First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?
Doctorow’s Enshittification describes it pretty much dead-on. It’s basically the cancerous form of late-stage capitalism that we’re living under now.
Spot on! We are seeing it happen before our eyes and I love it!
Definitely accurate to the situation lol
Thank you for this! I never really thought about late stage capitalism but this post helped a lot.
Wow that’s a great read!
The timeline split after harambe. This is known
We’ve reached the end of the VC-funded golden age where they are all now demanding a return on their investment, hence why the screws are now all getting tightened.
I’m honestly surprised it even got this far. It was just common sense to me, even a decade ago, that companies that burned through VC cash and tried building up user bases with little regard for actual profitability couldn’t possibly keep it up forever.
It also coincides nicely with web3 becoming a less nebulous thing and investors starting to shift their focus from user created content to practical applications of ai.
is reddit a zirp phenomenon?
I have a sinking feeling that these moves are not about money, but more about power and manipulation. If you squeeze these user bases such that the savviest users are forced out, those more likely to ask “Why?” about damn near anything, you will own access to a group of people that can be influenced to think/do/buy whatever the top management and/or majority shareholders want. If you lose a few million users, what does it matter if they were dissidents to your goals?
The twitter thing is sad, but honestly not a huge deal. I rarely used it anyhow.
The reddit thing is depressing, since I’ve been a huge supporter and user of Apollo for many years. It feels like getting stepped on and I feel for the developer Christian Selig who devoted so much time and energy to the app.
I hope nothing happens to Twitch in the way that Twitter and Reddit have though, the small time streamers I follow and support won’t survive a thing like that.
Reddit has so many small communities that the people in charge have absolutely no care for. I hope one of these services takes hold as a clear Reddit replacement so that they can be built back up.
The twitter/elon thing is hilarious. I honestly do think he accidentally got himself into quite the pickle and now his pride is keeping him there. As for reddit and twitch, I don’t assume these are the surface-level-dumb moves that we think they are. My guess is that this is a calculated means of rolling out the changes they actually want by:
- overshooting
- letting everyone get mad
- backing off to their actual changes (or something close)
- letting everyone think they’ve won
- and finally push forward a bit more once everyone is preoccupied with the next thing
Internet users love to cancel shit, but at the same time, are always looking for the next thing to cancel. So as much as people hate twitter or facebook or tiktok or youtube or windows or nintendo or chick-fil-a or whatever, they’re all just looking for an excuse to forget all about it, and continue using their product as quickly as possible. And corporations know that, so they’ve worked “giving them that excuse” into their plans.
For a minority of users on reddit, there’s a line. For me, it’s forcing me to use new reddit. If that happens, I just have to quit, I can’t stand it. I don’t want to quit, I have a lot of subreddits I read.
But I saw the stats for the old school users vs new reddit/app users, and we’re outnumbered. Reddit knows they might lose thousands of redditors but they don’t care because lots will just switch to their toxic app and if they lose 5% of the stubborn old folk then so be it.
The stubborn old folk are the ones responsible for creating a significant portion of the content on Reddit. While they may appear to be in the minority, without their content, casual users will be less inclined to use Reddit.
I’ve been wondering about that. You know if there’s a youtuber with 10 million subs, you’d think they’re a big, important star on the platform? And then you find out that youtube gets 80% of their ad revenue from kids watching Baby Shark on a tablet, and your 10 million sub youtuber actually isn’t that relevant at all.
Well I was wondering if there’s a reddit equivalent to that. Like maybe reddit gets 60% of it’s revenue from Indian cricket fans and we don’t even know about it. I’m sure sports fans in general are a lucrative userbase. And then places like /r/funny… basically imagine who would be less likely to use an adblocker and old reddit and the app, without caring too much. That’s low-effort content that basically runs itself.
At least, that might be what they are gambling on. I do agree with you that the old guard are very important for developing good content. I just don’t know if reddit cares about good content anymore.
The rub here is content moderation. Remember when Amazon carried brand name everything, then it slowly became shitty offbrand ZERBONO and AQUIVOO socket wrenches and alarm clocks?
That could be reddit’s future, times 10, if they don’t get a grip on their spam bot problems. In the last two months, my sub of 60k started getting tons of offtopic posts from bots. Users would flag them as quickly as they were posted, but even with third party tools, we were starting to have trouble removing them in a timely manner. Bots don’t sleep. Mods do. And without third party tools, blockers, all that…I shudder to imagine the cacophony of that many bots on subs like r/askscience.
