Turns out, stuffing the Internet into 5 apps from mega corps largely fueled by pretend money wasn’t the best long term play.
Who would have thought?This has become the prevailing opinion for most of the tech-savvy folks that I know, but it’s gaining traction with a wider audience.
Having steeped in corpo-climate for two decades, it’s naïve to say that the C-Suite has ever maintained a realistic perspective on the business that they run; but it is baffling to me that corporations like Reddit have completely lost sight of their actual product - a clearinghouse of perpetually donated content - and seem to believe that their platform cannot be easily duplicated, or made obsolete nearly overnight.
It’s exciting to be an insider as new paradigms like the fediverse become more widely known. If the last week is any indicator, there is a non-zero chance that ultra-capitalist hubris will be punished.
The fact of the matter is that I don’t care if something is a monopoly as long as it’s a monopoly for it’s quality. Reddit used to be that, a hub for damn near all of my interests, and I used Boost to make the experience great.
But reddit is getting worse with this change, so I’m here now.
I don’t care if something is a monopoly as long as it’s a monopoly for it’s quality.
But the problem with social media is that monopolies in this area aren’t about quality, they are about user base size. Which makes them impossible to dethrone once they hit critical mass. Reddit and other social media sites have a massive amount of content with people willing to figure out a way to sift through the garbage.
It will be interesting to see how bad things get once reddit moderators can no longer use bots and other tools in order to help them sift through content due to the API changes.
Yeah. There’s nothing inherently wrong with monopolies. The problem with them is just the behaviour that they tend to slip into, the squeezing of their customers for maximum revenue while not bothering to invest any of it in improving their services. There are some “natural” monopolies that manage to do okay, though usually as a result of government regulation.
Some monopolies are so solidly “okay” that we don’t even notice that they’re monopolies. The Internet, for example. What alternatives to it exist? None, really. But since it’s a decentralized protocol rather than some sort of Internet Incorporated with shareholders and quarterly profits to maximize and whatnot it’s managed to stay good and the fact that it’s a monopoly is actually beneficial in many ways.
As for monopolies… they are inherently bad because of the lack of motivation to innovate, or improve. You have no other option, and no ability to create one.
I don’t want to stray too far from the topic, but I feel like I need to address the mention of the internet as a monopoly.
If you’re talking about TCP/IP, it’s just a protocol that the most widely used - but others exist, and outperform it in their niches.
The internet is a collection of technologies that are owned and operated by thousands of companies. All have competition in their arenas.
ISPs have constructed local fiefdoms - but there are nearly always multiple services that one can use. Backbone companies own the major routes, but you can almost always go around one if it misbehaves. Myriad email providers, websites, etc exist to offer choices, as well.
Categorically, the internet can not be or become a monopoly. It’s core purpose is to provide as many avenues as possible to connect machines to AVOID monopolization.
Interestingly, the downfall of Communism was precisely that political communism forms a government-managed monopoly, exhibiting exactly the characteristics you outline. People who rail against communism are really railing against monopoly and the stagnancy and corruption it creates. And yet somehow some of these people are all-in on libertarianism.
What I really don’t understand is, how all these C suites are apparently a) completely unaware of theor cost structure and b) never seem to understand what they’re actually selling.
Reddit is nothing special, do you really need a bunch of Valley bros earning 200k or more?
Do you really need all those stupid extras like NFTs? Reddit launched their NFTs way too late, when even the pretty big idiots started to doubt the concept.
The older I get, the less I understand the whole world of business administration. Nothing makes sense, it feels like 90% of the CEO are working really hard to ram their companies hard enough into the ground to hit magma.
Because those C suites do it for their salary, not for the greater good or the good of their investors.
seem to believe that their platform cannot be easily duplicated, or made obsolete nearly overnight.
As much as it pains me to say it, I think they are right. The value in social media is in the size of their user base and I don’t see a mass migration to another platform really happening unless reddit itself went completely offline for several weeks. People do not like change and Reddit will continue to be just “good enough” despite the API changes. If anything their decline will be extremely gradual since moderators will have lost most of their third party moderation tools. And niche communities can probably keep ticking along without them for the most part.
Previous sites died because there was a continual stream of new VC funded initiatives still in the ‘seduce new users’ phase of low-zero monetization for people to jump to. That tap of new, user-friendly sites has been shut off by the recent interest rate hikes curtailing VC funding.
Worried we’ll eventually settle into semi-collusive model we see Cell Carriers and ISPs have. If all 5 major social media sites stay in lock step of monetization, who are you going to go to? And without VC money, what new site will be able to truly scale?
