Technology

It's getting there... The Reddit wave should be enough to get us there if the servers hold up semidecently

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.

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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4

May I ask what the whole "IPO" thing is?

Unfortunately the responsible for the shitshow aren't in the 5% who will have their lives upended.

The fucked up thing is that it kind of is...layoffs of this kind almost always have a positive impact on stock prices, which is why they do them. Gotta love capitalism!

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:

1. Embrace: large company creates a really stable and well moderated instance that federates with almost everything to attract users

2. Extend: large company adds custom features to the instance that are incompatible with other instances

3. 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.

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.