mobyduck648

This isn't the end for Reddit by a long way but it might in hindsight be seen as when its slow decline reached the point of no return.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall at Reddit HQ right now in general!

Reddit’s always had inept management, Spez in particular can’t help but antagonise his users with a daft unforced error every couple of years. We don’t need to ‘win’, we don’t even need to actively do anything but exist. As long as nice places like this exist and Reddit does too Reddit’s inevitable cockups will provide a small but steady trickle of users.

I decided to jump before I was pushed and bin off Apollo the weekend before the strikes started. This place existing made that jump a lot easier I think!

Since the fediverse unlike the rest of the web consists mostly of people hostile to aggressive monetisation there’s a built-in limit to how ‘capitalist’ (in the popular sense rather than the technical sense) an instance can be in terms of funding it. Instances will be forced to find alternative ways to pay the bills to the traditional ‘our users are the commodity we sell’ approach of the corporate social media platforms if they want to stick around for the long run which will be a fantastic thing for the web I think.

This feels a little bit like a Roman asking if we should build a steam turbine. It wasn’t beyond them to make a primitive version (one even existed!) but the necessary science and technology to do anything useful with it wouldn’t exist for a long time yet. Yes we have an idea of how we might potentially go about it but I don’t think it’ll happen until we’re flinging comets about like pool balls across the solar system.

I suspect if we do develop terraforming tech Earth will be the first target as we seek to undo the harm our mode of living has done to the planet.

Yeah lots of people apparently haven’t been in a tech company with the CEO saying ‘everything’s fine’ only to get hit with layoffs shortly either, even if his word was worth more than the square root of fuck-all which we know it’s not he’d be obliged to lie if ad revenue was through the floor.

Also he’s blundered pretty badly but he’s not a moron, that memo was inevitably going to leak and it’s classic strikebreaking tactics to go over the heads of the ‘union reps’ and try to get the ‘workers’ (not sure what the terminology is when nobody’s actually a paid employee) to fight among each other.

To be fair the aim of ads generally isn’t to make you go ‘oh now I’ll go and buy that’, it’s more about unconsciously planting the idea that $product exists so when you actually do want to buy something you buy that brand. It’s why ‘show me as many as you like, ads don’t work on me’ is complete rubbish and the only real solution is blocking them entirely on a personal level and on a social level laws that restrict where and when they may be shown.

A particularly egregious example of psychologically manipulative advertising would be ‘Joe Camel’ who was nominally just a fun mascot but in reality existed to advertise cigarettes to children so they’d buy Camels when they were old enough. Given the prevalence of really awful advertising in the present day Big Tech really does deserve the increasing comparisons with Big Tobacco I think.

If our success depends on Spez not being a knob then our future is already more secure than most.

Can the various servers take it? The one I'm on (BeeHaw) has held up admirably but I've heard of others going down with an influx of users.

it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.

Which is good news for us because even if this does blow over they will fuck up again and every time it happens we'll profit from it in new users. Spez's problem isn't that his dream is unattainable, his problem is that the person having that dream is him.

Aww, I almost feel bad for him. Almost.