It seems like a move to collapse the parts of the site that are not controlled by Reddit proper.
This is actually good for sites like Lemmy that have a more diverse and thoughtful user base. Reddit functions as a filter that takes on all of that thoughtless content so we are spare the bloat. I couldn’t care less if Reddit succeeds or not as long as Lemmy doesn’t turn into what it has become.
I’m ok with it. I like the tighter cozy feel of fediverse. there’s less antagonism and bloat.
Give it time.
That is to say, to the extent that we can, let’s be careful. We already see the same shit everyone criticizes Twitter for starting to show up on mastodon. It’s often not the platform that causes problems, it’s the people.
I think there needs to be a set of “commandments” for civil discourse on the internet. One specific rule I’ve made for myself but never heard anyone else mention is: don’t dogpile on downvoted comments. I think everyone feels a pull to do it, they see a controversial post that they agree with, they see the top few comments are more of the same…so they scroll down to the lowest voted replies, expand them if they’re hidden, get enraged by someone’s stupid world view, and jump into a flame war.
Some might lump that in with “don’t feed the trolls”, but I’ll counter with a second rule: it’s better to just not reply to someone than to accuse them of being a troll or a bot. There exist people who live with a wildly different set of information from you, and thus often have wildly different worldviews. And that’s ok. And if it turns out they actually are a troll or a bot, as long as you’re replying, they’re winning.
I agree. If someone makes an upsetting post, I ignore it. As far as my experience, engaging in it will only harm me. I see no value in responding. I even did a test. On RIF (it’s possible this is sitewide on all apps), if a post was in the karma negatives, I would have to click on it to see it. About 95% of the time, I agreed that I did not need to read that garbage, so I chose to ignore without expanding them. I appreciated all the pioneers that had to read that garbage at first and downvote it.
Anyway, there’s no sense in spending my leisure time becoming angry at internet strangers. I rather move on and engage in things that make me happy.
I do kind of think that if they’re downvoted so you don’t see them, I agree with you. But if no one ever challenges an idea, it easily appears as either consensus or maybe so obviously true no one can challenge it.
Very well thought out post and I agree with everything you’ve said. I still remember the outrage with Whatsapp and how everyone was moving to Signal. Once everything died down, people went back to their old habits and what was familiar to them.
An aunt asked me if she should delete her WhatsApp. I told her no. I knew most of the family would stay on WhatsApp even if they were virtue signaling now. Nowadays the WA group still has 40ish people and the telegram stayed at 20ish and my aunt is on both. I think that’s what most people do. They look around, stand up, breathe heavily, their heart rate goes up by 1.5% and they sit back down.
Great analogy yeah. I relate to the WA/TG thing. I was a relatively early adopter of Telegram and have seen multiple waves of people saying “fuck WA this was the final straw!!” with whatever mildly annoying update dropped. Then after about 2 weeks barely anything changed because, let’s be honest, most people don’t want to move to another messaging platform (it only works if everyone does it).
There’s a positive side to this phenomenon. For people like me that don’t like trends or people that engage in trends, having a trendy app helps filter those people out. I don’t have WhatsApp because of some philosophical value regarding the company. I don’t have it because I don’t want to interact with the people that use it. It’s great! The moment someone asks me for my WA, I say I don’t have one and note that I probably won’t be friends with that person. I also don’t want to be on long running 40+ members chat groups. That’s way too much meaningless information for me to process.
Big sites have made surfing the web so boring. I will end up spending the day on 2-3 sites. All this shake up will hopefully force me to look at more websites again.
You are right actually. I just find myself reloading reddit and the guardian. But the reason for that is that it’s hard to find good sites that have constantly updating and changing content. I will try my luck on the fediverse but I’m bummed about it. I hope I find some good stuff here.
It’s up to us to make the web/Internet not boring again. There are many ways to do so:
- Participating in the Fediverse
- Building your own web page and adding it to a webring
- Using alternative protocols, namely gopher, gemini, IRC, NNTP
- Using alternative search engines (wiby, marginalia, etc)
- Bulletin board systems
I just got into gemini! Sorta, just have a gemlog on gemlog.blue. I have to remember the early internet days where you just had to go from link to link to find interesting pages and check them again at my own will, but it is a nice little break from the everything that is the modern internet.
