Serious question - why so much risk and instability in this "internet chat" sector?
We are seeing a consolidation of moderators of the major subreddits. The number of moderators on reddit is incredibly tiny, sub-sub-sub pareto level of control.
These subreddits are losing diversity of who moderates them and it's suspected by some that many full time moderators are fully paid up employees of PR firms. Even volunteer mods admit that its basically like a full time job. It makes total sense if I was in a marketing firm for Netflix to have an employee being a moderator on the largest internet forum about movies. This pull moves away from the organic, disorganized and diverse nature of reddit to a kind of centralization and conformity. I suppose recent events have also shown the power of these power moderators in shaping the platform to the will of those moderators, come to think of it. Interesting times!
I agree for the vast majority of users it costs nothing to move, and they will if there#s something better which there isn't anything yet
But, as before with all the other cases, those who move will be the early adopters. moderators are the old guard, stuffy, controlling, professional, they will be the last to move as they have to protect their investment. Those who move first will be the more independent and chaotic riding the wave. I look forward to it.
Time will tell how long tiktok lasts. I find as time goes on the internet is less fluid than it used to be.
Digg was a big fish in a tiny pond even as late as 2010 when it launched v4. Most people in the English-speaking world Digg targeted were some kind of online, but usage jumped as smartphones became normal. Twitter took most of that growth in use.
Not just that. Once we all have GPT-n power in our back pocket, it will become trivial to flood Reddit and all other forms of social media with absolute time wasting drivel.
Platforms will start to require government IDs. But these will also be falsified with thispersondoesnot exist.
And then we'll have to verify with a trusted identity provider or phone number. And that will be required for and stick to everything we do online.
Short text-based social media, long government tracking.
Suppose, as a thought experiment, you could create the ideal, perfect, social network or discussion board. Say, with 40 of the smartest, most creative, quirkiest, considerate people you knew. Hell: the 40 top exemplars of this on the whole planet. It would be a pretty awesome network.
(I know this because I accidentally created something like this, just by creating a small group with smart and interesting people in it. It really was surprisingly good.)
It can only get worse.
Because if you've already got the best, then anyone else you can add will be less smart, less creative, less quirky, less considerate, than who's already in the group.
And at some point you'll notice. Maybe at 50 people, or 500, or 5,000, or 50k, or 500k, or 5m, or ....
For a few reasons.
- Gradation of capabilities. These are ordinalities, not cardinalities.
- Limits to common experience and interest.
- Differences of opinion. Or morals. Or philosophy.
- Just plain scale.
See: https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/1058991
Ultimately, the original founding cohort starts looking for a fresh platform / greenfield with smaller scale, fewer problems, and a higher S/N ratio --- this is classical "clue flight" (or brain drain in an earlier metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_drain).
Reddit started off as a quirky, self-selected, geek-heavy crowd. It's anything but that now. At small scale, a free-speech free-for-all was tolerable. At large, it's harmful at international scale.
A key problem is what I call Woozle's Epistemic Paradox:
Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the commercial web to social media.
We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in the first place -- and we've now transitioned to a situation where many people are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...
This is why the "it's just the Internet" or "just delete your Facebook" is not only an inadequate response, it's false. It fails to recognise that even for those not actively participating or engaging with those platforms, their lives are profoundly affected. The Arab Spring, genocide in Myanmar, the Hong Kong democracy protests, and the January 6 insurrection being four specific cases in point.