Yet. Reddit was a friend when Digg died. Any closed platform can do whatever they want whenever they want and as soon as they decide to start making money. I wouldn’t trust discord to not pull a Reddit in a few years.
Not. Your. Platform. Not. Your. Content.
Latest update from him: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_t...
We could have exactly what you describe but people just don't step up and take responsibility and leadership.
Its frustrating, exhausting and disheartening to constantly be dragging people into taking care of each other.
Free, competent, altruistically interested
Pick two when looking for leaders.
The "volunteer leader problem" boils down to looking for an altruistic individual who's capable and willing to put up with a ton of shit for... love of X.
There aren't many. There shouldn't be any, but some people are awesome.
In reality, you end up having to substitute some package of incentives (prestige, authority, etc.) in order to entice on-the-fence candidates, and then ride herd on ensuring they don't succumb to their baser instincts.
So when mods say mod tools are important, what they're really saying is: "I put up with a lot of shit, to make you money, and I don't get paid. Give me something in return that makes me feel like you're thankful."
Reddit's been pretty bad, historically and presently, at doing that.
All that is to say, it's one thing to feel like the ratio of hate:love you are getting from users is pretty tilted towards the negative... but getting only empty words and no support from the institutional level is actual injury not just insult. That's why I stand with the mods, and after 10 years or so of daily usage I have left reddit for good (or until reasonable accommodations are made).
Although I'll admit, I've been wanting to break my reddit habits for a long time, so this decision does include some self-interest on my part.
People who can't avoid being assholes to other people tend to avoid actually being around other people, but god knows they'll post a lot online.
Or as a quip I once heard said, "You have a higher floor of politeness to people who can punch you in the face in reply."
Them thinking they’re “working for Reddit” is the reason why so many of them seem out of touch. They are not Reddit employees and Reddit does not need them.
We’ll see.
I am not surprised to hear this sentiment so frequently in this startup minded space, but there is another approach to the problem.
IMO, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc are technically "simple" (once you strip them down to what the end user actually needs from the service) and they provide incredibly valuable services to the world (well I think Twitter is incredibly lame, but I guess I am alone in this opinion). Why aren't there non-profit (or benefit corporation) versions of these services?
Enshitification requires the profit motive.
Someone needs to moderate those spaces and Masnicks Theorem states that any form of content moderation at scale doesn't properly work[1] because nobody can agree on what "bad behavior" even is outside the blatantly obvious like automated spam. (And just to head this off - automated techniques like karma and "votes" sound great in theory but in practice enable all sorts of abuse. - the problem isn't technical and can't be technically solved.)
The problem is simply scale - there's plenty of niche communities for various interests who are likely to not fall victim to the process due to either being non-profit or existing perpendicular to a business' actual revenue stream[2]. Those communities will keep existing until they simply burn out (the natural lifecycle) and the last couple mods just quietly close the place down.
Twitter/Facebook/Reddit attempted to unnaturally cannabilize those communities by moving everything in their walled gardens (alongside a lucky break due to Tapatalk killing the ability for traditional forums to move to mobile) and then trying to extract money from them. Their state is honestly more unnatural than you'd think, but it's what most users gravitated towards.
The closest we have right now as a solution to marry the self-managed forums of old with centralized services is the fediverse, but explaining it to people is often considered to be difficult enough that it probably won't grab mainstream appeal.
And y'know... Maybe that's alright? Centralized social media that tries to appeal to everyone may just have been a mistake to begin with.
[0]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InternetJerk (formerly known as GIFT or Greater Internet Fuckwad Theorem.)
[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-t...
[2]: HN being the latter, mostly existing to market YC startups and because paulg wanted a discussion forum.
I agree wholeheartedly. We are no longer at the point where the core end user services provided by FB/Reddit/Twitter require serious technical innovation. They require a massive amount of moderation though. And Reddit shows that there are volunteers out there who will do it for free, but they need to feel that they are valued and supported by the organization that runs the show.
What better org structure to support volunteers than a non-profit?