Agreed. I really miss stuff like StumbleUpon and Google Reader which were my mainstays before Reddit.
From everything I have observed, businesses are hunkering down for a recession in the next fiscal year. It explains the lay offs, the penny pinching, and puzzling decisions that look like business suicide.
For services that are free for users, advertising revenue and investment fund raisers are the only thing keeping them afloat. With banks like SVB getting seized by the FDIC, it’s starting to scare investors. Advertisers are seeing the writing on the wall that people will stop spending as much as they used to. We are also probably seeing jacked up pricing across the board because businesses are taking what they can before it’s gone.
So what’s left? Squeeze users for money. Additionally, shed users that actually cost them money and these tend to be power users. The question, which everyone seems to be assuming is a foregone conclusion, is if this shedding strategy will end up killing the service. In reality, we don’t know but the idealists would sure feel good if someone else ate their market share.
I’m just glad that federation is picking up steam in the social media space.
The reality is that nothing is really dying and nothing is really changing. Twitter is still fully operational and other than a small hit nothing happened. Twitch already did a step back. For Reddit we’ll see but only a really small percentage of reddit is using third party apps.
Hah! Are we so inured to the death march towards dystopia that it is surreal when something good happens? All of these large social media sites are privacy hating monopolies that actively disrespect their members and misuse their information.
They should die. Let them. We should celebrate!
I’m honestly excited about this reboot. I hope more people will realize that reddit admins and the platform Reddit Inc. is not the same site you signed up for back in 2008. It’s a corporate entity that must make profit—which means getting rid of unprofitable means of accessing content they want to gatekeep. No thanks.
As someone who has been on reddit for almost twelve years, this site is so much closer to how reddit used to be. It’s crazy how much garbage we’ve been putting up with for so long over there.
I’ve already mentioned a few times here how I have similar feeling. An added effect to that is actually leaving comments again.
At some point I stopped really engaging with reddit and became a passive lurker. I thought I simply grew out of it, but maybe it’s more about how the site stopped feeling like a community.
Or how it started feeling like everything on reddit eventually became a witch hunt of one flavor or another. The days of karmanaut or years later unidan may as well be forgotten history to modern redditors. If they’re brought up it’s for the drama or the cringe.
The feeling of actually enjoying them and how the community interacted with itself at that time has been lost.
I love that upvotes exist on Beehaw, but not downvotes. No more brigading. Now, if someone disagrees, they actually have to comment. Ideally, that leads to actual conversation instead of ME NO LIKE. ME CLICK DOWN ARROW.
The age of wholesome brigading is upon us. Thousands of friendly users descending comments, pivoting and posting comments of encouragement
About a decade ago it was pretty common for subreddits to “disable” downvotes. It was just a css hack so nothing but a cosmetic change, but I remember people saying similar things.
As I understand it, on lemmy it’s kind of the opposite. I’m not on beehaw so I can still see the downvote button, but it does nothing if I click it.
That’s good to know, I wasn’t sure how interacting with the downvote button would work cross-instance.
Remember Streetlamp LeMoose? There haven’t been any such memorable events on reddit in recent years. What about the ol’ switcheroo? You don’t see that anymore.
They are indeed as you said, forgotten history to modern redditors. Back in the day, it was a closer community, and these events were discussed for days and referenced for months if not years.
Like you said, reddit has been consistently losing it’s community aspect. I’m glad to have experienced it, but I think it’s time to move on.
The ol’ switcheroo on lemmy would be a great way to teach people how to do inter-instance links! I don’t think it’s possible right now to link specific threads or comments, but it would definitely be a fun way to show how federation works.
Damn, that’s a genius idea - I’ve seen people linking specific posts, at least, so I’m pretty sure it’s possible - let’s see if this works
The hard part is that while you can have relative links to communities (/c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml) it doesn’t work for individual posts, threads, or comments.
I assume it’s a difficult problem because those would have different ids in different instances?
Damn, Streetlamp LeMoose, thank you for that memory
Damn I miss the ol’ switcheroo
It is funny because I remember talking to someone way back who was complaining about all the changes Reddit was going through, and that the new CEO sucked and the censorship was destroying the quality of Reddit. I guess everyone knew it sucked back then, and it just continued to suck even more with each passing year.
deleted by creator
You how the saying goes: The apocalyse is already here, it is just not evenly distributed.