I don’t mind if most of reddit users stay there, we just need to attract the valuable ones. Back on reddit I wouldn’t have welcomed the entirety of Twitter for example, too many bad contributors.
Contributors also want their content to be seen and communities with 500 subscribers aren’t all that attractive. So I don’t expect anyone to abandon the mainstream options. The most we can hope for (and all I’m really asking for) is cross-site posting and participation.
Go ahead and visit Reddit, just be sure to post on on the fediverse as well.
eh, depends. I can see myself contributing to a smaller audience of people I care for rather than a bigger one of people I don’t.
Whether their hubris is punished or not is of no consequence to me. In some ways the ultimate karma is waking up every day to find out we are ourselves. I’m more concerned with building cool stuff for us to use than with anyone getting what I think is their comeuppance.
nobody thought. that’s a big part of the problem-- late-stage capitalism doesn’t plan beyond this quarter’s profit statement.
I’m so tired of big tech taking social platforms and trying to make it increasingly profitable every year. It’s just ridiculous.
Remember when social media was created as a concept to talk to other people easily? I’m so thankful for Lemmy and Mastodon and hope to see more decentralized social media networks appear in the future where corporate greed does not impact the direction
It would help alot If telecom/internet infrastructure was treated like our other infrastructure. Not to mention the literal billions of dollars in fraud that companies like Verizon and Comcast get away with. I still get mad when I think about how they were given massive sums of money to expand fiber optic infrastructure and gave themselves bonuses instead.
The original infrastructure in North America was the railway. I’m really thankful that the Internet didn’t develop the same way the railway did, with lots of suffering and exploitation and a few people getting really rich.
The playbook used by the Comcasts and Verizons isn’t new; it goes right back to the Phoenicians, and probably even earlier.
It’s what all public companies do. Once your company is public, it is somewhat your duty to raise profits every year forever and ever to make your investors money and to attract investors. It sucks, but that’s how the market works.
Profit isn’t bad, but making money whilst destroying your customers trust, and disrespecting your customers, and getting away with it, is all too common.
Make money, AND be excellent.
That was back in the day when the devs were paid by investor money, and the money the investors invested was someone elses money so they didn’t care. Those days are over.
This is what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”, and it’s part of the reason I’m on Mastodon and Lemmy now.
A big part of the issue is that there is a general assumption that the execs are making the companies MORE profitable, as opposed to the reality that they are trying to make them profitable at all.
Enshitification happens because things start awesome and free to attract users. Once there is enough bar they start to change things such that they can eventually make money.
The only way to about this is to self fund and stop assuming Web apps are free.
It’s not like C-level folks aren’t cashing in well before their companies are profitable. They put on executive clothes and live executive lifestyles, either because it’s what they want or because it’s part of the theatre put on for investors.
I feel confident in the assumption that most users wouldn’t begrudge a company a modest profit off of the content they produce uncompensated on their sites. But it’s an unwritten social contract, and therefore ripe for abuse.
Some of it is born of users not realizing the value of what they give to the corporations— their data for mining, their engagement for attracting and maintaining even more users to the site. Some of it is born of the explicit contracts being written solely by one side(the execs).
Completely agree on all points. The idea of “modest” is not something that VC wants so unless you are grass roots there is no way it will fly
The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
I wish all articles covering the debacle but it at clearly as this.
We need to understand, though, that the Fediverse is going to undergo similar changes and struggles. People aren’t going to want to pay to run servers, forever, and there will be lost servers and ones that suddenly have ads or subscription fees.
Granted, this creates competition and it’ll be better for the end user, but the utopia of Mastodon and KBin is going to be challenged by the crappy, but very real, realities of the world.
I wonder if there is a better way to distribute the upkeep of all the data. Like bittorrent has the swarm and crypto got random people using hardware to prop up the transaction network. Currently these single fediverse instances puts most of the burden on the hoster and becomes a single failure point for that instance.
Some people just aren’t willing to pay anything unfortunately.
Yeah that’s my only concern and why I stick with the major instances, for now. I know monetization for the sake of running the services is going to have to come at some point. I’m sure we’ll see a bunch of variations and approaches and I hope people are open to the ideas. I want the fediverse to grow and, for that to happen, we need to make sure it’s sustainable for the people who choose to help prop it up.
I think the only difference is that there’s at least a chance to keep interacting with the community from an instance that is not showing ads.
Indeed and there is also competition between instances, instead of being left to the whims of a sole dictator of a centralized service.
