Are We Watching the Internet Die?
wheresyoured.at
wheresyoured.at
I know that companies use this data as the basis for commercial offerings and I am completely fine with that, but I know that the data will always be available for free as well. As a side note, in general I’ve found the local OSM community to be much nicer than the local Waze admins.
That’s a good thing and I like your framing. By contrast, the article frames this as you being tricked into it by the commercial companies to which you previously directly provided data but that’s just nonsense. You weren’t tricked, and you aren’t a victim. I’m glad OpenStreetMap is there to provide the same value with open data but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone.
I disagree. Google et al very much trick people into thinking they are helping "the community" by contributing to their databases. They even tell people how "popular" they are because their reviews were included in searches. Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"?
The only way that would be a trick is if they were helping the app owner while not making the app more valuable to the community which is obviously not the case. Clearly the voluntary contributors are adding value to the app and are therefore helping the community who uses the app.
> Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"
Their business models have been public this whole time, hence our discussion, none of this has been a secret. The mere fact that companies tend to paint everything about their operations in the best light possible instead of the opposite is not evidence of trickery or even morally culpable deception.
We definitely differ in opinion there. I don't know why people think companies can get away with things that humans never would.
I just don't get the mindset of 'companies are evil, it's how it has to be'. Because it doesn't.
But that's an edge case tbh. Hearing of scrapers ignoring Robots.txt and going after copyright show that they couldn't care less about ethical scraping. They more than overstepped their bounds in some places.
But the above comment was about user-submitted feedback used for improving Google Maps, which doesn't seem like a trick at all.
Every tech company agreed they could do whatever they wanted with user created data and the user had no rights over that data.
No user was informed of the full extent of the consequences of agreeing to use new tech... or allowed to alter the 'agreement' tech companies offered the user.
The 'trick' was hiding sales tactics that were illegal in traditional businesses, behind TOS, EULAs and unregulated internet space.
We all know deep down inside that no man would agree to what big tech did, so the deal was made unintelligble to the user.
Someone in the OSM community coined the term "crowd serfing" to describe stuff like contributing to Google Maps for free.
The tech industry is just a regulatory arbitrage play these days.
I wouldnt be so sure about that... do you receive emails from gmail addresses?
The problem is that the n^2 stickiness of social graphs makes competition impossible when they scale into the millions. All the value is created by the users but accrues to the network owners, and then the owners are able to abuse and manipulate the networks as they see fit without repercussion. I think the ideal model for social networks is that they would be owned by benevolent nonprofits, but besides wikipedia VCs were able to capture every important social network of the Web 2.0 era.
Re paragraph 2, yes. Mastodon largely fits your description of the ideal model, I think.
what’s sad is they don’t even compare themselves to historical patrons. Would we have Bernini without Borghese? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the genAI peddlers aren’t trying to grow artists and grow culture, they are trying only to grow content and sell it. It is a structure that is far less enriching for society than the patronage model.
That was us back then, 20 years ago, the nerds, the sub-culture, the people who found this new internet thing fascinating.
Today it's EVERYBODY. And they're really not that fascinated with the internet but rather the content that they're consuming from the internet. In their view this content could come from anywhere, it just happens to come from the internet.
So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we'll be a miniscule minority.
That way each node in the larger community can vet new members, but they can still communicate across nodes. Sort of like ActivityPub, or something like it. Not trying to prefer one design over another, we'll see what comes.
That was the ideal era that many of us entrepreneurial nerds wish we could get back to. You could stand up an online business with a website, buy targeted ads for approachable prices, and bootstrap (often sucessfully if modestly) whatever weird idea you wanted to pursue. It could be local and community serving, or digital and global, and you could put all the pieces together yourself without worrying about some garden's arbitrary/anti-competitive policy change shutting you down overnight.
You're talking more about the 90's which was indeed cool for the hacker spirit and hobbyisy nerds, but not as cool (to me) as the era that bloomed just a little later.
Traffic has increased dramatically with broadband expansion and the streaming that soaks it up, and the number of connected devices exploder, but the number of users are actually only a modest change and the distribution of traffic has decreased tremendously as traffic consolidated onto the few "winning" brands.
