I use Facebook mainly for hobby/owners groups these days as that's where a lot of them are. I sometimes use the market place. My feed is mainly my interests, motorbikes, local events, local cafes/restaurants etc etc. Then there's reels i never interact with which get forced on me every other week after clicking hide. The Reels are all short thumbnails of young girls of questionable age wearing little clothing in provocative poses/dances! They don't fit my usual browsing habbits, I don't interact with them but they force them on me as likely they'll gain lots of clicks from mid-thirty year old male demographic! I'm no prude but I don't want to see what look like children in my feed. We know why they do it though, they all likely get high clicks.
Youtube is the same except content more relevant to me feed. I use Youtube for longer form videos, travel, motor vehicles, tech. They still insist on forcing shorts in my feed. Mobile has got particularly bad as they mix shorts in the feed timeline as regular videos. AndroidTV Youbtube isn't so bad but they are slowly promoting shorts there to.
Not shorts but similar is I used Spotify for many years then it started forcing Podcasts on me as Podcasts where the hot thing. On my homepage where I had music which was relevant to me I had to hunt around to find my music as my homepage was full of podcasts I had no interest in so eventually cancelled my membership.
It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
I remember in the 2000s, all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer". Um, no, people who play WoW already play WoW, and you are really trying to convince everyone who doesn't want to play WoW to play a game that is designed to be very similar. It never made any sense.
But I guess if you are a business exec, and you are risk averse, and lazy, you don't mind any of that. You just say "WoW makes money please make me one if those." That is not how creativity and innovation work though.
What happens usually is some middle tier exec (or big name customer if B2B) will say, “hey did you see Snapchat new stories feature? We should do something like that” and then without careful customer research, or a product leader connecting it to an overarching vision, the devs just start work on it and it rolls out because it’s just there.
Everyone needs something to do and everyone loves new features right?
Blindly copying some other company’s new features or UI patterns, and pigeonholing it into an app without cohesive product-wide strategy (aka connecting it to what customers already like about your service but even better) is always the sign the company has entered mediocrity. Largely a talent issue and execs who don’t really care about long term product dev. People just looking at generic growth charts and hoping they go up and then buying other companies when their own teams can’t hack it, hoping they can seed some life, without fixing the root causes.
Is that really the goal though? You can have a successful MMO without killing wow. Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, etc. were all great games from the business perspective.
OP said:
>all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer"
Guild Wars and WHO weren't positioned as WoW killers. They were positioned as WoW alternatives that prioritized or PvP or had an endgame that revolved around PvP. Which is probably why they did well - they offered something that WoW wasn't good at instead of trying to eat WoW's lunch.
Edit: Rift is probably another good example, though less high-profile than SWTOR.
What's funny is WoW has declined so much but is still clearly a viable business, but I'm sure things like LOTRO, City of Heroes and Tera peaked at higher levels than current WoW. But the WoW of their time was on like 10-12million subs so that was a failure.
The difference is that these are replaceable, consumable or temporary. With 'platforms', it's not enough to make something similar to something that someone likes, you have to make something that displaces something someone likes. How someone spends their leisure time is a limited, valuable resource.
This means you need more than just a better product; you need some inciting event that forces entire groups of people off the old product at the same time. Something like that product deciding to destroy the tools people use to access it...
> ...
> It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.
I wonder if we might give this a name like "tradegy of the social networks".
It's easy to see how a company, like Meta/Instagram can choose between keeping their own smaller market, or taking half the tiktok market by transforming their app to reels. They can't do both, as nobody would install a new app.
For the users this suck, as the total market is now smaller, meaning less choice and diversity.
Say you have a shop and brand that sells chocolate cake; but a competitor appears that sells ice cream, and their market turns out to be 10 times bigger than yours. You could try to make a new shop, selling ice cream, but the lack of brand awareness might make it never take off. So instead you turn your chocolate cake shop into an ice cream shop, and use your existing customer awareness to catapult you into taking half that market. Good for you, since you now have half of a 10 times bigger market. Bad for the customers, since they now lose the choice between cake and ice cream.
Ok, maybe the part about "using your existing brand" is where social networks are a bit different from other industries. There are hundreds of companies that could create a good social network, but the hard part is getting a big enough user base going. Probably this is less of an issue in the cake industry.
