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The Reddit Blackout Is Breaking Reddit
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Convenient how Wired (who is owned by Conde Nast who is owned by Advance Publications who has a stake of ownership in Reddit) mentions that "Like with Twitter, no clear alternative has emerged as a replacement." and fails to mentioned the fediverse or forums.
Not to whitewash the take, but it's a bigger issue.
The idea of success and being big meaning nearly the same as being relevant are the true villains of the story here. Every business wants to go big, every businessperson wants to make more, every platform wants to aggregate more and more content, etc. The people making the most impactful decisions in companies are plagued with these ideas and lead their businesses in the opposite direction, while staying blind to the alternatives, no matter how small, because they believe that the fact that their users are fleeing to smaller places is a joke, a temporary inconvenience, or a failure.
But it's not, truly.
Kbin and Lemmy and Mastodon and Calckey are, indeed, smaller platforms than Reddit and Twitter are, with less content and fewer people, but the fact of the matter is that is a considerable amount of people that fled both Reddit and Twitter for good in favor of smaller, to some "less relevant" platforms. The effect is the same - less traffic for Reddit and Twitter, less influence from these two, less ad revenue.
I don't want to sound like I truly believe that CEOs and other exec-level people are stupid and make decisions based on ego and simple solutions (like looking at numbers and judging nothing but the numbers), but hell, it does feel like humanity, as a whole, is not perfectly capable of properly functioning at the scale we're trying to function at right now. Smaller companies are more sensible and have higher net profit margin, smaller communities are often safer and more welcoming (on top of being more manageable, too), smaller projects are easier to keep track of and deliver with more satisfying results, etc. Execs don't seem like the type of people to even consider these simple facts, instead opting for being the bigger fish with the bigger wallet and market share.
Maybe that's just me feeling increasingly less comfortable about anything that is sized to unmanageable degrees, thus just seeing things... but then again, that's the tendencies we've seen time and time again in this late stage capitalism, with synergy becoming the same good ol' monopoly, while the common folk begrudge another "mall", its policies, and their results.
Damn I really feel this. I own a game dev studio and the pressure to make the biggest, best selling game is real from all sides (publishers, staff, gamers). However the people who fund games (publishers, platforms, etc.) are starting to understand AAA is too expensive and takes too long to make. There’s some silver lining in that more ‘medium’ experiences are getting a chance and I want to stay at this scale because I know infinite growth is just a recipe for eventual collapse. I may never own a mega yacht but I will happily work with my friends and take care of my family by being content with what risk and reward is available at this scale.
While you have absolutely made some good points here, particularly psychologically, there is a good reason these larger corporations and entities came in to existence and then became so effective.
As much as we are typically tribal animals rather than herd, we can't ignore the simple facts of economies of scale and de-duplication of effort. The Fediverse will need to use more hardware than reddit would to support the same number of users as they spread across instances, and the admins of the various instances are all having to do the same kinds of setup, troubleshooting, scaling tasks as their communities grow, that reddit only had to do once.
You're right that it's a bigger issue, but it's also a little more complex than your comment presents, I think.
Are you surprised? The status quo does not want a new competitor. Unfortunately for us, the easiest way to keep the fediverse down is to not even acknowledge it as an option.
I mean. I'm going back and forth between Lemmy and kbin, but let's not kid ourselves. We're not at a Digg-level exodus yet. The, for lack of a better word, hardcore users are moving on, but the casual redditors aren't showing signs of going anywhere.
Not saying it might not happen, but we're not there yet IMO.
The power users and enthusiasts go first to clear the path and kick the tires to make it easier for the others to come later.
Let's see what happens when the 3rd party apps die at the end of the month & moderation goes all to shit. That's when things get real for more people.
I agree, switchover isn't going to be instantaneous, but when trolls & fascists start taking over and the collective IQ there drops 30 points, the exodus will accelerate. People won't go to Reddit for discussions when the threads there assume Youtube quality, and without that, it's just another doomscrolling app.
Reddit has so much more content than Digg that you really only need a small fraction of that on your new thing for that new thing to be viable.
This.
And this place doesn't need to be the place where 50 million redditors go overnight.
It can't be. That would crush it.
But just as the Fediverse microblogging space has seen steady growth following Elon taking over Twitter, this space will see steady growth, too. And it's ok if that growth doesn't include people that don't understand that Reddit is a website and not just an app that lives on their phone or whatever.
They can come later when there's more and better support for them.
it’s going to be a pain to find something amid the sea of federated upstarts that all claim to be the next best thingThey kinda bring it up but nothing is named directly.
That's also pretty dismissive. Who's claiming to be the "next big thing"? And also, if they're federating with each other, does it actually matter?
Like I know BlueSky isn't federating with ActivityPub sites, but once their protocol is released, there's a very good chance that it gets integrated into at least some Fediverse projects.
Good, don’t send the normies here plz