When you use "tiny" in all-caps, I imagine you to mean an order of magnitude difference in users or well-visited services. It's nothing like that.
The time from today until when Star Wars came out has been 46 years.
Time sure flies.
Ive long accepted low quality users focused on easy consumption. I'm not as welcoming of the realization of the Dead Internet theory. If I'm going to take time to engage with someone, they should at least have the good graces to be sentient.
We already had a successful era of decentralization with vBulletin and PHPbb boards in the 2000s. Reddit and Facebook Pages took over that niche, and started pulling up the ladder behind them by de-emphasizing posts that linked out to a third party site. The message was clear: got something to post? Post it on the site directly, don't link. Their advertising business relies on people spending as much time as possible on [myPlatform], as opposed to [yourSite].
Heck, even that famous article about "dead Internet" has its source in a forum topic, not a viral tweet. Because it's a forum post, it's not arbitrarily limited to 280 characters, there's actually room for nuance, both in the OP and the replies to it.
https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
On the forums end, there's also things like ProBoards, which works like Discord in sense that they are hosted by a company (and thus pursuant to their terms), in which they act as the community "hub".
how in the world could it possibly cost $900 million a year to run Reddit?
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
> Cost of revenue consists primarily of payments to third parties for the cost of hosting and supporting our mobile applications and website. In addition, cost of revenue includes expenses directly associated with the delivery of our advertising and other services, including advertising measurement services and credit card and other transaction processing fees. Cost of revenue also consists of personnel-related costs, including salaries, benefits, and stock-based compensation.
That was only $111,011,000.
Edit:
This is incorrect, R&D does include R&D salaries.
And I guess that matters more as 3rd party tools have been locked out.
How many people is dang really?
Or maybe keep trying to get in on the NFT craze and working to carefully ensure third party apps can't work with Reddit. That's also a choice.
Sounds like an interesting place to work.
Yuval Harari wonders what we'll do with people made useless by AI. They will be activists directed by AI generated propaganda campaigns to force all the people the AI doesn't control to comply.
Yup, that's the future with AI. You have a few AI researchers that program the robots and everyone else is crusading for justice and working in compliance. There jobs consist of inventing new things to be offended about and enforcing new rules to prevent their feelings from being hurt though everything they believe comes from AI generated propaganda campaigns.
Same thing happens at colleges were you got like $20 million spent on salaries for senior DEI person in charge of putting tampons in men's bathrooms and such whose job mainly consists of going to meetings and finding things to be offended about[1].
[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/virginia-taxpayers-a...
You seriously think 80% of Twitter was “woke commissars”?
Sometimes after a change of ownership, they cut whatever they consider fat. This is Broadcom's strategy for example, acquire and cut.
Morals aside, 193m is almost double Tim Cook's compensation and a bout 90% of Sundar Pichai's. Public companies that made 1000x the revenue in a quarter, compared to this yearly revenue report. How is Spez justifying such compensation?
Reddit never owed me anything, never spent any money and was paid back for the time invested. Might spend 5 minutes per week on it now. Plenty of people are trying to make a better Reddit, nobody has targeted them with unfair competition.
I do not understand people who volunteer unpaid labor and then complain bitterly about it.
I’d be more worried about those that don’t complain.
Well, let's say you helped someone on Reddit.
What you were intending to do is to share your life experience with someone, making their, and maybe probably someone else's life meaningfully easier/save them some time. And, hopefully, someone will treat you the same way in return.
What you also have done is contributed said part of your life experience towards making some meaninglessly rich guy even richer, and who will enshittify the platform you presumably enjoy using in return, so that he can make pennies on top of the follar he already earns.
If there's a better platform for giving you what you want, I'm sure you'd leave Reddit and never look back. If this platform you're imaging doesn't exist, how do you know it even could ever exist?
Of course, the huge downside is networking effects and you now in the 2020s have to compete against "free" services. It shouldn't be such a hump to overcome if you appeal to the right crowd, but you also need to somehow appeal to the power users who will ultimately get your site off the ground. And those are never easy to find.
