Nope, the biggest sub to my knowledge that tried to move bringing a sizable audience is r/piracy.
Most other subs have kind of mentioned lemmy or kbin exist, but haven’t established communities over here. (IAMA didn’t promote anything at all sincethey didn’t even take part on the protests)
While terrible on so many levels, giving third party developers the boot is, ironically, precisely the best thing you could do for a competitor like the threadiverse since some will inevitably come over here. Experienced developers who know the domain will suddenly be putting that experience to work to make the threadiverse better. Is that really what Reddit wanted?
Guess we're about to find out. Their loss is our gain.
It’s like reddit has a fundamental misunderstanding of what some of their core userbase was there for. We weren’t there to meet people and make connections and lifelong friends. We were there because our brains want constant input but for information and learning, not entertainment. We can have these same discussions with anyone anywhere. It’s not that we’re antisocial, it’s just that “social” for us is interacting in a different way than interactions done for the sake of forming connections, which is what reddit seems to be really pushing people to do. We can have those same discussions with anyone, anywhere.
I don’t know if that makes sense. 😂
Anyway, I’m using wefwef now and as a hardcore Apollo user, it feels like putting on a new pair of the same favorite shoes. It feels a little different, but once they’re broken in they feel just like the old ones.
I ran the script to delete all my posts and comments on Reddit overnight. When I logged in today I had a new message - an automated reminder I had setup, today was my 9th cakeday on Reddit. Kind of poetic.
Any form of "Karma" is going to be a net negative, reddit showed that just fine.
It was supposed to be a positive thing. Being as it's calculated through up/downvotes, and up/downvotes being meant as a representation of how relevant someone's post/comment is, the user's Karma would be an indication of how relevant their content and additions to the discussions are.
Of course, back in the real world, everyone just went and used karma to say if they liked/disliked a thing, so rather than Karma being a metric of relevance/helpfulness, it was more often than not a metric of how many useless fucking memes were posted.
People engage easier with rapid-consumption content like memes/images, or quick quips, etc. They don't have to take time to actually read reasoned discussion, and so someone focussing on the low-quality, low-effort crap will always end up winning when it comes to Karma, vs someone who takes out the time to actually add something of value.
Karma is the reason why huge swaths of reddit are full of low-effort garbage, and it needs to die as an idea.
It was a well intentioned idea that didn't work. Best not to repeat it again here imho.
Karma is all about gamification. Made up points to make you feel like your contribution was worth something. You can see it in pretty much all social media platforms.
You never really care about checking others, but I bet you'd probably take a peak from time to time at your own.
I never cared, but I would be lieing if when I post blew up I wouldn't notice all those upvotes.
While I agree with everything you said, it did also serve a tangible purpose on some subreddits as a barrier-of-entry to prevent bots from posting OF spam or whatever or stop new troll accounts from being able to post.
I'll go and look at how my recent comments and submissions are doing, but that's more to get a sense of how my outlook aligns with the outlook of the general readership. And when the alignment is off, I'll look at other comments to see what is getting traction.
By this process, its become clear to me that the outlook of Reddit The Userbase (as opposed to Reddit The Company) has become much younger in recent years. All too often, when my positions are heavily downvoted, neighboring comments expressing more popular (populist?) positions make me think, "Yeah, I used to think that ... thirty plus years ago."
I didnt like to check the karma on my comments bc what if i got downvoted or worse... what if someone replied to me and id have to engage in conversation?! :0
Mark Hanna: Number one rule of Wall Street. Nobody - and I don't care if you're Warren Buffet or if you're Jimmy Buffet - nobody knows if a stock is going to go up, down, sideways or in circles. You know what a fugazi is?
Jordan Belfort: Fugayzi, it's a fake.
Mark Hanna: Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not fucking real.
If you buy a house with a loan and pay it back, you haven't turned a profit either - but you do now own a house that has a theoretical value. That's basically how these things work, investing everything on growing the company in the hopes that some day what they have built can start creating profit, or be sold to someone who thinks they can.