You want some experience, but then you describe how Youtube is forcing you to click through shorts and BS as that.
I think power users should give up on direct interaction with internet. With youtube you can have a scripts that download videosm, and filter out shorts, ads and other garbage. With news you can just print everything on laser printer... Spotify should be exported as bunch of MP3 files...
It is very easy to hire some English speaking assistant in India or Philippines, or have cron jobs that does tedious work for you. I think today, if you see ad on web, or you are directly exposed to some shifty behavior like Reddit does, it is major red flag for your lifestyle. Like when you live in an apartment without proper ventilation or with toxic fumes.
Mate, can I interest you in a bit of GPT? We got 3.5 and 4, good shit, you don't need to hire someone. The newsfeed is not a critical task, AI will suffice.
As for myself, I'll just stop using Reddit (largely have over the last year), and do something else with the free time.
A lot of UI and design work that people think is creative, making a positive contribution, is actually spending millions of dollars on removing and reducing value delivered to the users relative to cheaper or near-free alternatives.
Sometimes it's even funny. How many startups are explicitly or implicitly trying to be a replacement for some internal Excel spreadsheet? How many of them realize that their offering would work strictly better if it was distributed as an Excel spreadsheet or plugin instead of an SPA?
But it's not about utility, it's about control. Driving users through funnels, putting them on flows that minimize actual creative or maintenance work for you, locking them in and bleeding dry with subscriptions.
Today browsers barely give you a few blunt tools to control your own browsing experience: Javascript on/off, Styles on/off, and so on. I want a browser that 1. fetches YouTube's HTML, 2. understands it to be essentially a bunch of links to video URLs, and 3. present me a simple list of those video URLs that I can click to watch or download. I don't want my browser to act against me by being a platform where YouTube executes god-knows-what on my system to render everything the way YouTube wants and to show me things that YouTube wants and push content that YouTube wants to push. Put the user back in control.
Same for Reddit. Browser should fetch Reddit's HTML, realize it's essentially a list of links, and simply display those links, ignoring all the other shit that comes down in the site's HTML, CSS, and JS.
I realize that step #2 above is hard and probably magic at this point. But that's the direction I'd like to see browsers go. Stop adding even more APIs that companies can use to control my browser.
It's so frustrating. The Web, of course, has a similar but much worse problem with that, in no small part because there aren't—for no good reason—excellent built-in UI elements. They could be good, and there could be a lot more very helpful more-complex and smarter elements (think: mobile listviews, native hands-off payment prompts, that kind of thing), but they're not and there aren't :-/
Damn near every app on my phone would be better if the designers and brand-obsessed product managers hadn't gotten their way.
There’s a relationship between how social- or video-centric an app is and how well short form video fits into their mix. You can’t shoehorn it in. Not least if you feel obliged to because you paid some ludicrous sum to tout the name.
For example, short form video feels ass-y on Reddit. It feels okay on YouTube, even if you don’t engage with it.
And to nobody's surprise US tech will be primed to offer their TikTok clone.
Short term thinking makes money, but dooms the brand to an uncertain future.
Back when I got my car, I installed an Android Auto head unit and justified a Spotify subscription because I could easily navigate the AA app and play any music I wanted.
I had a major breakpoint one day driving home from work, and there was *no* music on my main page anywhere. I had to scroll 3 full pages down to get past all the podcasts they were trying to get me to listen to. After that I just canceled my sub and went back to buying/downloading my music, 2007-style.
That definitely belongs in a textbook on absurd corporate decisions.
I thought you must have been exaggerating somewhere, but nope, that is exactly how it went.
Probably Reddit thought they were just buying a mailing list and a development team. So the cost should be compared to Reddit marketing's acquisition costs and Reddit HR hiring costs.
Maybe money had to be moved under whatever pretense.
Today's social media corporations are so fat with (venture) capital that they can, and do, spend that kind of money just to keep any potential competitors locked out. TikTok, the last social network that became truly big, was launched in 2016, seven years ago. Seven years without any new player entering the space. That's an eternity. I can promise you this wouldn't be happening without (very costly) interventions from above.