The main problem is that I don't think a non-profit could realistically meet the cost required to actually run a platform like this. It's really expensive to run a general purpose platform (not to mention difficult since Masnick's Impossibility Theorem), to the point where I'd call it almost inherently unsustainable. It can work easily for smaller communities, it just won't work for massive ones.
--
To give you an idea, I've been a mod on-and-off on several communities for the past decade (not Reddit, mostly small Discord servers for homebrew projects and a couple of IRC chats) - for the most part, "being a mod" just translates to "check recent userlog to ban obvious spam, tell people to stop butting heads constantly, be welcoming to the newbies". If you think being a mod is enjoying power... well you might have only reddit/discord mods (and their bloated mod teams) for reference. In practice, you're closer to a kindergarten teacher than to the "landed gentry". Usually doesn't take more than 10 minutes a day in experience, if the tooling you have is good enough.
The problem is... the communities I moderated only had 2-3k users in total at most, and only 30 or so were active at any one day. This is very much how smaller communities work (and should work) in practice. But... that doesn't even come close to the total userbase of something like Reddit, even less with platforms that don't at all segment their users like FB and Twitter. Those sites service millions of users each day and their larger communities have thousands of new posts to deal with every day. Reddit mostly mitigates it by splitting it up to volunteer mods who all control a smaller portion of that community, but with FB and Twitter it just... doesn't work since the platforms are opposed to such a notion by design since their entire selling point is "talk with everyone, everywhere, all at once".
Moderation on such a platform just cannot work unless you pour as much cash into it as FB/Twitter (used) to do and no non-profit comes even close to that degree of income (nor can you really obtain it without becoming as privacy-invasive as those two platforms are). Reddit completely gave up on global moderation if I understand it correctly and now only bans users for breaking the law or if they risk damaging the PR of the company.
I do, personally, think that now would be a good time for some form of non-profit/co-op/etc. reddit competitor to emerge. I've seen multiple suggestions in this direction, including from a GSU professor quoted in an MSM article. The demand is there - I think that most of the people aware and annoyed vis-a-vis the Reddit storm would coalesce easily enough around a properly structured alternative - set up clearly as a community-driven platform w/ an economic model strongly signaling commitment to that etc. And, I suspect the easiest way to do it is to form some reasonable organizational structure, and start with a version of the old reddit code base available through GitHub.
I've noticed projects springing up left-and-right to write new code bases, move in different directions, etc., but, seems like the lowest possible friction option (not 0, but low enough to be quite appealing for many potential users) would be throwing up a fork of the old code base (ideally, audited / security-improved out of the gate).
This seems fairly workable to me - you could even move back to the original model of not hosting images, video, etc. I suspect reddit inc. wouldn't be interested in going after such a service considering that their hands are full with trying to juice numbers for IPO and all of the constant foot-in-mouth disease drama out of Huffman et al. Etc.
But, I must write that, I haven't looked into this matter in any depth and may be way off base in some way or other - apologies if so.
Finally checked it out - this service, apparently set up in 2018 (!) has one of the types of structures that fits. In fact, the introductory blog post (https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes) seems ... "prophetic". Not so much in terms of stating anything many didn't know at the time, but, more in the sense of a sort of anachronism like: this sounds like it was probably written in the past two weeks.
So, FYI - "tildes.net" seems a very fitting low-friction (to move to) alternative that's already been running for multiple years and where more and more "reddit refugees" seem to be showing up.
Code's open source etc., as well.
From a quick search, it seems that the operating costs for Meta in 2022 was USD $87.66 billion. Twitter was $5.6 billion in 2021. Reddit's is a mystery but it has 192 million more monthly active users than Twitter (not that they necessarily post the same amount of content or that the content is as expensive to store/serve, but in any case it's not going to be cheap either.)
So to run something like Facebook, you'd have to have one of the best-funded non-profits ever. Non-profit doesn't mean it has to be a charitable foundation (so you could run ads and sell services, which you'll need to, because you're not getting $87.66 billion through donations), but even non-profit companies with a decent amount of revenue do not come close to that amount. I don't think it's impossible to create an ethical, non-profit alternative to Facebook, but I understand why one hasn't been created (there are non-profit social networks, but most seem to be distributed/federated social networks, which are a very different experience for most users.)