A houses value is not theoretical though. You own land and a roof to live under. It’s not about making profit. Companies don’t have value outside of making a profit. Now that I type that I see they actually can have value. Such as political sway or if it’s a company that has some value beyond money, like education or taking care of the needy. But you’d have to find someone willing to sink money into them simply because they find value beyond money.
A houses value is not theoretical though. You own land and a roof to live under
But that doesn't mean you can turn a profit from it, or even break even. If you want to do that you have to sell it to someone, and there are multiple reasons why you might not be able to - maybe you spent too much money renovating it and now nobody wants to pay that much. Maybe a bunch of new housing was built and the value crashed. Maybe Detroit happened and the location and land it sits in is literally worthless and nobody wants to live there. - until you actually find a buyer for it all houses have only a theoretical value, as do all companies.
I get that, but who would want to buy a company that's never been profitable? It smacks of a scam. "Hey, bro! Buy my company! It never managed to make any money for me, but it'll be highly profitable for you!" Sounds like the company founder is looking to pull a fast one and laugh all the way to the bank while their investor is left holding the bag.
The only way I can see this working is if the idea is to build a large user base by offering a good user experience, i.e. not monetizing the platform very much, just enough so that it barely pays for its own operating costs. Then you sell that user base to someone else for the express purpose of shoving tons of ads down everyone's throat. In that case it's still a fast one, only in this scenario the users are the victims. But even then I'm skeptical. If that's the plan, why sell the company instead of enshittifying your platform yourself?
Profits don't matter under capitalism, it's only stock money. Trying to profit is a death sentence in the tech space, as we're all seeing right now. This system doesn't work for the 21st century
why sell the company instead of enshittifying your platform yourself?
Because it's a lot easier to find someone who thinks they can do it than it is to actually successfully do it yourself - as we are currently seeing with how wonderfully incompetent Spez is with Reddit.
When Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013 - only to sell it for $3 million in 2019 - was Tumblr bringing in millions and millions of profit? No. But Yahoo thought that they would be able to make it.
Elon Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, it hasn't turned any profit either (and never will enough for him to get his moneys worth, but that's just because Musk is an idiot).
But yeah, quite often it does feel like a scam. Or kinda like... gambling? You hope someone will pay a lot for your company, while they hope they can make it turn wildly profitable, both may or may not come true.
it's a lot easier to find someone who thinks they can do it than it is to actually successfully do it yourself
That's pretty much what I said, though. That's the core of the scam. You sell something you know to be worthless to someone too ignorant to understand that. Maybe I'm just extremely ignorant and naive in matters of business, but selling a fake company like that seems no different than selling pyrite to someone who can't tell it apart from gold.
You're basically assuming that the company can't be made to turn a profit, in which case, yes, it would be a scam.
But that's not the case. The company could potentially be made to make a profit, and you're basically selling that potential. It often works out, like in the case of Amazon. Sometimes it doesn't, like Yahoo buying Tumblr.
As long as what the prospective buyer is actually getting is clear and up-front, it can hardly be a scam. With your "You sell something you know to be worthless to someone too ignorant to understand that.", you're essentially assuming the company can't be made profitable, and that the seller knows that, but doesn't disclose it to the buyer, and that the buyer is somehow naive enough to not be able to tell.
It's generally unlikely that a company can't be made profitable, it would be unlikely for the seller to know that, and it would be unlikely for the buyer to be unable to find out before buying it, which altogether, makes it unlikely this would happen. Which is why it's big news when it does happen, like with Theranos (Which was eventually found out)
If the company can be made profitable, why isn't it? Why wouldn't the current owner rake in some profits before selling? Surely a company that is already profitable would be even more attractive for buyers.
Well it depends on why the company has never managed to turn a profit. A great example is Amazon. I think it existed for like 15 years before it first turned a profit because it was aggressively growing and spending all of their income to try to grow more.
