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.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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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 Moderators Stop Work in Protest of Lax AI-Generated Content Guidelines"
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.
Damn, Reddit must really not want me back. If I can't use Boost or at least the mobile version of Firefox with ublock installed there is no way I'm going back. Thankfully I'm quite happy on Lemmy and don't really miss Reddit.
Fellow boost user! Would be great if he made a version of Boost for Lemmy, I'm just so used to that UI.
Jerboa is designed to be reminiscent of Boost, but it just isn't the same yet...
Agreed. It's working, but the bugs and problems are pretty noticeable. The comments from the last thread viewed are always visible for about 2 seconds when I click on a new thread, and I can't scroll down on my settings page, so I'm a bit limited on customization.
Embedded media in comments was a pleasant surprise though
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Self destruction Speedrun - expert strats 😎
I checked out the official reddit app just out of curiosity. What a shit show. It felt like half the posts were ads or "recommended" posts. Spent a whole 5 minutes before deleting. Relay or nothing.
Best advertisement ever for Lemmy
Is anyone else also been gettin loading errors on Apollo since yesterday? I’ve stayed off since then but seems like they are already messing with API access already.
I was able to use Apollo a few hours ago. Now it gives me errors but looks like reddit is being ddosed atm
Same here.
I think that is the dev shutting down the app for the blackout.
Nah, the dev already said they're not shutting down the ApolloApp subreddit because it's how he's communicating with everyone (per his most recent post on there). It wouldn't make sense for him to shut down the app.
That was the protest beginning.
long live RiF
I saw this two weeks ago. I had a few days where I thought I was going crazy because there was no "log in" link in the header, just a more obnoxious "open the app" button instead. After a few days I did see the log in button again, but I had already accepted the fact that I'd only be allowed to use their mobile app and convinced myself I'd close my account (which I subsequently did two weeks later)
reddit ? what is it ? a new platform ? is there anybody here who knows what it is ?
I think the notorious hacker named 4chan works there
@serenitynot Somehow not surprising in the slightest, and yet still managing to impress with the level of quadrupling down on things
I think they're just A/B testing things, I ran into that a few times in the last couple months
That's what I was thinking - they could have broken code they were testing, but who knows nowadays ¯\(ツ)/¯
Nothing makes me more upset then requiring an application.
I used Boost and Apollo a couple of years ago. The feed wouldn't update and there were minor glitches. The only thing I liked was the ability to download videos, but it was glitchy too. Maybe they are better now.
I assume they want people to avoid using mobile browsers to bypass ads. Which, I'm done with reddit at this point. Just shooting themselves in the foot at this point to drive away the very thing that keeps them afloat, free content.
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