No Stupid Questions

Greed.

its the eshitification of the internet....it's inevitable

It's the lifecycle of social media sites. I knew when I left Digg 13 years ago Reddit would inevitably follow the same fate at some point. The problem we have now is that there are no alternatives of similar size nor established communities to replace the sites that are falling apart. Digg and Reddit were equal and provided an instant replacement of similar size for the exodus. Same with MySpace and Facebook. Now, the users of the big sites don't really have that haven to jump to and people don't want to spend the time building a new community. There is no Twitter alternative. Mastodon just doesn't cut it right now and the fact that actual companies use Twitter as an official mode of communication makes it harder to leave. Reddit is the same way. Every controversy draws users to alternatives, but nothing can match it's size.

Start making alternatives, open source alternatives.

I feel as though the user base is a large part of the problem. I might be wrong but the accessibility of social media that have apps is a lot easier for the younger population who these days are flooding social media. I don't think a lot of people use forums or currently Testflight apps such as Memmy (for Lemmy). The iPhone is the phone for influencers and if Lemmy officially releases an iPhone app the same problems may happen.

only now? to me most social media platforms were shitty to begin with, or had become shitty long before.

I feel this is a matter of perspective. The average Joe whose concept of "social media" is Facebook probably has never noticed anything getting any worse. The mainstream users who just want to see funny pics and couldn't care less about 3rd party clients might actually be quicker to side with Reddit than with the protesters.

Twitter has never been attractive to me. Even back when its API was public (ancient history). Not only is their feed noisy and of poor quality, constantly swayed by "trending" stuff I don't care about, it also has always had you depend on a privative and closed source walled guarden. Things were much more open before twitter, when people used blogs to post their stuff instead.

Reddit might have been a bit more open once.. but it stopped being so long ago, this is not a change in behavior. Maybe this is an unpopular thing to say, but I'm actually glad this is happening. I think the API fiasco might be an overall good thing if it helps people get away from Reddit, and if so I hope Reddit does not backtrack.

Actually I once applied for a job at Reddit, there were like 5 or 6 interviews spread over 2 days basically. And almost everyone I talked to did something related to Ads. (The position I was considered for would have been about some service to deal with problematic posts, hate etc.) So it's just a huge ad machine.

This reminds me also about this Facebook documentary from 2 years ago, how ML algorithms implicitly shape how we interact. Maybe such efforts were better put into good moderation (oof), and a well-working UI...

That said, I wouldn't mind paying a little and already even did so to give awards and also for an App. (Can't be that much they earn with ads anyway?) I hope Lemmy is there to stay though, I'd be happy to donate/contribute every once in a while.

What were the bad decisions discord is making? Im out of the loop

Because a user base has yet to demonstrate that there will be significant consequences for such actions. Maybe there will be, but they will be less-tangible long-term consequences that can’t easily be attributed to these actions.

Companies in general are just designed to make more profit, that‘s it. All their decisions make sense from a business perspective, they are just shitty for us from a human perspective. This is why we need decentralised platforms which aren‘t inherently profit seeking.

Funny also how every time someone criticises capitalism someone shows up attributing all technological advances to capitalism. No. It‘s the people, under any economic system there will be inventions, it is small minded to think people only innovate or work out of greed, if that were so the entire open source just wouldn‘t exist and volunteering wouldn‘t exist.

I reckon there are two factors at work here, the profit imperative and enshitification. The profit imperative relates to how corporations have to make exponential profits every single year (and as we all should know you can't have exponential growth in a finite system.)

And enshitification is a result of the profit imperative, with all the corporations trying vainly to keep the profits rolling in they have to cut quality, be it through replacing ingrediants with inferior ones or pumping in the sugar so it's harder to taste the wood chips, killing third party alternatives for viewing your site to keep all the ad revenue to yourself, putting out unfinished products and charging top dollar while treating your users as unpaid testers.

Or any other of the million shitty practices corporations can think up to keep the economic perpetual motion going, it's all going the same way in the end though because you can't get blood from a stone and as a great man once said “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

Capital only looks out for itself. Online communities are a product to be exploited in the eyes of investors. The purse strings are getting tighter with rising interest rates, and investments that relied on potential are suddenly less exciting when the price to service goes up. Profit is king at the end of the day. It sucks, but that's capitalism.