As for Reddit, they are not growing like Amazon did. However, capturing a large user base is worth something because they may be able to monetize those users eventually. Investors view simply having a large user base as pretty valuable.
So imagine that you have a lemon tree that grows the finest lemons in the neighbourhood. You know that with those lemons you could make the meanest lemonade and make a ton of money selling that. The problem is that in order to do that, you need to buy a juice press, a bunch of sugar and maybe throw together a dashing lemonade stand that will draw attention to your business.
The issue is that you don't have any money to buy those things and even if you know you will get rich down the line, the whole project is a dud if you can't even build your lemonade stand.
Enter Mr. Money Bag. I have a whole €1,000 just sitting there in my wallet not doing anything. I would really like that many to become bigger so I look for a way to do that. I have however seen your lemon tree and the awesome lemons it produces. With those lemons I absolutely believe that you can make the greatest lemonade the world have ever seen and I believe the only thing you need to do that is more money.
So I agree to give you those €1,000 in order to build your lemonade stand and in return I will take some of the money that you make from selling the lemonade. It will however take a few weeks for you to do that and until that is done the materials will probably cost more than what you're making from the lemonade.
That's OK for me, though. I wasn't doing anything with that money anyway and as long as I trust that you can still make a bunch of money when it's finished, I'm fine with it. In fact, I decide to give you another €100 to put up a sign in order for more people to find your business quicker.
So everything is tugging along and now you're actually making more money than you spend, so you give me an amazing €1.200; €100 more than I spent! You also get some money, which is awesome because now you can buy yourself that rocking NiN T-shirt you've always wanted. Now this is great, except I still don't actually need that money, not right now at least. So I tell you to keep that money in the company and build an additional even better lemonade stand which will make us twice the amount of money in a few weeks.
Currently, your company haven't made a single cent, but that's fine because your business is sound and everything is tugging along exactly as planned.
Eventually, I decide that I actually want to buy a new high end TV so I actually need some money that I can spend right now. I know that in about ten weeks this company will have made at least €20,000 that it can either invest in further expansion or give back to the owners. So I go to my buddies Greg and Lisa who definitely have that amount of money and tell them that they can buy this company for €20,000. Greg also owns a carpentry which he can use for building even more lemonade stands and Lisa is really good at making signs so with them the company might even make €40,000 in the same time.
So Greg and Lisa together buy my part of the company for €20,000. I get to watch Eurovision on my new 70 inch TV, and Greg and Lisa will together make €40,000 in a few weeks so everyone is happy.
Then after a few months, someone realises that your lemon tree can really only grow a basket of lemons a year and you can't actually grow enough to make the money you hoped for. Everybody panics, the company's value plummets and eventually closes down.
Greg and Lisa are mad because they didn't make the money they hoped for (they did however get back €5,000 from selling the lemonade stands to a neighbor who was about to start an apple juice business). You're also disappointed, but at least you still have your NiN t-shirt. Your gardener goes to jail for some reason, though.
I mean, did they steal it? Or did people largely willingly give it away? People willingly left the older decentralized platforms in favor of centralized corporate platforms because, for one reason or another, they felt it was a better use of their time. The old-school forums weren't killed; people stopped using them and left for Reddit and Facebook and Instagram etc.
If we want to reverse this, we need to understand why this happened, what those service provided that lured people, and how we can build better alternatives, and I think there's more to this than just "corporation bad".
Edit: Downvote if you like, but I'd much prefer an actual response, because I think there is an interesting conversation to be had about this.
