Huh. I didn’t realise until the end that this is from 2014, interesting.

I found the example of a pub really interesting. One could see sites like Reddit as something like this. On the other hand, pubs don’t use unpaid “volunteers” (at least outside the US) to wait the tables.

In the end the proposition of an online community, made and maintained by the community, seems at odds with making profit. Maybe concepts like Lemmy can fill the gap and each user only has to provide their share to keep their instance running.

While the article is 9 years old, it’s incredibly relevant today. Towards the end is the paragraph:

As described, Reddit is an interesting example where people voluntarily fill the same community leader role that Aol’s volunteers did, although they do so with fewer restrictions and more agency. That said, while we don’t expect or believe that Reddit should be sued for back wages, it may suffer from the same problem as Aol: Reddit’s fanatical users may remain devoted only as long as the site still feels, as volunteers once described Aol, like a “community where people got together to get together.” Reddit has struggled to ratchet up revenues, likely because users would rebel against aggressive monetization.

This may be the moment we are living through now. Or not, I don’t think things have been fully decided yet. But what we have been seeing happen to Reddit really fits Cory Doctorow’s Enshitification framework. Reddit’s growth was based on providing users with a great way to interact. With the growth of the user base, it became desirable to monetize those users, and Reddit has been trying like mad to do so over the past several years. This isn’t necessarily bad. Running a popular website is expensive, and Reddit needs money to cover storage, processing and bandwidth costs. However, that monetization may be reaching the point where the users are noticing it and may be less willing to put up with it.

That said, Reddit probably has a lot of life left in it. It still has (and is generating) a lot of content people want. Right now, those of use who feel strongest about the enshitification of Reddit have made the jump to other places. The question remains, can we build a critical mass of content which starts to peel other users away from Reddit, who are less bothered by the commercialization going on? Only time will tell. There was a time where AOL’s position seemed unassailable, then MySpace was king for a time. Even FaceBook has been facing issues retaining users. And, of course, there is the slow moving train wreck which is Twitter. Large, successful social media platforms can fall. Perhaps this will be a repeat of The Great Digg Migration which fed Reddit. Or, maybe not. Maybe this will be another “Chairwoman Pao” moment on Reddit. Where users make a lot of noise for a little bit and then things go back to normal. Only time will tell.

Really interesting how what we post and garners attention, only concentrates money in a select few.