This statement confuses me. I see how the fact that most people tend to cluster around a small number of platforms effectively at least trends this toward being more and more true, but what are the older "dark ages" referred to here? AOL? In the 90's you could take the easy route and sign up with AOL, but there were numerous dial-up ISPs you could choose from. Even then, you didn't have to use the AOL portal (though I'm sure non-tech savvy people who only used AOL for email never bothered to understand).
But shortly afterwards there was an explosion of web content and forums that over time has been digested back into giant conglomerates - but for a short, beautiful time, if you wanted something you had to go find it yourself, on site-owner's terms.
i haven't had a retro memory pull that strong in a while
The internet at large (web, gopher, http, ftp, email, etc) existed and was available at universities and through regional ISP's and a smattering of local BBS's but for a very long time there was very little shared traffic between this common "internet" of services and those proprietary services.
The propriety services were delivering convenience, curation, cohesion, and features that the internet-at-large hadn't matured enough to deliver. Consumers liked that.
That's the "dark" time the author, and myself, generally see us trending back towards.
Even Reddit, stackoverflow, and other “portals” originate most traffic from Google. Facebook is probably one of the rare “internet” estates that isn’t navigated to via Google, but I’ll betcha the browsers they start opens Google first.
The whole “the internet is dying” is a continuous and trite refrain. It’s not dying but continuously changing. There’s always subcultures in various places. But the mass market internet has always been corporate curated crap for profit. That won’t change. And the whole AI is ruining the universe is malarkey. SEO garbage has taken over most search results and it’s of such incredibly low quality that AI generated SEO is actually a significant step up. At least LLM AIs are trained on stuff that has the content looked for whereas the SEO crap is written by people with know knowledge of the subject. While the AIs may hallucinate a bunch of weirdness into a page, that’s no different than some SEO content monkey typing in nonsense to capture clicks. Probabilistically the AI is more likely to write something cogent.
Quantity is a quality of its own. In moderated forums there has been a distinct rise in moderation load because of AI generated "not quite" crap and bots that still do not contribute to the quality of discussions. This is what the death of the internet is about. It's turned into an ocean of piss and pollution that is and will continue to drive people away.
But it depends on what you want the web to be, I suppose.
The fact your useful site could be DDOSed by any kiddy so you had to put it behind cloudflare is but another. The fact that security became a huge burden on most self hosted software was another. Moderation and spam if you allowed posting is just another. Getting all of your content copied and Google boosting the copier above you yet another.
> None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits, or performing the vital-but-thankless role of moderation, will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing
.. and then mentions Sam Altman's investment. His announcement in fall of 2014 specifically said:
> First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time.
https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit
So _are_ there people who were highly involved reddit community members in 2014 who will get a payday? Or did they already have a chance to cash out some time ago, and only some fraction held on until now? Or did that 10% contribution to "people in the reddit community" not happen at all?
- aren't there regulatory/legal problems with having a very large number of people owning equity in a company that's not public?
- associating active reddit users with real people with addresses, accounts, etc would be real lift, and potentially alienating to users who have been operating under pseudonyms
- establishing that you eventually get paid for activity seems like it creates a natural incentive for low-quality/high-volume (spam?) engagement, karma rings, etc. Rewarding only the people who _actually_ add value is messy
Here's their email
"tl;dr – you’re invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock at the same price as institutional investors when we IPO. Details about eligibility and next steps follow. This (long, dense) email has all the info we can provide due to legal restrictions.
As you may have heard, Reddit has taken steps toward becoming a publicly traded company with the initial public filing of our registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on February 22, 2024. Yes, it’s happening.
And because you have helped make Reddit what it is today, you now have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors.
We’re offering a Directed Share Program (“DSP”) that invites eligible users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to participate in our initial public offering (“IPO”). (Including you!)
Program Requirements While being selected to pre-register is the first step, there are certain legal and regulatory requirements to participate in the DSP that are outside of Reddit’s control. Bear with us here…
To be eligible for the DSP, you must: Be a current U.S. resident; You will be asked to provide the DSP Administrator a valid social security or permanent resident number, along with other personal information. Reddit will not have access to this data. Please note that U.S. residents using a VPN may face application limitations if the VPN locates them in certain non-U.S. jurisdictions. Be at least 18 years old; Provide your full legal name and an email address; Not be a current or former Reddit employee (FTE). When the DSP launches (a few weeks after pre-registration ends), individuals who have been confirmed for the program will be contacted by our external DSP Administrator. You will then be asked to provide additional information securely to the DSP Administrator to confirm your eligibility.