Modern tech capitalism doesn’t want to compete in the “let the best product win”-space. It’s just not enough money and making stuff is hit or miss. They want to own access and rent-seek. At least that’s my interpretation.
That's simply -not- capitalism.
The point is to show the contradictions of market liberalism, how they never fulfill their ideals and by necessity lead to the conditions under which we live. Communism simply says: let's live in a society without money, without a state, without class. Where one fishes in the morning, hunts in the afternoon, and debates in the evening. Where we live, produce, and labor in a social fashion, where people's basic sexual and physical needs are always attended to as the highest priority of the collective. Where each and every person is given the opportunity to pursue the fullest extent of what they can be as a person, to flourish as a human being.
Somewhere in here the Soviet Union fits in: for having the highest degree of sexual freedom, for guaranteed housing and jobs, for fair working hours and a living wage, for gender parity in all aspects of life. All at the expense of a vast police and security complex employed to crush potential dissent, and to use those political prisoners as a free pool of labor in order to compete with western late-capitalist states (which they failed to do).
The Dengists succeeded by simulating market capitalism to generate the industrial conditions necessary to move towards a more fully socialized state--the Soviet Union, on the other hand, was never willing to subject their backwards populations to industrial capitalism, which led to even greater violence in some respects. People wonder how far it will actually take them, we'll see...but the CCP seems to be uninterested in an internationalist movement.
I think that the basic propositions of Communism are mostly appealing, its just that people are not sure how to get there. We've had successes, like the Paris Commune, that were ruthlessly crushed by the state--they don't tend to last very long. Is there a way to achieve revolution without strict military disciplinary measures? After all, the hierarchies of an army nearly reproduce the hierarchies of capitalism with marked precision. Short answer, nobody knows, the French almost had a successful revolution in 1968, that failed, they spent many decades theorizing why, alternatives to an armed movement. Foucault, the great French theorist against disciplinarian social organization, became a neoliberal. Many of those who descend from these french thinkers became Neoliberals, like Jonah Peretti (who founded Buzzfeed) or Nick Land. You could also call them accelerationists, who believe that by accelerating the contradictions of capital one can bring down capitalist society faster, as it will end up crushing itself.
Everybody knows the system doesn't work, we're all sick of it, but nobody knows what to do about it. Everything else besides plain and simple labor organizing seems like a lost cause. Anybody who says anything else is usually confused or in someone else's pocket. We had a nearly international, decentralized protest movement only a few years ago that could've toppled multiple governments if the people were angry enough. You don't think the people won't get angry again?
1. Have an excellent business idea 2. ? 3. Profit!
Also why does reddit mobile site lag? Takes 5-10 seconds of the stupid icon before you see the text. Compare it to instant i.reddit or old.reddit.
Are they so incompetent that they cannot write a site that doesnt lag? Or they just dont care?
They don't seem to understand a couple key things, one of which is that if they can't make a website work, I will not install other things they make. They break trust.
Hacksaw Bob: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kZtN3XTk5w0 Whole series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOLArO56vjuqhmPDfbLGa...
Dubsmash had a sizable userbase with almost no overlap with Reddit's and their conversion rate appears to be less than 0.01%
Guess how long we lasted before being "brought into the fold".
Mo 1-3 is new owners finding all the buried bodies, and restructuring leadership with people they can trust
3-6 mos is learning who is valuable and who is not (overlap with months 1-3)
6-9 mos is predicting how customers will react to X change or Y Change
9-12mos is final legal review of changes, exit packages, PR statements,etc (especially is mass layoffs are involved)
12-18mos is execution time frame for layoffs, and restructure of the organization
After the first year is when people get fired.
Not many people got fired though, only a few managers (who to be fair, were a bit useless). Most others left "voluntarily" after the corp changes were made (you know, the ones that definitely weren't going to be made). It wasn't so bad though, we all got a good deal.
Is this really the kind of competition that made reddit quake in its boots? Like, I never heard of Dubsmash until now but this was still around the later years of Vine.
Reddit is an aggregator so from what I understand here, social media that encourages original creations/re-creations are a commodity, not competition. As seen by how most of the current front page at any given time has aggregated TikTok videos.
It is just a very tough business.
