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?
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!
They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.
…jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called “Tiktok’s enshittification”. It’s a four-steps process:
- The platform is good for its users.
- The platform abuses the users, to be good for its business customers.
- The platform abuses the business customers, to claw back all value for itself.
- The platform dies.
In my opinion it’s also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.
Was going link this.
Some people have come up with the word “enshittification” to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.
The cycle consists of three parts:
- You make the service that attracts new users by providing what they want. Often you do that at a loss, because your goal is to gain a big enough userbase for steps 2 and 3.
- Once there’s enough users, you shift to attracting commercial interests instead – vendors if you’re running a store, advertisers or celebrities or other “big clients” if you’re a social network, etc.
- Once both users and commercial interests are hooked, you can start tightening all the rules and switching completely to profiting yourself and your shareholders.
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!
All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.
The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet’s history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the “next best thing”.
Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It’s only just getting started, you watch.
The timeline split after harambe. This is known
It is known.
I wonder what our alternate timeline selves are doing. Good for them, right?
In Timeline-α the Visitors didn’t turn away in disgust and Contact was approved. The Uplift process is well underway, environmental conditions have been stabilized and restoration is progressing well. Space travel is still restricted to the Solar System but Humanity is on track to full Membership. Ambassador Harambe has resumed his duties on the Council.
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.
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?
Not money per se, but the oil of the 21st century: data.
I guarantee it’s primarily about improving their ability to harvest and sell user data.
Exactly. The native apps can gather so much more info than a website and they have to kill third party apps to force people to use the official client.
This is where my mind goes. Kinda convenient that Twitter and Reddit, both likely particularly dangerous to those seeking power happen to be destroyed seemingly intentionally in the same year ahead of a sure to be insane U.S. election season.
Hmm, kinda interesting. A lot of Trump shit was spread on Reddit during the 2016 election, makes sense they would try to get rid of anyone who would oppose that content
100% power There’s parallels to the writer strikes Netflix ceo got like 2x the money that all the writers are asking for in bonus so it’s not about money It’s something else
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?
I don’t think all that many redditors are moving to Lemmy. Judging by the stats on join-lemmy, there are only several thousand monthly Lemmy users, which is nothing compared to reddit which had tens of millions daily users
Everybody just wants money now. Some of that is reasonable, these companies tend to work if not with a loss, then with quite unpredictable margins.
Now that tech investors have found a new bubble - AI - they are no longer willing to sponsor old-fashion internet stuff and wait if it ever turns a profit.
Especially since many got used to becoming all that richer during the pandemic, and are looking to keep those numbers rising.
But there’s also some sudden hatred of porn, and I don’t know where that is coming from. Tumblr, Imgur have limited it completely, OF wanted to, Reddit probably will, coedcherry shut down. The owner of coedcherry said it was really a sudden 180° turn of the banks to no longer wanting to do anything with porn, and nobody knows why.
It’s especially bizzare considering how these platforms keep assuring us that we’ll still be able to post and see blown off heads and all kinds of other nasty stuff, it’s just the titties that are being banned! Eh?
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.
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.
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.
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.
