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?
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.
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This is the corporate ethos now. The company I currently work for requires a minimum of 10% growth annually or we are failing. 9% and we are facing layoffs. Doesn’t help that we have a fixed customer base and new installations are a year long affair with RFPs and million dollar bids. I believe perpetual growth is a myth that will eventually catch up to all these corporations, but what do I know since I don’t have an MBA or a three letter title starting with C.
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.
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.
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.
That’s fair. I just associate it with Musk since it’s become much more blatant through him.
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.
There is nothing too complex for the ingenuity of advertisers to corrupt eventually.
Decentralized social media needs the users to understand the importance of keeping it free from corporate interests.
This fediverse is a version of the commons, and it’s up to each of us to acknowledge this in order to keep it that way.
