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
The line has to go up.
The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don’t demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don’t sell and bail.
Now, with Twitter there’s a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn’t the place for it.
Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it’s money.
Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it’s Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they’re making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.
Facebook: I don’t even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it’s just ads.
Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn’t feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they’re a bad thing, just using an example)
Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.
Just to add my thoughts to your Facebook point:
I don’t use Facebook much but I do have an account for the sake of keeping connected to distant family I’d otherwise never speak to again. The rare occasion I’m directly contacted and open the app to see what’s up, legitimately every other post, sometimes several in a row, is some kind of ad or sponsernd Post. Legitimately my entire timeline is one massive ad reel, I cannot fathom how people keep using the platform. Literally anything else would be better
Maybe its a feature, not a flaw.
Maybe Facebook is not only for connecting with family and friends, but also for shopping (ads)
Lol, never seen someone justify ads as such, gave me a chuckle
It’s pretty bad, the content you want to see the least is what’s always at the top of your feed. It’s like they are intentionally trying to piss you off.
Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn’t feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they’re a bad thing, just using an example)>
Oh it totally is a bad thing. They show women in an oversexualized lewd context to a target audience that consists to signifact extent of children. Don’t misunderstand this as moralism. I’m not coming from a conservative perspective that wants women to be all buttoned up or something. I’m just being critical of a company normalizing the objectification of women (or anyone) to children for the purpose of making money.
I may have worded it wrong (mainly because morning coffee takes forever to hit me). I meant to say that I don’t think those hot-tub streamers are bad because of what they do, I just don’t think they belong on Twitch.
Yep, it’s this. Despite how it seemed in the 2010s investor capital is not free money. Investors want it paid back many multiple times over and they’ll risk destroying the underlying product if necessary.
Facebook: Mainly because of Facebook groups. They’re pretty whacky, have a lot of fun normie non-degenerate drama, and a well moderated facebook group is more wholesome than any reddit sub in my experience.
It is relaxing to not have the hivemind like reddit or having users constantly one-up each other like twitter. Also wayyy less bot accounts in Facebook groups.
Although it is declining because of FB’s shitty censors and bans, the group scenes are very much alive and fun.
Yep, i have Facebook for groups, events, and also local services.
Oh yeah I forgot about the Local Events and Services part. and Marketplace.
I don’t think there is any replacement for FB in local event organisation. And with how crap google is rn, it is much easier to search facebook marketplace for local services and have a better outcome.
Mobilizon is an event organization site that is part of the Fediverse but the benefit of the corporate sites is widescale adoption.
TIL
That looks like a nice piece of tech, but you’re right about the adoption part. Getting a minimally significant number of people to sign up for this in my country in gonna be a herculean effort
I hate how much of the entire internet experience is focused on ads, ads, ads. I go out of my way to block trackers so the ads often aren’t that relevant and really transparent. Buy, consume, give us your data, repeat. But what would the alternative look like?
Surely wouldn’t it be easier for them to just inject ads into the API and keep it cheap?
IF that’s something they can do? I don’t know. I don’t know a thing about backend work on third-party programs.
There’s a part of the that thinks Reddit is the same way and just went “Hell with it, use us or nothing at all” and nukes the whole API except for the big-rollers.
I wouldn’t even know who would pay such a high price for that anyway, outside of advertisers and algorithm scrapers.
It is possible for them to return sponsored posts via the API.
Apps will request something like “Give me the first 100 posts from the subreddit /r/aww, using the sorting Hot”. And then Reddit can return 95 actual posts with sponsored posts sprinkled in between every so often.
Like everything that gets advertisements, ad-blockers will be built. While technically possible, look at the quality of SponsorBlock for YouTube. Serving ads in the API will clutter up feeds, data gathered by automatic programs or moderation tools, and it’s impossible to tell (on the Reddit server side) if they have actually been viewed.
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?
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?
Their death is waaaay overdue. We literally jumped one cycle because the 2008 financial crisis and 0% interest rate.
Now there is no free money, and they need to extract value to seem a good investment, so they canibalize themselves and turn into shit.
Most of Elon stuff is doomed once reality catches on. Same with Uber. Same with streaming platforms. Same with Meta.
Also there is a new/old boy in the bubble and burst town, Microsoft and their AI push. It’s going to destroy them pushing them into overspending to keep up.
Facebook dies due to privacy concerns and misinformation. Twitter under threat because Elon. Imgur just deleted their NSFW content. Reddit with its API pricing. Twitch executives also getting greedy. Youtube has been going down for years.
It feels like we’re seeing the natural life-cycle of social media companies in real time.
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.
I think this is the most tragic thing about leaving Reddit… The tech subs, the politics subs - those are easy communities to make replacements for on any platform. But the in-depth analyses and discussions of Star Wars lore or joke communities around Garfield will be tougher to replicate I think.
Yeah, I heard someone pitching the old let “AI” handle it line. Machine learning can’t moderate those communities to even a mediocre standard. It’s just too variable, subjective and nuanced. Even actual members of communities can be crappy at moderating them!
Even actual members of communities can be crappy at moderating them!
Ummm…have you been on Reddit? 😆
As a mod of a small community on reddit, I’m weary of building up from scratch again. The sub is about polls, which isn’t a feature on Lemmy. So I guess I’ll just give up on my moderating hobby for now.
I get the impression that owners of large servers aren’t too interested in the growth from Reddit. I think some post even said that using “Reddit refugee” as a reason for application for an account is gonna get you rejected.
Which is fine because you can join another.
I think it’s an important lesson in impermanence.
The net will always have good bits and bad bits, but they won’t always stay the same.
I hate it when things change, but you’re totally right.
Same, but ReddPlanet. I paid for Redd, but not Apollo because you can’t convince me to pay for something if I don’t have a chance to see if the features are worth it.
ReddPlanet, slide, Relay were all amazing.
I recently saw my wife use the official Reddit app. I… can’t take that kind of user experience.
What about switching back to YouTube from twitch? Some streamers I follow stream on both.
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.
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.
Course-correcting, maybe? Web 2.0 really overstayed its welcome with Facebook/Twitter/Reddit being such dominant websites over the past 15+ years. Various reasons of greed, narcissism, and other factors finally popped the bubble.
I’m really enjoying the Feder-verse or whatever we’re calling it since decentralization can prevent a lot of this nonsense from ever occuring. It feels like a new approach to the late 90’s era of message boards and such.
This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.
I’ve always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn’t invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I’m probably on here too much though!
Same. Never cared about Twitter, but I like new internet stuff, so I got on Mastodon. Never used it and forgot about it for years. Came back to it with all the Elon stuff and realized the instance was dead, so I created a new account on another instance to never use. The point is, like you said, Lemmy is something I will actually use if the community continues to grow and sticks around.
Mastodon has a place, just isn’t for some people. I found the same problem you had with it. Just like how conversations work better in a Reddit-like style of communicating.
I think we do have a sufficient number of users now to keep going irrespective of how reddit fares. Communities are beginning to form and even if there is no futher mass exodus from reddit, I think Lemmy will be fine and will see organic growth over time.
I’ve already noticed I’m spending more time of Lemmy than reddit since the past few days.
It’s easier to spend time on Lemmy for me because the comments are actually worth reading. Seems like the type of person who’s drawn here are actually interested in holding a conversation vs. reddit where it’s about saying something witty or whatever to get them upvotes
Agree with you on this! The migration was super smooth, and even tho, its still quiet small comparative to reddit… It seems to be growing quickly, and seems pretty polished for something in such infancy
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.
Agreed. I really miss stuff like StumbleUpon and Google Reader which were my mainstays before Reddit.
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.
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.
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.