Of course there's more to this than "corpo bad", it's the economic system that drives these businesses to focus on profit over the quality of the user experience--but I think that's the core to all the "corpo bad" arguments when you really boil them down. These websites and services have become so ubiquitous for two reasons:
The first reason, is that people tend towards simplification, if you can give them a centralized location where they can have all their needs met, they prefer it to the effort it takes to use multiple locations/services. A great example is the popularity and convenience of stores like Walmart or Costco where you can do all of your shopping in one quick go. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and even YouTube to a lesser degree all offer these one-stop-shop kind-of models by allowing you to connect with a vast amount of people, discuss a large number of topics, and view multiple forms of media. So, unless they have a good reason to remain diversified, people tend towards simplification.
The second reason is also psychological in nature. These companies, (whom we will refer to as FaRT), have designed and redesigned their entire systems to drive up refresh rates, click-through rates, and otherwise increase advertising visibility. In addition to hacking the addiction mechanisms, and the desire for people to feel important, they take it even further using deception and "dark UI". Even when you utilize many of the adblocking systems, for example, FaRT inject advertising content directly into the same stream of other user content(the best example is direct corpo sponsorship of big name YouTube content creators, but at-least that money goes directly to the creators). Plus, advertisers are getting much, much better at disguising this content so that you are less likely to skip it before seeing it.
So it's a two-sided coin, a major part of the problem is that "corpo bad", and now that they're taking it to a degree of harming the public experience for profits (which is why cable television died), it's our responsibility to step out of our comfort zones and show them that we are willing to inconvenience ourselves a little for a better UX.
There comes a breaking point where people and organizations who are dependent on Facebook ads will actually move from the jaws of this giant corporations for more freedom and control. We are certainly seeing it now by example. I'm someone who just left Reddit and actually am here to invest in this platform and you can't say well I'm the exception.
Most of the old internet platforms which failed were bought by corporations - sometimes to do just that, to shut it off.
Livejournal was bought by Russia to stop any dissent. Similarly twitter was bought to kill activism which for ultra rich was becoming an issue as it was undoing their lobbying. (forget all the drama over it, thats a smoke screen to hide real issue)
In the end, only when we leave gluttony and greed behind, and understand the full game - can we have a fair internet. Otherwise there are powerful people with power and money behind them who would like to keep controlling you for their benefit.
There were us knowledgeable early adopters who were ridiculed endlessly by ... pretty much everybody ... who actually worked to build the thing. Then the companies came.... and brought with them the ignorant, unthinking majority of the lowest common denominator who believe everything they're told to believe. I call it stolen. The consumer class that followed the corporations didn't build this place, nor did they represent what we had built.
I get what you're saying, having just nuked my nearly 12 year old Reddit account yesterday. Things changed a lot, and I'd definitely say most of it was for the worse.
However, I don't know if this, for lack of a better term, superiority complex, is particularly helpful The fact is that early adopters and enthusiasts made Reddit a cool and useful platform, and so more and more normal began using it. The only way to prevent that from happening is to make a platform actively unappealing, and I wouldn't say that's exactly a good idea. The best thing, IMO, is to stay isolated from monetization incentives and ensure that communities of like-minded people can be formed and interact with each other in a healthy way, both normie and enthusiast.
I mean, if Reddit today magically became a non-profit, reduced the API fees to cover only costs, and eliminated active monetization schemes, that wouldn't suddenly revert the user base back to the way it was a decade ago. The presence of the "ignorant unthinking majority of the lowest common denominator who believe everything they're told" is not dependent on the pursuit of profit.
While I think you are right and there are surely factors worth investigating, I cannot shake the feeling that 'money for ads' is a really big one.
To the point: I cannot htelp but notice that the bigger services place emphasis on you presenting, ourself, while small decentralized ones place more import on anonimity. I think there's a part in all or most people that wants to present themselves and be lauded among peers. This is to me why platforms with photo capability like fb and insta took off. Also reddit was trying to gravitate more and more towards this with following profiles and bla
That's definitely a pretty important distinction, and I'm definitely interested to see if there'll ever be a federate platform that does emphasize real identities. Growing that would be very hard given the network effects, but TikTok etc show that it is possible, at least.