Well, that would never happen as long as they figure out a appropriate way to make a profit. Mastodon using ‘Crowdfunding’ system to earn money
I just cancelled my discord nitro(whatever the previous highest tier annual plans) in May because as a paying subscriber, I still get those intrusive ads that pops above your user corner and won’t go away. You are only given options to “try it” “maybe later” and no “not interested”, also no button to close it.
The ad client probably pay then significant amount of money that it’s worth the risk to piss off paying users.
I sent my support ticket and got lead around the hoops and need to send the request to sort of their internal voting board, which at that point I just gave up and cancel my subscription. If I got spammed more I will probably just go back to web interface and use ublock to start blocking elements. And if I can’t I probably just gonna say bye. (the campaign was over, there are no newer spams, but they lost my annual sub pretty much forever as I don’t think discord is gonna “be better”. )
This phenomenon isn’t new. I used to have a GeoCities account back in the day. Eventually Yahoo! Bought them, and you know what happened with them. Had a Hotmail account too — and you know what happened to that. Had an ICQ and an AIM account too.
The problem now is that these more recent platforms worked to make themselves harder to replace, so when it came time to replace them, there was more resistance.
I still have active Hotmail accounts. It isn’t like they went bad, they just changed over time.
Although email is probably a good example of what will happen even if you introduce a decentralized system. You still have a few main companies that run most email on the internet and their spam policies dictate who gains access to that user base. The free versions are run by ads, but there are paid versions that give more options to those who buy the service.
The problem now is that these more recent platforms worked to make themselves harder to replace, so when it came time to replace them, there was more resistance.
Things have become more centralized and people just want tech to work. So when things like the fediverse need patients while “stuff gets worked out” they are not used to it.
That’s because the main audience of the internet shifted from the tech literate to the tech illiterate, who can’t deal with issues
Yes and technology has gotten a lot better too. The younger generation has had technology that more or less “just works.” They didn’t have to learn how to troubleshoot just to be able to use it as intended like previous generations have had to.
Half the fun is using things for how they weren’t intended.
I was thinking exactly this! At some point a long time ago, all of these centralized platforms were “cool” until “uncool” people started joining and sharing garbage content… now we’re in a bit of a renaissance as these platforms commit social suicide. The more intellectual individuals are both able and willing to jump ship to these “complex platforms”.
Will Grandma or crazy Uncle Bill ever join Mastodon on their own and understand federation? No, probably not. But that guy you went to University with who is now working as a Civil Engineer or Financial Advisor will probably figure it out and migrate when it gets bad enough.
Now I ask, who’s content would you rather see filling your feed? 🤣
Is the thing in common venture capital? Its venture capital, isn’t it. I knew it.
I think it is a combination between interest rate hikes from the free money paradigm that propped up startups and the gig economy and the AI hype train driving the capture of public data (think enclosures 3.0) at the expense of strong communities. This somehow reminds me of when post-dot-com bubble companies like google had to become “profitable” so “don’t be evil” went down the drain and they found ways to monetize their users’ data.
“Don’t be evil” was always going to take second place to “make money”. That reality sucks, but it’s inevitable in a corporate oligarchy.
We’re not free from it. If the fediverse took off and ISPs somehow ganged up on the activitypub protocol to force it to make money, some larger instances are going to crack, that’s what I mean.
I don’t understand - why would ISPs gang up on ActivityPub? How would it force larger instances to “crack”?
Are you saying that they would ramp up costs for utilizing the protocol specifically? Wouldn’t that go against Net Neutrality…?
destroy reddit ASAP. force google to remove its reliance on reddit. It’s time we stopped giving free content to enrich idiots like spez and ohanian. and oh yea and stop Musk as well.
I’m wondering if a Co-op model would work for some of these alternatives. Then they would be less reliant on a single owner/developer system, there would be additional support for some of the businessy components, and there would be a built-in groups structure for resolution of issues.
I’ve been watching the formation of a co-op Etsy alternative, and I’m very interested to see how that goes. I think it’s fine to complain about corporatization, but I think it’s also crucial to build and support other models at the same time.
I am not a member of this Artisan’s Coop, but am considering it.
@mem_somerville_kbin @hedge My insurance company, Amica, is a mutual company; I get a substantial rebate every year.
Liberty Mutual is also a mutual company, but I hear they never issue any rebates, that management thinks it is more fun to spend any extra money on themselves.
Cooperates and mutuals are not a magic alternative to rapacious capitalism.
@mem_somerville_kbin @hedge if you haven’t checked out the mastodon side of the fediverse, #socialcoop uses this model and has existed for a couple years.
The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
It’s nice to see an article which finally states the obvious truth–that Reddit wants the third party apps to die so they can have a captive audience to advertise to.
