Reddit has no idea how lucky it is as a platform. I've met and interacted with and learned from some of the most intellectual down to earth people on Reddit. It's a real shame. Hopefully those users will find other platforms and get away from the parasite that Reddit is becoming. And they want to go public? Need a new CEO.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Not to be all the way "that guy", but in a capitalist framework, its death was inevitable.
Their only hope of staying that great platform long-term is the Jimmy Wales route, which they were not remotely prepared to go down.
If you are running it as a business, enshitification is inevitable. Sooner or later.
Meta is a capitalist social media company and they seem to be doing okay. Facebook might be uncool with the kids these days but it's still massive. And Instagram and WhatsApp are still very popular.
I think the difference between Meta and Reddit is that I bet Meta would issue some sort of apology and carefully crafted PR if they found themselves in Reddit's current situation. But Reddit doesn't even seem to care about angering its users, which just feeds the anger more.
Meta is doing great if all you care about is liking pictures of your nieces and nephews. That's not totally fair, they do allow niche communities to post information and share photos. But there's no where near the thought provoking discussion that Reddit or Lemmy provide.
They are also heavy-handed with moderation and auto-moderation. I'm in a private tabletop wargame group, and a popular game from the early days of wargaming is called Third Reich, say that on Facebook, and get a 30-day ban.
"The working class and thought provoking discussion are surplus to society's needs. Kill 'em all and get it made overseas."
Depends on a country. In Poland Facebook is the place for discussions in many many communities gathered on Facebook groups. They have all the Reddit vibe of sharing informations with similar variety of topics from cats to serious military analytics.
The difference is Facebook doesn’t want to be indexed so those posts never reach beyond Facebook audience.
Meta is just a shell of its former self these days. I went back a few times recently and I shit you not : 3 out of 4 posts on my feed are sponsored or suggested content. Almost nothing of my friends, it's just full of garbage people are trying to sell, or clickbait videos.
I'm more of a lurker on there, but I have the Facebook Purity extension that hides all that crap. It's a bit of a shock when FB changes their code and the author has to catch up.
Facebook has been stagnant for a while, as they focused on pushing advertising and monetising users. It's not just "uncool", it's broken what made it good in the first place. I left Facebook a few years ago due to it's enshittification, and it's very very different to what it was right back at launch. It's a very similar issue to Reddit's but just manifesting in a different way.
Meta bought Instagram and Whatsapp to stay ahead of it's competition, particularly with younger users when it comes to Instagram. It's increasingly pushing ads on Instragram and trying to monetise users, and at the moment trying to monetise Whatsapp by getting businesses to pay for access via new tools. They've already changed terms of services on Whatsapp to the benefit of businesses and Meta, and are trying to merge it in with Facebook and Instagram messaging. On all platforms it is harvesting and selling user data.
Meta's revenues fell for the first time in 2022, and profits are also down, plus the "metaverse" is not succeeding despite heavy investment. Expect "enshittification" to accelerate as ultimately Meta cares about it's share price more than anything else, and shareholders in the tech space expect year on year growth. Meta's pivot to the Metaverse is because the company knows there is not much growth left in it's core social media products, and also a lot of competition it's struggling to beat (TikTok for example).
Meta is treading water at best, and it already monetises it's users and disrespects their privacy and data in ways that people wouldn't tolerate if they understood what is going on. I honestly wouldn't hold Meta up as a company that Reddit should look to for good PR.
This is an important point. Just because a platform is profitable, doesn't mean it hasn't been enshitified. It's far more likely to have been enshitified to drive profits, imo.
And the underlying problem is capitalism itself. There's nothing wrong with making money. But capitalism is based on the pursuit of infinite growth and profit, which of course is impossible, which means that every capitalist enterprise is doomed to follow the same predicable path of enshittification and eventually collapse.
Capitalism is a plague on society—a malignant cancer on humanity.
They don't care.
Pump and dump.
Inflate reddit's value in the short term by any means, IPO, cash out. Watch reddit implode after they've left.