Even if you created something with perfect feature-parity of Facebook, it'd still be extremely difficult to convince users to switch. For messaging platforms, there is a non-profit organization that has a secure and private messaging app (Signal) but few people use it compared to Facebook Messenger, Telegram and KakaoTalk (which by default don't use end-to-end encryption) or even Snapchat (doesn't use E2EE for messages aside from photos) (WhatsApp at least always uses E2EE, not sure about Line.)
> Enshitification requires the profit motive.
Not really. Firefox killed support for WPAs: that alone is enough reason for some to switch to a Chromium-based browser. They've done several questionable UI redesigns that their users don't seem to like (people like a consistent UI.) They're also starting a bad trend of adding new features that they're killing within a year or two (their password manager, their E2EE file sharing service, their encrypted notes.) I personally didn't use any of those features, but for any user who used those new features that they promoted, having to switch a year or two later is a good way to turn them off your products. Google is obviously far worse with this with their various services, but the point is that quality can decrease even when their is no profit motive. I'll agree with you that it's certainly more likely to happy when there's a profit motive though.
How much of that actual cost is related to running a simple social blogging/connecting tool vs anything that is ad/surveillance/manipulation/etc?
Also, how much are they paying to moderate? Imagine the power of volunteer moderation when supported by a non-profit volunteer-focused organization that values its volunteer assets...
>perfect feature-parity of Facebook
All I wanted was a place to share baby pictures with grandma and they bolted on the panopticon...
>it'd still be extremely difficult to convince users to switch.
Even grandma knows that FB is evil now. She keeps asking me why the baby pics are on Facecrook, but I don't have any good solution for her today.
It's plausible that the ad/surveillance/manipulation/etc makes up the bulk of development costs nowadays but I'd imagine the actual content (photos, videos, etc.) being served makes up the bulk of the costs. It undoubtedly could be made more efficient, but even if you could cut total operating costs by 99% (very unlikely) you still need $876 million/year. If you can only manage to cut it by 95%, you'll need over $4 billion/year. In any case, Reddit doesn't pay most of its moderators and it's still not profitable, so I don't think moderators make up a significant portion of the costs.
> >perfect feature-parity of Facebook
> All I wanted was a place to share baby pictures with grandma and they bolted on the panopticon...
> Even grandma knows that FB is evil now. She keeps asking me why the baby pics are on Facecrook, but I don't have any good solution for her today.
If you only want to share things with a small number of users, do you even need social media for this? Sounds like something a group chat on Signal or WhatsApp (with notifications silenced) would work for this if everyone you know is willing to use it. I like Facebook because it lets me see what my friends, family and former coworkers that I can't always see often are up to. Hard to stay in contact with everyone you've ever been friends with, but Facebook makes it a little easier.
I agree with you that Facebook is evil in many ways, and I'll 100% advocate for viable alternatives (which unfortunately I don't think distributed/federated networks are, due to regular users being confused by them), but I acknowledge that it's going to be very difficult to get people to switch. Ultimately I think there needs to be a reason to switch other than privacy (as most people don't care), and unfortunately Facebook can quickly copy any unique feature that an alternative network adds. It's not impossible for new platforms to come about, but most new platforms aren't really clones of old ones (TikTok isn't a clone of Facebook, YouTube or really any other major existing platform.) I don't know what the solution is. Not sure how much of an improvement it is for privacy, but in terms of mental wellbeing, I find Discord to be more enjoyable and less addictive, but again, it's not really the same thing as Facebook.
I think non-profit versions of social media can easily happen from a financial standpoint. The big issue would be adoption.
[0]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2022-annu...
If all they cared about were paying the server bills, there would be easy compromises to be made.
My only worry is a tragedy of the commons scenario.
It is inevitable that Discord will also become terrible eventually, but they might be the last centralized social network.
Who was running Reddit back then?
Leadership matters. Take climate change for example, or anything really.
It is my content, but I've licensed it. The platform existing doesn't take away copyright law