A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.
I've always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn't invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I'm probably on here too much though!
The reddit exodus is comparatively very small. Tens of thousands of users, many of which will not stick around. Reddit has millions of users (hundreds of millions?). They barely notice.
I have to wonder just how many genuine users reddit actually has based on the amount of account harvesting that utilizes reposting content.
Wait for after 1 Juli if they don't reverse the decision they made. Right now the mods and users believe they can change this madness, but when the go through with it, many more will leave, especially mods and the og users that contribute most content.
The thing with these sites is that only a tiny proportion of users create content. For Reddit it's even worse, since they also need subreddit moderators, essentially employees working for free. So, tens of thousands of users leaving will definitely have an impact since in this case it's old power users who make content, and mods. Will the site "die"? Nope, we'll see it working for a long, long time, but will be a shadow of what it used to be, for example i remember the Obama AMA and many similar high-profile ones, that's not gonna happen anymore or will be reduced greatly.
true enough, but I don't think i'm going to care that much as long as the community stays big enough to stay somewhat active. I feel much more engaged in the community here than I ever did on reddit.
To me, day 1 here, it feels like a niche subreddit about something you enjoy but that's the whole platform. The federation and the ability to have multiple of the same communities moderated differently is intriguing idea to me. I think reddit's troubles began ultimately with it's popularity. More content, less quality, more of an inclination of reddit for monetization. This is going to be an interesting month that will test the capabilities of this idea we are participating in. I feel like it is entirely possible but I hope that not too much strain is placed on each instance operator and their mod team. I want to be somewhere to anonymously socialize without being the commodity. I do have some concerns about Lemmy, primarily, it's lack of a privacy policy and a tos. Really my concern is, if I delete my account for example does it and my content also get deleted? What's the data retention policy? We are seeing this federation could easily be made into a archive like what pushshift for reddit l became which was a major frightening idea that everything you ever posted or commented was archived without your consent or knowledge. This truly is the wild west right now. It's exciting and I'm glad to be here. Just want some understanding of what we are signing up for. Lemmy's dev did say there is no logging of your IP address anywhere except web server logs which is to be expected.
Yeah, I unsubscribed from almost all the default subs and have endless block list of subs, since I stopped enjoying most of the content and lot of the communities got way too big to follow the rules of why certain subs were created in the first place. Upvotes and downvoting just don't work effectively once communities get past a certain size to curate content.
Although, there are subs where really large userbases are needed and useful like /r/gamedeals and /r/buildapcsales. But, lot of the discussion based ones don't need to be that big.
I wonder if we're big enough to have a hive like "PC Builders" or just "PC Gaming", so we at least have somewhere to discuss parts / ask for parts advice, offer build help, and so on. But then, I suppose "Technology" or "Gaming" would both be suitable spots for that at present.
They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.
...jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called "Tiktok's enshittification". It's a four-steps process:
In my opinion it's also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.
Really great article. I've been hearing about it for a while, but finally managed to read through it fully. Very well thought out and a brilliant write-up IMO.
I don't think all that many redditors are moving to Lemmy. Judging by the stats on join-lemmy, there are only several thousand monthly Lemmy users, which is nothing compared to reddit which had tens of millions daily users
Late Stage Capitalism.
There is a crisis of democracy in contemporary societies, every time that you invoke the direct power of the people, the status quo conservationists ban your participation and exclude you of most of the expression spaces.
The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company.
All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.
The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet's history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the "next best thing".
Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It's only just getting started, you watch.
big money ruins everything
money ruins everything
Ayyy that's capitalism, baby!!
We've reached the end of the VC-funded golden age where they are all now demanding a return on their investment, hence why the screws are now all getting tightened.
From Cory Doctorow:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Some of it is because we had a decade of cheap borrowing which has come to an end and many of these platforms were never profitable.
Let them self destruct.
I'm just glad to have found this place. 😂
It's not just tech companies like Reddit and Twitter, it seems like it's most companies. Ever since the COVID lockdowns prices have been going through the roof, you get less for what you pay for, they're laying off workers, and all while raking in record profits while also crying about how no one wants to work and how they can't afford anything because of the economy. I've never been more cynical about companies than I have been the last year.
Some people have come up with the word "enshittification" to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.
The cycle consists of three parts:
Social media sites that have been in the red, growing primarily through fostering good will in their customers, are finally trying to turn a profit, and there isn't much available to profit off of without intentionally kneecapping some aspect of your product. Taking stuff away is the fastest way to pissing someone off.
Dying? Twitter is very well "alive" despite everything that has happened. I don't know what will happen to Reddit and Twitch but I doubt these platforms will "die". They aren't dying really. Just becoming worse over time. People will continue using these platforms up to a certain degree.
Yeah, I agree. Like how Facebook has been dying for a while, but these platforms are immense. Their quality has declined and people (like me) have indeed left, but I don't think they will disappear completely any time soon.
They've entrenched themselves in society too much to really die off like how websites used to. They just kinda slowly putter along and rot, bleeding users every now and then but barely ever taking a hit.
What's going on with Twitch ?
They were going to ban multi-streaming. Basically most streamers stream to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and I forgot the last site but Twitch was going to ban this so they could only stream to Twitch no matter if they were official twitch partners or not.
I thought this was already forbidden if you're an affiliate / partner (i.e. have a subscribe button)?
they are realizing that if they want to maximize profits they don't actually need to maximize users.
@notExactlyI20 Also, in the centralized model it only takes a few decisions to tank things. See: Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover and his following decisions and Reddit’s new pricing scheme.