"you now (2024) have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors" is very different from in 2014 saying "the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community".
Is there anyone who was a very active community participant prior to fall 2014, who as part of the series B got (was _given_) shares?
Users and moderators who created an account on or before January 1, 2024 are potentially eligible for the directed share program. Eligible participants must reside in the United States and be at least 18 years of age. Further, eligible users and moderators must be in good standing on our platform and cannot be a current or former Reddit employee.
We will invite users and moderators to participate in the directed share program in six phased priority tiers. We will assign each eligible participant to a tier based on that participant’s contributions to Reddit. User contributions will be measured in karma (a user’s reputation score that reflects their community contributions). Moderator contributions will be measured by membership and moderator actions on our platform. Tier 1 will include certain users and moderators identified by us who have meaningfully contributed to Reddit community programs. Tier 2 will include users who hold at least 200,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 5,000 moderator actions. Tier 3 will include users who hold at least 100,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 2,500 moderator actions. Tier 4 will include users who hold at least 50,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 1,000 moderator actions. Tier 5 will include users who hold at least 25,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 500 moderator actions. Tier 6 will include all other eligible users and moderators.
I think this idea that “moderators should be paid” or that users of Reddit deserve shares of the company just because the website wouldn’t be very useful without the users is such a stretch.
That would be like saying that people who post classified ads in the newspaper should own the newspaper. After all, the newspaper would have far less revenue and value without classifieds.
Seems like Reddit not turning a profit is strictly Reddit's problem — not users or even really basic business model, but spending.
If I juice 20 oranges per hour and sell that orange juice for $5, you might say that I created $5 in value, but if minimum wage is $20 all I accomplished was losing $15.
Similarly, Reddit moderators only generate business value if you assume the website costs less to maintain than it does in real life.
If Reddit users and moderators would like to start a non-profit alternative they can go ahead and try that.
It’s not like Reddit has been an especially spendy tech company, either, they’ve had well under 1000 employees until very recently. They’re the 15th most popular website in the world and their headcount is not particularly extreme.
If I'd like to, say, fold custom envelopes for less than minimum wage while I'm watching TV, no crime is being committed, and society is not being harmed.
There are certain social restrictions that are set to prevent social harm, and then there are those that are set because some people thought it would prevent social harm but in fact does the opposite; minimum wage falls into the latter.
I don’t think this is fair. When you publish an ad in the paper you’re not also responsible for the moderation, ensuring the newspaper content is appealing, interesting, well organized, or building your own tools to make it so.
But on Reddit, prolific users and mods did all that only to get a gigantic finger that led to the blackout and the killing of all third party apps only to leave the dumpster fire of a client that the official one is.
- I think the "giving 10% shares" thing morphed into reddit creating its own crypto coin which was supposed to be backed by shares? https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-scoops-up-50m-serie...
- But a coin/gold system was retired last year, but I can find no mention of these being in any way related to shares by this point https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/13/23794403/reddit-gold-awar...
So I kinda think that the 10% shares thing was a nice idea which more or less got abandoned in favor of a "reward system" which got watered down and killed.
Perhaps someone else has more background here. Naturally when I search I mostly get unrelated posts about other stock and crypto on subreddits, and reddit community people starting their own coin.
Reddit is way to late to IPO. They cannot sell the idea of future growth. They have already gone deep down the enshittification path and are still not profitable. On top of that, they missed the top of the market for what they are selling by several years.
Are we watching the internet die? We are certainly watching a lot of it become worse, and the Reddit IPO is a good time to point that out.
Microsft & Scum need the Web3.0 gimmick to hype up their shareholders &/or fanbois.
We should have gone P2P in 200X, but Facebook and Google took us down a different path. Bittorrent was good. Semantic Web kind of understood the task, but it was academic and not leveraged. Now we understand the assignment and have all the experience necessary to build the thing.
Mastodon and ActivityPub are not the solution. Bittorrent was.