Agreed. I’ve gotten increasingly worried that the web has consolidated more and more. I’m actually very surprised to see some traction for new sites (especially the fediverse). I’m hoping more of the big internet companies trash their established positions and hopefully help inject some newer life into the internet
Oh, if only I could get past my cynicism that any large company will ever do anything decent and make something that benefits people without eventually fucking everything over.
COVID.
COVID changed everything. In an attempt to recover quickly, companies ramped up their abuses to new levels. While billionaires defending them all had their masks removed as the world collectively realized that it’s impossible to make a billion without exploring others.
Toss in back to the office mandates and rising costs while those same companies post record profits…all while the population is Uber sensitive to that kind of thing, and we’re in the middle of a not so quiet proletariat revolution.
Thanks to COVID a lot of people realized that despite the elites best efforts, the enemy isn’t left or right, it’s us versus the super rich. And it’s having a trickle down effect.
The infinite growth ended. COVID moved everyone online that it could. There’s no new people to move online, so there’s no future growth to promise, and they have to make money off of their existing userbase.
Theres many different lines to be on though.
I’d like to add that the WSB-GME event pulled reddit into everyone’s awareness, causing an influx of geberal FB and IG users to come pollute the site sith their influencing.
You know what, I never thought of it this way. Your timeline is definitely accurate.
I suspect that we’re at end-stage capitalism, essentially every company feels they should be constantly making record profits and they think of predicted profits as granted, when they didn’t reach predicted profits it was seen as losing money which in the CEO’s eyes meant they needed to increase their income to make up for losses and the only way for companies that rely on user generated content for revenue was increased advertising which is the route youtube is currently going for the rest they had no way they could see to increase their income till elon decided to crash twitter with introducing the payed blue checkmark. What we saw when elon did that was a failing company but what twitch and reddit saw was an opportunity to not be blamed for following musks example, funnily enough though they fucked up on the attempt and everyone saw them as money grabbing
This is it. When there are millions of people using a platform every day, the advertisers start foaming at the mouth. Corporate greed (capitalism?) Is a poison and will eventually destroy anything it touches.
Its really funny though cause as dwarf fortress proved when they released their game on steam its more profitable to not run a company solely for profits, as when you get down to the details profits get in the way of things people enjoy.
I think this is “normal” and the previous status was a glitch due to the low interest rates. Investors threw money at tech companies and didn’t care whether they made any money. Not any more. It’s now “make money or go bust”. I am not sayiny these new trends will make them money, but IMHO it’s what’s driving them
That is a great point. I never considered this to be an effect of interest rates increasing. But I think Reddit was already profitable.
But it recently went public and I think the board is like, “Make more money now!”
They really just want to get everyone on the Reddit app so they can collect user data to sell and to show advertisements.
Profitable is probably a big word here, but they were surviving and without any real ambitions, not a lot of money was necessary. Originally, the Reddit gold awards seemed to be enough for them to pay for server usage and the handful of developers/admins.
However, the last couple of years things felt like they were changing behind the scenes. More investors were attracted and growth became an objective. The low interest rates indeed meant a lot of money was available and that investors wanted more growth as there were plenty of alternatives that WERE growing. If your growth is/was disappointing, you’d lose the investors as they would go elsewhere. The current situation is likely just the tail end of that process.
I think you are right. Investors just want more money than they have and it is ruining the platform. I guess that is why I love these federated platforms. It is not really easy for them to be taken over.
They can, however, be misrepresented by media, to the general public, using sometimes fabricated other times exaggerated events. And that agenda can be pushed, more than ever from July onward, by lobbying. Not that I care, because I don’t give a **** about what other people think of the place where I spend my time, but a lot of people do. Even reddit had a time like that “oh, isn’t that the network where the CP / jailbait scandal broke?”. I’m sure Lemmy will have some of these growing pains.
Reddit hasn’t gone public yet (it’s planned for this year) and very likely isn’t profitable — we don’t know for sure because it hasn’t published its financials.
Was there some sort article or post, I only heard people say they will.
Thanks for the heads up. I thought that it already happened.
It’s the thing with capitalism, init. Moar!!
I dunno. A lot of the investors were (are) on waverides from previous success. There are absolutely loan-backed ones, but as one startup investor said to me “I look for 200-300% return in 5 years to not call something a failure.” With expectations like that, you hold to record profits even if 2/3 the companies you invest in fail.
