Like many people I’m here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I’ve been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?
This is the enshittification of the Internet. Cory Doctorow wrote about it here: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys and it explains why this was always going to happen.
Interesting read.
The likes of Spez were just not that intelligent enough to figure out how to make Reddit pay before the VCs called in the investments. Not that it’s an easy problem to solve, but if you’re going to take on money like Reddit did you sure as hell needed a better plan then leaving it up to later to figure out. Amazon had a plan clearly, Reddit did not.
Also, what Reddit is now doing mimics a little of what Facebook did too, the enshitification of your feeds (just look at the app). They’re just hoping Reddit is as addictive as Facebook is and you’ll stick around regardless. I wonder if they recent;y hired some new advisers that told them to make these recent changes too?
Here’s the play, charge a reasonable amount for API calls and people will either pay with money or with data, some will even do both.
Instead you and I are having this conversation on kbin.
After the way shithead acted and talked, well I waste less time on the internet, and yeah, it’s a little harder to find results on google, but that is just making me realize how much I relied on Reddit.
I need to find another search engine too, I rely too much on too few providers.
They got us one convenience at a time.
It’s a failure of a business mind all of this.
I had a reddit account for 16 years, and as soon as Apollo stopped working a few days ago, I logged out everywhere and not going back
A better option might be to require third party developers to use a Reddit based advertising API with the benefit of free API usage and revenue sharing. Everyone’s happy. Third party developers would get paid for ads, they can show more ads and use other ad providers along side Reddit if they want to, the API gets paid for by advertising revenue for all of the third party apps, Reddit gets to track it’s users by requiring API Ad calls to send a user id, etc., etc…
I will never go back to twitter or reddit.
Some search engine options aside from Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo:
https://docs.searxng.org/
https://search.brave.com/ (Brave also has their own browser; I’ve been using both and liking them)
https://www.mojeek.com/
https://search.marginalia.nu/
If anyone knows of and likes any other search engines, please post a reply here and/or tag me!
If it weren’t for MLM Huns and boomer memes of ice cold takes from 2013, Facebook would be long gone too.
Even just taking the huns out probably would have killed it 3 years ago.
I dunno. If the general trend is to move toward the fediverse then things might actually get better.
Meta has already expressed interest in the fediverse. It’s going to be up to everyone who likes it to defederate from every corporate instance.
There are no good corporate actors
I don’t know it off the top of my head, but I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere that over on Mastodon, a large number of instances have banded together to collectively block all Meta owned instances, and publish a list of them and so on.
I think convenient-to-add, publicly viewable blocklists will be a thing on here sooner rather than later.
You’re telling me I can just block Meta/Facebook altogether here in the Fediverse?
I think I’m going to like it here. :)
Yes, blocklists are excellent, if you’re looking to advertise those sites.
I hope that will be the trend, but I think the VC funding cycle will continue
Can we think of a better word than this enshitthing?
Mistifying / Mistification works if you like Anglo-German puns. Emmerdification for an Anglo-French equivalent.
If you’re against anything to do with faeces at all, I’m not sure there’s as short and easy a neologism that as fully captures the meaning and, importantly, disdain without being a mouthful.
You need an en- of some sort because it’s clear that something is changing and then the action is the attempt to squeeze as much profit out of an enterprise with the expectation that nothing much will, er, change. This inevitably ruins or destroys the nature of the enterprise from the users’ point of view.
Then the CEO immediately has cognitive dissonance between their own ego and self-belief of infallibility versus the fact the enterprise isn’t working or has changed far more than their expectations. Their ego, and desire for profit, inevitably wins.
Much like badly managed corporate take-overs, all the smart people leave as soon as they can assuming they haven’t already been fired and replaced by an inferior of some sort.
Thus, the whole thing turns to… well. Is there a better word?
I’ve seen rentrophy thrown around, the decline in service as rent increases.
Thanks for sharing this. I learned a lot.
I’ve been saying this will happen for years and people just dismissed it, I’m feeling quite vindicated now