re not doing this because they are struggling. Its a common tactic for shitty corporations to do so it looks like they made a shit ton more money and can claim losses on their taxes
Hopefully if the 2-day blackout is unsuccessful they’ll extend it or plan more blackouts.
I’d imagine so… it makes sense to me to start with 2 days, and then go from there, rather than starting with the “nuclear” option.
Does Reddit have the power to un-blackout the subreddits? I.e. Overrule the mods and open things up? I feel like, as in most cases, there are a modest sized group of high caring individuals that will reject/boycott/cancel reddit, but the majority of users, casual and the ones that make reddit their life, will just continue on, only slightly inconvenienced.
Yes Reddit could do that… but mods are extremely valuable, and a lot of subs would stop working without them. Reddit has already been moving to big subs being moderated by Reddit employees, and it generally kills the sub.
Reddit is big enough that it probably won’t die quickly (e.g. like Digg did), but my guess is that this kind of policy shows that the best days of Reddit are in the past.
Reddit is big enough that it probably won’t die quickly (e.g. like Digg did), but my guess is that this kind of policy shows that the best days of Reddit are in the past.
i think twitter is a good model for how we might expect this to go: a slow but undeniable decay into a worse, less functional, generally more miserable site to be on. when the decay will end? who knows. but there’ll likely be an obvious before and after, and an equally obvious point where the site goes from a vanguard of influence online to a social media backwater.
Agree, although it could happen even slower than Twitter. Musk taking over has been a huge shock to the community, and killing off third party apps is only one of the many changes he’s made in a few months. Even if Reddit sticks of their guns on API charges (which they might not), I doubt they’ll do anything as drastic again for a while.
True, they likely have smarter people at the helm than musk
in fact a good metric for this might be when reddit stops contributing anywhere near as many productive search results as it currently does. that’s undeniably a big use of the site for people so it’d be noteworthy for that to disappear (and despite itself being a symptom of bad things it’d probably be quite bad overall, given the state of online generally right now.)
While i basically never used twitter, i dont see it dying. Some sources post decresing userbase some are saying that after the big hit things started to go back to normal People forgets. Today they protest, tomorrow they bend.
@AnagrammadiCodeina @alyaza what is normal? Bird site lost people even before Musk.
deleted by creator
If that’s true, it’s even more asinine. A small number of users make numerous API calls from third-party apps, and in doing so, create all the content that the majority of users are perusing with ads? The quest for short-term gains so often harms long-term viability in corporate America, and I truly just don’t understand how we keep hiring C-level people that keep making the same mistakes over and over
Because C-Level people are more about “how can this company make money” and less about “how can this company treat its workers/customers well” (unless the latter leads to the former).
They are told that increasing value for the investors is the thing that matters. If you have to make “tough choices” that abuse the workers or destroy the brand, oh well. It’s worth it if that revenue number keeps going up. To them, it’s an acceptable loss to keep the board happy.
Every company that has VC, investors, or stock is going to be like this at one point or another. It’s just getting more blatant and obvious now. Disney, WB, Netflix, Twitter, Reddit…it’s a list that just keeps growing.
I remember seeing someone say that it’s possible they want to monetize using their APIs to train AI on user content. Currently it’s basically free for someone like OpenAI to do it.
deleted by creator
For sure it’s unconfirmed. The only things we really know for sure are:
- Reddit wants money for API calls
- Their monetization structure is unreasonable
- The only possible outcome of their monetization structure is the death of third party apps
- Reddit is an American company and conducts itself with the same grace and farsightedness as most of them
Which leads be to the conclusion that the thing you’ve said is quite possible
I’m not American, but isn’t it mandated by law over there to do stuff like this, to create the maximum profit for shareholders?
Forgive my ignorance of US laws!