Nah. They always wanted money.
twitter was overvalued. reddit has made a lot of questionable business decisions over the last decade or so but their recent API change will be their death knell. it feel like a cash grab. I personally only use Twitch to watch Bob Ross reruns :P
Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter seemed more like an extremely elaborate shitpost that went horribly wrong. It’s like Musk never intended to buy them in the first place but was legally forced to do so (he tried to back out of the deal beforehand.)
As for Reddit, that place has been going down the shitter since around 2016. Power users have ruined that site, especially the handful of moderators that control hundreds of subreddits between themselves. Spez is a blithering idiot who has done more to censor and subvert the site than Ellen Pao ever did (ironically, everyone accepted it and didn’t revolt against him because he wasn’t a woman.)
That being said, I really hope Steve Huffman doubles down on the API changes and kills Reddit as a platform. Nothing would make me happier.
Twitch and YouTube literally think they’re too big to fall and work actively to fuck over the content creator, when decent competitors like Rumble and Kick are coming along. Mixer could have been decent but Microsoft’s strategy was literally to offer two streamers nine-figure contracts and somehow think this would drive people to their Twitch-clone. At least Rumble and Kick are competently run.
That being said, I really hope Steve Huffman doubles down on the API changes and kills Reddit as a platform. Nothing would make me happier.
I think this all depends on their reaction to the blackout planned for the 12th. If Reddit starts taking over the default/large subs that shut down it’s 100% going to crash and burn. Not backing down on their API changes I think is an optimistic 60/40 in favor of Reddit chugging along albeit just a bit crappier for it all. (The 40% being a Digg situation that hopefully blows up their IPO plans and VC funding.)
I can certainly see Reddit’s admins staging a hostile takeover of all large subreddits, banhammering any moderator who takes part in the blackout, and installing their own yes-men.
But can you imagine the PR shitshow that would occur if Reddit suddenly deposed its most powerful users? Imagine if a major content creator like Linus Tech Tips, SomeOrdinaryGamers, Penguinz0 or Asmongold jumped on the ‘fuck Reddit’ bandwagon. It would be a major PR boost for any competitor.
Maybe I’m pessimistic but I have little to no faith that the blackout, especially if only 2 days for some subreddits, will have any impact at all. Most likely what will happen is everyone will just scroll like normal, get bored with no content and do something else. They’ll come back a few days later and everything will be normal. Most people probably really don’t even care, unfortunately. :/
For reddit itself, I think they’re going with game plan of throwing this shit out there and then going radio silent knowing that nothing is really going to happen. For them, no PR is probably the best move really.
I think a lot of the old core group will actually end up leaving by the end of this business. The question is will it matter. Can the site be successful as it transform itself into an also-ran tiktok-clone?
The good news is that those of us who move on won’t have to worry about it anymore.
I know that as soon as baconreader dies, my 14 year stint on reddit is over. I’m guessing I’m not alone and those using RIF and Apollo are also going away.
I hope lemmy is ready :D
You and me, brother. I’ve used Baconreader for over a decade and it was a great experience, but it’s time to move on.
The good news is that those of us who move on won’t have to worry about it anymore.
I’ll drink to that!
I’m treating reddit like an ex. Good luck, but not my problem anymore. If it succeeds, good for them. If it doesn’t, I probably won’t find out. I’ve got other things I rather focus on.
Spez is going to do an AMA tomorrow. That’s definitely going to be interesting…
It might be interesting to read about it on here because I’m not going back there.
I see that as a good thing. I don’t want all of reddit coming here and ruinng the atmosphere of this place.
I’m from reddit exodus, I was on fedi before. just moderate those evil and ban em from our nice communities.
Thanks for Rumble and Kick, first time I hear about them
Rumble is “that place which welcomed Andrew Tate and Sneako” after they both got banned from mainstream social media. They’re the right-wing free-speech platform.
Kick was formed by a former Twitch streamer (TrainwrecksTV) cause he thought that Twitch went too far in banning gambling streams. Plus he got the backing of Stake, a cryptocurrency-fuelled slot machine website, who are the main investors bankrolling his company.
Thanks for the context, doesn’t seem as appealing anymore ha ha
If I remember he said no once he had a closer look at the financials and cybersecurity reports under NDA, but at that point in a merger and non-compete it’s basically telling you “good, you’ve bought it, here’s what to plan for” - it’s not something a competitor can just peek in and then back out of.