Bittorrent is not a good way to download small bits of data like status updates. What do you think is so bad about ActivityPub? Should we fall back on RSS and just settle for stale data sometimes and excessive polling other times?
Now if you had a system with 20,000 computers where there are 20 copies of your content in the system that might be interesting, but peer-to-peer networks can easily be a way to make Amazon Web Services look cheap the same way that Bitcoin makes Visa and Mastercard look fast and inexpensive.
A simple in-memory object store with basic signing for authorship would work. This isn't even a hard problem. It's a UI/UX problem. Let individual clients / implementers worry about customer specific asks, like video, media, voting, and persistence. The core protocol should just be about exchanging messages in a swarm and clients keeping track of the nodes that they like.
The big win here is that everyone gets to decide upon their own algorithm and curation. You could compose your own Hacker News and suppress stories about Bitcoin. The next big win is that it's censorship resistant (you can opt into whatever personal censorship or automatic curation you want). There are no misaligned incentives between the platform and the consumer, so you can do whatever you want with the product. Finally, since the data and protocol are first class, you can meld it into whatever you'd like.
About a billion pieces of content are posted to social media a day, maybe you can look at 100 of those, so no matter how you look at it content is being winnowed down by a ratio of 1-to-10,000,000. Maybe I can afford to show you one comment that was inspired by Fox News's ceaseless agenda spamming on certain issues. Trouble is, some people like to keep repeating things that other people repeat and they're going to cry censorship if I am not showing you 99/100 pieces of content. Trouble is all that spam displaces real content that somebody put blood, sweat and tears into plus it also poisons the well and drives consumers away. (You never hear complaints about "censorship" in the West when it is a book or an investigative journalism project that takes person-years, it is always in the context of low-effort imitation, spam, etc.)
This 1971 book is head and shoulders better than anything I've seen written recently
https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med...
about the problem of personalized news media. I find it quite interesting that the book predicted we were going to have something like the WWW almost 15 years before we actually did. (Technologically we did, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel. The trouble was the lack of a business model to make it a sustainable business outside France. Technology had to progress so far that it was so cheap that we didn't have to think about it as a business when we were deploying to people...)
Most notably Bagdikian points out the severity of the filtering problem, that the editor of a small town paper looking at the AP feed in 1971 could spend at most 6 seconds deciding what article to run.
In recent years we've had an epidemic of aquired situational narcissism where someone whose life was just work, sleep, eat, repeat suddenly discovers that the government did something really bad with respect to COVID-19 and now they wake up and their computer is now a command center and they are trying to organize everybody. I will hear what they have to say but I am not going to stand for them repeating and this person has another 999 just like them and, sorry, I listened to the first person once and just don't have time for the other 999.
That's how I see it.
Without moderation and without limits spammers would just use up all the bandwidth and compute they could find blasting you off the face of the map.
ZeroNet is about a decade old, though it looks like development has stalled.
A fully P2P status update network would really only need Internet connectivity to participate.
Or does the new USA constitution of 2024 state that "free" speech is not as in speech as we used to understand it but more in the sense of free beer? Maybe we can trade the possibility for people to put a lot of effort into having meaningful to say for the "free" ability for people to express their membership in a tribe.
The word "just" is doing some heavy lifting here. Even cheapo web hosting (that automatically handles TLS) and a domain name still costs more than the "free" of Facebook/Twitter/etc. That's besides the non-zero technical competence to set it up and then actually update the RSS.
Then you're at the mercy of the host's AUP/EULA. You can have your account terminated for a number of reasons, like getting DDoSed because someone doesn't like what you said or your account is hacked and is used to host malware.
Most people, even the technically inclined, don't necessarily want to be their own system administrator. It's an order of magnitude more effort than signing up for a centralized platform and pressing a button. RSS might be fined for a certain demographic but it's completely untenable for the majority.
That is besides the ergonomics of RSS. Because RSS readers want to display item titles because they treat all items like more formal news articles they de facto require posts to have titles. Common blogging platforms also want titles on posts.
Short form content is attractive to many people because it doesn't require formalities like titles or subjects. Short form platforms even understand inline tags (hashtags etc) so posts have even less friction then the typical blog software.
