It’s honestly really sad what’s been happening recently. Reddit with the API pricing on 3rd party apps, Discord with the new username change, Twitter with the rate limits, and Twitch with their new advertising rules (although that has been reverted because of backlash). Why does it seem like every company is collectively on a common mission of destroying themselves in the past few months?

I know the common answer is something around the lines of “because companies only care about making money”, but I still don’t get why it seems like all these social media companies have suddenly agreed to screw themselves during pretty much the period of March-June. One that sticks out to me especially is Reddit CEO, Huffman’s comment (u/spez), “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive”. Like reading this literally pisses me off on so many levels. I wouldn’t even have to understand the context behind his comment to say, “I am DONE with you, and I am leaving your site”.

Why is it like this? Does everyone feel the same way? I’m not sure if it’s just me but everything seems to be going downhill these days. I really do hope there is a solution out of this mess.

  • zhaosima@kbin.social
    20·
    1 year ago

    I hope you’re right, sounds quite exciting!
    Could you describe what “webrings” were? I’ve read about them in a similar thread, but couldn’t find any info on them.

    • anon@kbin.social
      53·
      1 year ago

      I’ve been online since circa 1993 and for the first decade or so, discoverability was a challenge due to the lack of efficient search engines like Altavista or (later) Google.

      Webrings consisted in individual website owners (e.g., on Geocities) placing one or more banners at the bottom of their webpage linking to other like-minded sites, typically in quid-pro-quo manner (I link to you, you link back to me), or to a manually-curated directory of like-minded sites.

      This was when “surfing the web” meant exactly that - you would surf from one site to another using hyperlinking within web communities. Bookmarking was then how you kept track of the most interesting sites you came across.

      Now there is hardly a need for hyperlinking and bookmarking, since much of the content is centralized on a few platforms, and search engines take care of the discoverability of niche content.

      • cassetti@kbin.social
        17·
        1 year ago

        Phew I feel old remembering webrings lol. Crazy to think how much the internet has changed since those early days thirty years ago.

        Anyone else remember Infoseek? It was my favorite search engine because you could select to search within results to refine your search down to a single page of relevant results.

        • knoland@kbin.social
          6·
          1 year ago

          those early days thirty years ago.

          I misread this ad thirteen and though, “haha silly it was 20 years ago.” Then re-read it and realized it said thirty.

          Then I had to go sit down for a minute and contemplate my impending demise.

      • zhaosima@kbin.social
        12·
        1 year ago

        Thanks. I now realized, how I came to that conclusion: Last time this was discussed the person called it “link ring” and that didn’t not yield any reasonable results.

        Edit: And because notifications for comment replies are deactivated by default I didn’t even notice the person has corrected their wording. Still learning how to kbin :).

    • Unmarketable Plushie@pawb.social
      3·
      1 year ago

      So back when search engines were in their infancy, webrings were kinda a big deal. Essentially, they were collections of topic-related websites that agreed to mutually link to each other so that people could find content related to the pages that they were visiting. They kinda died out after Yahoo bought webring.org (where most webrings were controlled) and replaced all the webring control pages hosted there with Yahoo pages, and by the time they let go of the domain contemporary search engines had mostly rendered webrings obselete.

      However, there are definitely still webrings around. The official site of maia arson crimew (the hacktivist who made the news for leaking the no-fly list to select journalists) belongs to two webrings, for example. I can definitely see them making more of a comeback among computer enthusiasts if search engines enshittify themselves more.