Everyone needs to read this.
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This is a great article. I’m gently, slowly crawling out of the cave I’ve been hiding in. For a few years now I’ve kept away from all social media. I got freaked by a revelation that all of the techno joy I had growing up for the amazing new tools of the internet, was built on shady foundations. From my cave I have witnessed these horrors. I crave the community, and the connection, though, and so am tentatively taking measured steps. Starting here, maybe mastodon… we’ll see. Hope to see some of you along the way.
Very understandable for a millennial and younger audience. I remember multiple apps and web services turn from cheap useful tools into crap. Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, every food delivery app were all great at one point until the late stage capitalism machine hits. They all destroy themselves to hit profitability targets that no company can achieve.
The thing is most would be very profitable companies if the executive wing wasn’t so damn greedy trying to eek out the highest salary and bonus possible so they can have that new shiny gold watch and fancy car to impress their “friends”. It’s human greed, plain and simple, and it’s not limited only to social media companies.
Exactly. People feel the need to get every last cent out of it as fast as possible. Destroying it
That article was such a good read. It was a less a stroll down memory lane, and more being hit on the head and dragged down memory alley. But, it was so worth the read.
That was a great read, I’d never heard of Prodigy, but its sad how since the beginning of the internet, companies have been trying to monetize community and just end up destroying it.
Why do I get the impression that most of the commenters here haven’t noticed that the wider fediverse, and of course kbin.social, are made as an attempt to solve this exact problem.
You’re here because we’re trying to fix this!
I’d put my money on spritely.institute rather than the current system, but whatever; we are trying!
Insightful, evocative, well-written, and 100% pertinent to what is going on these days.
Thank you for sharing this.
Anyone reading my comment who just read a bit of this article or skimmed it - please do yourself a favour and devote 10mins to reading the full thing.
That was a long read but very good. It pretty much encapsulates how I feel about most things right now. Websites, game/movie/TV franchises, public spaces, even nostalgia itself. They all get squeezed dry until everyone hates them and then they are discarded.
Thank you so much for linking that, I loved it, and it seems so relevant as we start up in this new oasis!
Great article. Damn, I miss the glory days of Livejournal
It really was so valuable in its heyday.
When the Russia thing happened circa 2016, I copied mine to Dreamwidth and while it’s been great it’s also pretty lonely. Basically no one in my circle updates anymore; maybe two or three friends read my stuff.
But I’m never going to stop. My whole adult life is recorded on Dreamwidth; I started my LJ the month I graduated from high school, and 22 years later I’m still blathering, just on DW now with no one to interact with. (The loneliness is mostly a result of me making a decision ~15 years ago to limit my LJ friends list to people I actually knew offline, so at this point the number of people-I-know-offline who have any interest in regularly updating DW can be rounded down to zero.) (But it still bums me out and I dream of a Dreamwidth Renaissance.)
I stopped using LJ long before that, so I didn’t know anything about the Russian stuff until fairly recently. A RL friend told me about Dreamwidth and I immediately moved all my stuff over to there… though it’s private and I have no friends.
So many of my years are recorded in that journal… I would be absolutely destroyed if I lost all of it. I met my husband through LJ. I wrote about losing my mom on LJ. My entries are so so special to me. Even the cringey teenage angst! I go through them every once in a while just to remember how far I’ve come and how much I’ve changed from the person who wrote those entries.
There’s also tools you can use to make local downloads of your LJ posts. I did that with all of mine, so I have them stored away as a series of per-month html files of all my posts.
I thought this was just going to be ‘The Enshiftification of TikTok’ again but it became so much more (and as an added bonus was made 1 month before that article.)
fuck all these peopleDoctorow links to Valente’s essay in that article! 👍
Oh, you’re right! Forgive me for not bothering to look at every single link though when the first one was a wikipedia article to ‘jedi blue’ haha
Eh, it’s not surprising that people who spend money on the upkeep of a thing will eventually also want to get revenue out of the thing. If she doesn’t like it she can host her own version of reddit and pay the server fees for everyone.
While I appreciate that businesses are in existence to make money, things like Reddit aren’t strictly a business, like your local grocery store, for instance.