RSS, because of common patterns of readers and generators, sucks for carrying short form content. To make it work you'd need not just generators to make items without titles but also add a "short form" mode to feed readers that don't try to make every feed item look like a long form blog post. Both sides of the equation would also need to capture things like references to posts to display posts as replies to others.
It's all doable but requires agreement on what changes need to be made to the format/schema then implement those in feed readers and generating software. The Atom format tried some of this but too few bits of software really leveraged the format.
I say all this as someone that loves the idea of RSS. The lack of affordance to short form message-like content is a major limitation of the format and a design oversight. I think social media would be very different today if RSS (as an ecosystem) handled informal short form content better.
With the obvious caveat that it's not done, ATProto is pushing towards this. Pick your personal server (your PDS), pick an aggregator (or multiple) to get a firehose from, delegate moderation and feed creation to other systems, view it through a mostly-standardized appview.
I showed up to the internet party around 2011, a little late for my age, so I was still getting my legs and kind of missed "being there" for a few events, like Megaupload going down and Google Reader getting killed.
I'm honestly starting to get a little stunned at the number of number of times I see people say "yeah, Google Reader could do [this-or-that]".
It's not P2P, but that seems to be what Bluesky is aiming for. Whereas Reddit fights end up with /r/MyTopic, /r/MyTopic2, /r/BetterMyTopic, etc., you could have competing curators for #MyTopic and choose to view any one or any union or intersection of them.
What does this guy want users to get? Is the platform not enough?
I think this is the idea behind the post, users shouldn't "get" anything, they just need to stop destroying every good online experience left.
He resents how social media destroyed traditional media via free labor from users, that statement a perfect reflection of that sentiment.
And second, that if there are vast amounts of money to be made off of all this activity, it's fundamentally not just for all of that money to go to the people who run the infrastructure, rather than some of it also going to the people who create and moderate the communities that make the infrastructure worth money at all.
If most of the money flowing in to a company like Reddit went directly toward improving the user experience, then maybe the original deal that "the platform itself is your reward" would still be fine. But as soon as there are executives and investors getting big cash payouts, that means that a whole lot of user-created value is being siphoned off: the deal doesn't feel nearly as fair anymore.
I see what you did there!
EDIT:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221102132003/https://www.tumbl...
Now if you're talking about running on IP, we'll whatever system you're going to build is going to inherent all the problems of the internet instantly when someone here on HN makes a IP to magic wonderland gateway a day later.
Since Reddit is following the enshittification path to try to pump up its valuation (ex: forced push to app use) I imagine that Lemmy will continue its slow organic growth until it hits critical mass. Hopefully all reddit investors would have exited until then...
Or if niche communities are found on niche instances, how do I participate without either keeping up with inter-instance politics or just creating local accounts?
It feels possible to scale Lemmy organizationally, but it also not something to take for granted.
Treacherous cretins.
Yes, such places exist but are in the very minority.
People keep finding ways to discuss , all around the internet. No, the internet is not dying as a communication medium, it's dying as a content medium. IMO, twitter has made a comeback as a more relaxed, (and yes, more free) discussion place. The format is not conductive to information density but maybe they 'll figure something better
Short answer, no. I was in college when the internet went public. It's very much alive and well and exceeding all expectations.
The question is no longer is it dying, its how do we change it or even replace it.
Also, reconcile with contributors, and reverse some recent changes.
But it’s not clear if a license will be needed.
Oh and the CEO made much more than that 90M last year, so you could cut his salary and immediately be profitable, no AI sellout required.
I think a contract with Google is too big to keep it under the radar (or Google wants their involvement to be known).
It has too many separate barely-related ideas about some barely-related websites with a sprinkle of AI.
Take the example of Reddit. Yes, third party apps were effectively banned except for those who want to deal with paying a monthly fee.
As someone who used to use one of those third party apps, one of its main benefits was to avoid advertisements. Reddit is a company that has never turned a profit. I’m not sure what person expects them to keep allowing people to access their API directly and cut out advertisements.
When we bust out the word “enshittification” I feel like all logic gets thrown out the window and it turns into sensationalism. A Reddit that isn’t profitable is a Reddit that will die anyway, regardless of how enshittified it is.
