this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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It’s like they actively want to drive users away. I know a lot of people have said this, but it really feels like Reddit is about to have its Digg moment.
Honestly seems like a lot of major sites are imploding. Stackoverflow's mods are striking, Twitter is on a downward spiral and likely to go bankrupt this year, Reddit is axing itself, etc.
It'll be interesting to see what ends up happening to the internet after. I think a return to more niche forums or community-run things like lemmy is unlikely to be fully mainstream, but I think enough folks will shake off the major platforms onto these to get them really active.
Perhaps this will mark the end of an era. Running a social media company requires lots of money, and making it profitable is very hard unless you leach data off everyone. Perhaps investors will learn that there are better ways to make money.
I'm just not really sure what those other ways to make money could be. Other than monetizing a service outright via a subscription or selling a product to the users, I don't really see a good way for online social media to be revenue neutral or positive.
I was mainly thinking that investors should consider dumping their money on companies that have nothing to do with the social media. Making an online platform like this profitable has been proven to be very difficult, and investors should have learned that by now.
Profit ruins everything. Heck I don't even enjoy producing art or figurines or whatever if it's for profit. I'd rather be part of something driven by passion and interest in doing something for others than profit. Infinite growth is a really bad model... if humans grew indefinitely it wild be catastrophic, and claustrophobic...
Maybe the problem lies in the expectations. Normally, an investor wants the investment to grow forever, but that’s not realistic in the long run. There used to be lots of family businesses that only wanted a sustainable income. For instance, a bakery like that wasn’t supposed to branch out and spread to other cities. If they just keep on selling bread every morning to the locals, the family in question survives with that money, that’s enough. They just expect things to be sustainable, not exponential.
The best way in the modern capital environment is to pivot to algorithm-driven content like TikTok-- I think we're seeing the decline of traditional social media in general in favor of platforms that follow the TikTok formula.
Donations
Other than Wikipedia, which asks for donations pretty prominently every time you use it and has some substantial corporate backers, I don't know of any major projects that're wholly backed by donations. Blender and Krita I guess? None of which are really social media though
Huh I hadn't heard about Stack Overflow's protest. Found these articles:
"Stack Overflow strives to protect community content from AI firms, striking mods say “re-enable the data dumps”"
"Stack Overflow Moderators Stop Work in Protest of Lax AI-Generated Content Guidelines"
What's going on at SO?
This is a good summary of whats going on and why the mods are striking.
NewTumbl shut down last week as well, something not really covered. It's where all the NSFW content from Tumblr went.
I like that idea. I miss just participating in niche forums. Keeps me from being tempted to watch something grotesque or read rage bait.
They want to push everyone on their apps because they collect a ton of metrics that they can easily resell. Metrics are way harder to collect on browsers in a consistent fashion.
It's a natural consequence of the "enshittification" cycle: The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok — Or how, exactly, platforms die
In other words: yeah, it's systemic, and Reddit is very likely to continue going that way. Whether it has one, big moment where users just mass abandon it or it'ss a long, drawn-out process of attrition, the end result will almost certainly be the same.