The grocery store has employees, products, and creates its own products (bakery, deli, etc) by paying its employees to do so. They do NOT rely on non paid, non employees to generate the ENTIRETY of the “product” that makes them exist. They pay taxes, employees, rents, vendors, etc. in other words, overhead.
Reddit relies solely on non paid, non employees to create, maintain, and expand things that, while intangible, make Reddit exist. Reddit itself doesn’t create anything people go there to see. They just provide the infrastructure.
So all that being said, yeah, sure, Reddit should be able to at least cover their limited costs, without issue. That’s not what Reddit is talking about though. Reddit it talking about destroying the things (3rd party apps) and people (mods and users) strictly for, what they see as huge profit (IPO).
This is like when there were a bunch of really great forums, and then IB started buying them all. Immediately they went to shit, and have pretty much all been left to rot, if they are even still hosted. A lot of magazines went through the same thing too, at least in the car community. Profit over everything, and then inevitable failure.
Ok, and what would you do instead? How would you keep a forum up and running and able to sustain itself? To me, pointing out that things are bad and could be better is an extremely obvious observation. The interesting question is, how do you make it better?
Firstly, if Christian’s numbers are accurate, and a user costs Reddit $0.12 (doing this from memory so my numbers might be off), and Reddit is proposing each user costing third party apps $2.50 then that’s the first place to start. You could charge the 3rd party apps $0.50 and everyone would be happy. $0.38 doesn’t seem like a lot, but when you factor in the volume, then it’s a lot. Even if they needed to be greedy, $1 per user. FFS CEO asshat praise Elon musk’s cost cutting/business sense. I’m pretty sure we all know what that means by now (the trump approach. Just never pay anyone what you owe them, contract be dammed).
Third party apps don’t have ads. Or at least not reddits ads. Ok. Fair enough. I am pretty sure there’s a way to pass that onto the 3rd party apps too. And then the third party apps can charge a premium fee to remove ads. That said I’m not a programmer so I don’t know how it works well enough to say unequivocally.
Those two things would have curried a lot of good will with users. The thing that Reddit, and all the other apps/forums before them, have failed to realize is that yes, you’re a business, but that business is built on people WANTING to engage with your servers in the first place. If there’s Jo good content, because all the real content creators left, you don’t have shit, no matter how much you charged (twitter looks like a good modern example). Also like to point out that Reddit is as much guilty as he’s accusing the 3rd party apps of using api to make a profit. All those news articles, videos, pics that come from other places probably aren’t being paid for my Reddit. That’s easily 1/3 of their content or more (probably more like 1/2-3/4).
The issue is that what Reddit isn’t saying out loud, yet, is that YOU are the product. Your info IS the product. They don’t give a shit about user experience, or content creation or that third party apps exist, frankly. It’s that THEY don’t have control of, and sometimes don’t have any of, your info. That’s the real money maker.
Reddits reaction tells us a lot. First it was that we are noise, and it’s a storm, and it’ll pass. Now it’s fuck you I’m in charge. You’re going to do what I say and like it. Even discussing removing mods is a losing proposition. Not immediately but Reddit is going to change for even worse. The user experience that ceo is claiming he’s trying to improve is going to take a VERY sharp nose dive very soon.
If it was just about maintenance costs, that would be easy. By being public, Twitter and Reddit will need to always grow revenue, every year they are expected to bring in more money than the previous. Stable and sufficient are not good enough, it will always need to be more. And that’s how these apps get shitty.
Just seconding this - it seems like it’s just never enough for these companies or owners. It can be a solid, steadily growing thing and yet that expectation isn’t high enough. Eventually it must always be ramped up to constant obnoxious extremes. Speaking to the author’s point, there’s just never enough. Every space must eventually be consumed by this awful mentality and worldview until what makes it worthwhile is eradicated. It just sucks.
I’m genuinely curious what the maintenance costs really are. I’m also wondering about equitable ways to share that cost.
This writing is a little too emotional, but I understand what it is trying to say. I think it is always someone’s emotions that make something newer than it is now.
Yeah I would have loved more concrete examples, but looking at the reaction here I feel like the author is just channeling what a lot of early web users feel nowadays.