The Internet isn’t only made up of a handful of bad websites bad corporate leadership which are on the decline, it’s still an incredibly diverse place where new ideas come to fruition.
Yeah, it is particularly unusable for the community/commenting aspect of the site, because of how often you need to "click to load more", which sometimes means content popping into the middle and sometimes means navigating away so that you lose your place (and sometimes previously mid-loaded stuff) when you return.
IMO it's heading into some of the same pitfalls that killed Digg, which over-focused on the headline-links and promoting specific material, at the expense of the person-to-person communication.
As long as MAU is the prime target, enshittification will continue.
So? It's not a paid job, nobody said it was. You don't even own your Reddit posts. If you want something in return for your time spent, don't agree to terms you disagree with. Plenty of moderators are just doing it for the sake of it.
> First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. We have some creative thoughts about the mechanics of this, but it’ll take us awhile to sort through all the issues. If it works as we hope, it’s going to be really cool and hopefully a new way to think about community ownership.
How is that "new way to think about community ownership" going for the reddit contributors?
it has become apparent? oh, this is someone having their "light bulb" moment. wait till they read about actual slavery in 2024!
Seriously: in a few years they'll be the Pets.com of our era.
Pets.com only lasted for 2 years (November 1998 - November 2000)
Reddit is active since 2005, 18 years
Reddit is doing an IPO, so the internet is dying? That's, um, not the greatest evidence. Neither the Reddit IPO, nor Reddit itself, show that the internet is dying.
The AI angle is more reasonable. That at least has the chance of doing real damage. Sites may have to find a way to restrict the damage, and search engines may have to prioritize results from sites that do. It's not an easy problem, but the traffic will go to the sites that best solve it. Nobody wants to read an infinite amount of AI spew.
The best you can do is create AI that detects AI but that's hardly effective. Twitter can't even get rid of "PUSSY IN BIO".
>search engines may have to prioritize results from sites that do
You mean the same search engines that prioritize Quora, Pininterest and Medium which have all also become progressively worse?
> but the traffic will go to the sites that best solve it. Nobody wants to read an infinite amount of AI spew.
We have already witnessed the sites with the most aggressive recommendation algorithms and quick dopamine generators like TikTok win, not sites with high quality content.
Even hyper specific subs, like city subs, are victim to the ideological whims of their moderators. My local subreddit has basically become useless because mods have banned so many people, or attempted to ban questions which are generally related to the city. They want typical city related questions or discussions to go into weekly roundup threads, and the main sub is just for current events (read: politics).
It’s extremely frustrating. I know it’s kind of boring to complain about mods, but seriously Reddits moderators are what poisoned it.
While yes a subreddit about trains should stay in topic space about trains, mods have overstepped that. Take for instance the Star Trek subreddit. Criticism of Star Trek discovery is banned, despite being clearly on topic.
In my mind it looks something like this:
1) user posts a link (and upvotes some initial topics)
2) other users vote on those topics, also can propose some additional ones
3) topic mods can superdownvote/remove some topics (in case of trolling etc.)
4) community mods select posts for their communities from available posts, possibly automatically (based on upvoted topics)
The interface is horribly twitter-like but does at least have threading (and unlike !&*#&$ Mastodon, respects `:preferred-color-scheme`), and it's not clear that it couldn't have an alternative old.reddit-like interface.
They'll not make money because they're stupid. I have never participated in this kind of scam (this is what I call getting free labor to prop up a private company). But several people seem to love donating free work for private companies.
That's what it comes down to - this site has a particular purpose, and it is open about it being basically a freebie given out to help Ycombinator; worth whatever hosting + dang costs these days.
The truth is that many people don’t view the world through these lens. They just enjoy a hobby and a community. Participating in a forum is a fun experience for many, and I’d guess the average Redditor would be less happy if they bought into the mindset that they must be paid for the writings.
Of course, Reddit has always been a for-profit business so arguably people should have known. But the fact that the mechanics of monetisation are deliberately obscured, together with the fact that (as I understand it) Reddit has actually been loss-making for most of its history makes it easy to overlook.
This is a fallacy.