I think PixelFed is going in this direction if I’m not mistaken. Also to your points and which I keep bringing up… you can have both anonymous and Real identities interacting directly with each other here. Of course other social media sites can do this somewhat but they all encourage you to give them as much info as possible.
Honestly as an early user of Facebook, Reddit, etc., we shouldn't forget that when people first came to these services, they were the smaller, cleaner, more text-based alternatives to bigger corporate bullshit. Myspace was busy, bloated, Malware prone, Facebook was light and organized. Digg became super corporatized overnight, Reddit was clean and simple. Once early users are on that shit when it's good, their friends follow, and eventually communities form and it's very, very difficult if you care about a community to abandon it for an alternative. Websites aren't just "websites," they're people, and just like tech companies eventually always put profits over people, people put people over software. They'll put up with a lot of shit to stay on touch woth the people they loved.
I upvoted you, but I think some people just downvote and move on not because they 100% disagree with you, but because they don't quite have the time to post a detailed reply, and they're probably hoping someone else does on their behalf, which they will upvote if it's close to what they're trying to say.
Not enough hours in a day to type out a detailed response to a downvote (or even upvotes) when you have so many other things on your plate. I'm guessing they were trying to say something like, "I didn't choose to leave decentrazlied platforms, I'm still on them. Everyone else did, I had to follow them if I wanted to keep in touch with my family and friends."
You can't really blame this on the people. The centralized platforms offered something that for most people worked a lot better than what was already existing. In the beginning, those corporate platforms were actually quite good so it's only natural that people flocked to it.
It's only after those companies achieved a monopoly in their market, that they started pulling a bait-and-switch and began to enshittify their sites. Network effect makes it so that mass migration to something that's technically better is unlikely. This bait-and-switch is where they stole it from the people.
I'm not really blaming the people here, and I kind of question how useful an exercise blame even really is in this kind of the thing. Being angry at companies for trying to make money isn't a particularly productive exercise, since that is their entire point, and I'd much rather funnel that energy into building alternatives that are insulated from those pressures. The fact of the matter is that the corporations built something that people wanted, they began using it, and now the monetization is dialing up and sharply degrading the user experience. This was always going to be possible, and they are perfectly within their rights to do what they want with their own platforms, even if it's shitty. I wouldn't really characterize this as 'theft', though I suppose that's really a question of semantics. Exploitation of human psychology, perhaps yes.
But as that experience continues degrading, it does create a big opening for platforms like the Fediverse that aren't bound to those same monetization incentives. Network effects definitely make transitions difficult, but that's not insurmountable, and also is much less powerful in anonymous platforms like discussion boards and forums. I think kbin and Lemmy are in a pretty promising position, though there will of course be some growing pains, and it'll take time for a critical mass of users to arrive and participate in a wide variety of topics.
Hell yeah you can blame the people. They chose to use those platforms, and they choose to stay with them as they grow ever shittier. They're the ones enabling platforms like reddit.
I found it really hard to believe people would care that much about karma to the point that I never really believed most accusations of “karmawhore.” Because who would care that much? You just don’t like this kind of content that got popular. I totally believed a few individuals would optimize their posts and comments for the most upvotes, but not nearly enough to justify how often I heard that accusation flung around. Sure, it feels nice to see that other people like your comment. And it’s nice to have the voting system so incorrect information, spam, and trolls get downvoted and thus hidden; while theoretically the helpful and insightful comments rise to the top (and at least in the subs I used, this is how it also worked in practice, although judging by all the complaining about Reddit I see here it wasn’t true for a lot of other peoples’s subs). And of course you will want to get your karma past the common thresholds for not getting your post removed for being a new, low-karma account. But otherwise, what does it really matter?
There were a lot of attention-seeking people on reddit who weren't necessarily trying to get karma. It just happened that karma was the measure of the attention you were getting, so being a "karmawhore" was a side effect of wanting attention.
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