Facebook is a repository for aging, red-cap-wearing boomers. Meanwhile, Meta is focusing all efforts on Instagram, which becomes shittier by the day as they attempt to transform it into whatever competing service is most successful—currently TikTok.
Enshitification does not mean it becomes unpopular. It means it becomes non-valuable. If Instagram disappeared tomorrow, there are other platforms that will happily absorb those users because nothing important happens there anymore. Facebook is much the same; the only reason to engage on FB these days is because you are trying to do some kind of locals thing or neighborhood association nonsense.
I recommend you read the essay for enshitification, because I think you're mistaken my use of the word for a random pejorative instead of a description of a process that platforms go through in which they become bad for their users.
Reddit, maybe, will have a longterm position as "a place you go to for product reviews". Unless most people do the right thing and nuke their posting history. But it's gone down the enshitification road where it intentionally squanders its value for profit.
Meta is a cesspool. Financial success ≠ good for end users.
Meta also does A LOT of data harvesting, which is what drives profits for them. Due to anonymity, Reddit could never really do the same. Meta, Instagram, and Whatsapp all serve as different routes of recurring revenue for Meta, they can park millions of users on each platform and sell the data collected to interested advertisers. Reddit could never really do the same, so they come up with the next best (worst) thing.
Hence why capitalism* sucks.
*Not to be confused with commerce.
Hopefully they will go to Lemmy and Kbin.
I wish /u/iamthatis would create an Apollo analog for Kbin. His app was such a great combination of ease of use and granularity
He's announced he's working on something for one of the services (can't remember if it's Lemmy/kbin or whatever and can't find it).
Kbin doesn’t have an open, documented api (or I lost ability to find docs) so all the apps now are not gonna happen.
It's still in development. There's a contributor who's working on the API endpoint, trying to get out an MVP of it, but realistically for someone new I'd expect it to not be perfectly stable for a while . Great that it's in active dev though!
For those keeping up at home, "encouraging the submission of sexually-explicit content in previously safe-for-work spaces" is now against the rules, since marking a subreddit NSFW is also against the rules.
But what it really boils down to is their system not requiring users to opt back into a subreddit after it switches to NSFW. It's an edge case. So they call it a rule violation instead.
I think I’m ready to delete my post history now. If this is the deal they’re offering then I’m taking my content. Subreddits protesting is a losing battle since they can just take control. The best way to protest is to keep them from profiting off your posts by removing them
Don't delete, edit and leave your account and comments in an edited form. Delete your submissions. My chosen text: "Spez doesn't get to profit from me anymore. Stop reverting my comments." You may want to have that account handy in case there's some additional shenanigans required down the road.
Redact.dev can do this automatically.
My question is: if you change or append your comments to include the words Fuck Spez, will the shadowban bot auto-hide all of your content from the rest of the users on the site?
One way to find out.
Remember you can only edit/delete content on subs that are restricted/public. Private ones, you cannot, so if you are nuking you need to keep going back and re-nuking as subs turn back on.
What if every mod stopped working for Reddit?
To quote a professor in a documentary from the 1980s, “Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!“
One should better back off. He is a scientist.
@botlt_test. Well Reddit was bound to do something like this. They were kicking them in the wallet and basically saying screw you. That said if the community voted to allow it as a rule change, then Reddit should not object more than perhaps request a slight name change or identifier. In that case the community they are swooping in to defend actually said "Let's Do This!"
Kind of a wild situation: It's reddit's platform to do what they wish with....but the platform is completely worthless without mods and users contributing and putting the time into it.
Why would you spend time building a community somewhere only to be treated this way? Reddit's software isn't good enough to keep me there.
Yeah, I miss all the normies, but it does feel a little gross spending time there now.
I know the feeling. When I jumped ship from Twitter to Mastodon, every time I visited Twitter, I felt dirty just opening my own profile. This mixed in with the feeling of "why am I even here?"
Honestly this kind of thing is nothing but good news for Lemmy/kbin/fediverse. The worse the reddit protests get, the more reddit refuses to compromise, the more people it will push to alternatives.
Good. Time to say byebye to R$ddit. KBin ftw.
Post here for the memories.
Literally 1984
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