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.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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?
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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."
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VC meddling
In this case, Advance Publications is the group pulling the strings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
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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.
Go go capitalism!
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:
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Embrace: large company creates a really stable and well moderated instance that federates with almost everything to attract users
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Extend: large company adds custom features to the instance that are incompatible with other instances
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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🍿 let it burn 🔥
Boy, things are going GREAT over there huh
Yeah things are going soooo well
Probably because I just deleted my account over there and deleted all posts and comments I ever made
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.
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