That depends on which theory about capitalism and its purpose you subscribe to - in your (and my) case social-democrat style capitalism (which was the dominant theory prior to the collapse of the USSR/GDR/Yugoslavia block) generally assumes a responsibility of the corporations towards society at large: paying fair and livable wages to employees (so that they can buy the products), paying proper taxes so that society can fund what's needed to give the corporation a chance at being successful (i.e. education of new workers, road and rail transportation, a fair court system), not laying off people for pure number games and invest a part of the profit to improve the corporation (invest into new machinery, R&D, or training the staff). Stock markets primarily serve as a way for corporations to raise money for investments.
Modern-day "neoliberal" capitalism however is a different beast. Basically, making money is a goal all on its own, with no rules and limitations on how to make it. As a result, we got "investment banks" "creating" insane amounts of money from thin air (and growing so large they threaten the financial stability of entire countries), everyone is constantly looking on how to squeeze those below him out of money on all levels, and if you got money you're free to do with it whatever way you please, including burning it or using it to snuff out a competitor.
I think the problems we're seeing today is that the government is just not doing its job (or more charitably, not moving fast enough to keep up) in regulating the industries _before_ the damage is done. And before the entrenched interests of the resulting megabillionaires can just pay the govt to look away for as long as they can milk this cow.
Reddit, you are replaceable. The moment you turn off old.reddit, I'm gone. I'd definitely admit I am addicted to reddit in it's current form but new reddit and the app are just too insufferable I'll happily give it all up and find somewhere else.
The only one that did was the short-lived Amazon original Betas, which had more irritating younger characters, yet for all of its memespeak it really did feel like it grokked the startup bubble culture well enough, especially since it was actually set in the SoMa of San Francisco, rather than Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto!
But yes it would be great to have the show nowadays with a fresh look at the current environment.
Can't they make a TikTok-like app with a subreddit as a backend? So ppl get same content but with a different front-end?
So the obvious answer is to create a standalone service… which it was before they acquired it.
This model does not fit for Reddit with its poor execution (old.reddit.com is still the best) and its user base.
More sites will split off and use the old.reddit.com code base.
How? Its not open source. And its just a frontend. How would people split it off?
gah that's frustrating. they could have bought apollo for 10 million probably. (in his own words that would have been life changing money) but instead they go down a darker path.
There's a long way to go before shorting can happen. If anything, Reddit are shorting themselves.
Not necessarily illegal, but I had thought that, for sure, one shouldn't boast about heavily discriminatory race-related factoids, even if they thought that it would be for a "good" cause.
Didn't they think what would have happened had they replaced the "black teens" in their press release with "white teens"?
Same as when a "cool" person goes anywhere, you don't monetize them, you monetize all the people they bring into the club, bar, theater, etc.
An example. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1011899328/black-tiktok-creat...
Please don't focus on whether on not they should or should get credit or any political statements, focus on the fact that they are the ones that made the "cool" dances that the most followed two girls on TikTok used, which then went viral, which in turn made TikTok a bunch of money because those millions of views had ads played against them.
I think it's self-evident that hip hop is at least a trillion dollar phenomenon and that it started with black folks in the United States.
Still sounds racist, in its way. As in, why aren't the black kids seen as the boring, nerdish kids that will get to form the VC crowd themselves in 20 years' time?
Later edit: Reminds me of this Dave Chapelle skit [1], the part with the "white dude" whispering:
> Oh, my God, I think those black guys are gonna try to save us
It's just essentialist stuff.
That's a good question and if you're sincerely interested in understanding the answer, there's a long history of thought on the topic of black excellence in the context of racial oppression. You could start with W.E.B. Du Bois and the "Talented Tenth"
For the record, I'm assuming your questions are disingenuous, but answering in good faith for other readers who might interested.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr...
Thank you for the your recommendation.
Found it funny that one of the establishment's darling magazines, I'm talking about Foreign Affairs, has started doing the token racial thing when it comes to Du Bois by finding out that he had, indeed, written for them 70 to 80 years ago [1], and in the May/June issue they even re-published a July 1943 piece of his. No mention of his communism, of course, that would defeat the purpose of talking about race without really looking at what stands behind race.
[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/web-du-bois-doc...