I’ve had this feeling that since there are forces that do not want us to have free speech, and that the destruction of Reddit and Twitter does this effectively, creating a chilling effect, destroying social links and communities. Might it not be an intentional effort to stifle the ability of the downtrodden to organize and fight the power?
There are so many other ways things are engineered to benefit the minority and prevent the majority from gaining power, why not this too?
Just a thought rattling around in my head.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. “Don’t attribute to malice what could be explained by incompetence.”
Either this ^^ or whatever has been lost is just a series of casualties in the search for money. There’s not much money to be made by hosting free speech alone - that social media companies do what they do to enable free speech is a popular misconception. Above all they want to make money, and if you need to do that free speech thing at a net loss for a couple years before you start milking your users for all they’re worth, then so be it.
As for Twitter, it could be argued that His Muskiness has been kind of a trial-and-error guy for his entire career - so far it’s worked out pretty well for him. Twitter is just special in that his random ‘let’s just try this and see if it sticks’ decisions instantaneously affect (and piss off) millions of people in a very public way. Maybe that’s why Twitter is such a challenge for him.
As for Reddit, Spez doesn’t exactly keep his admiration for Elon a secret. If Elon joked about improving Twitter’s ‘bottom’ line by shoving a cucumber up his arse, Spez would probably be spotted in the closest supermarket’s produce section within the hour.
I appreciate your sense of humor, regarding cucumbers.
I was never really under any illusion that they weren’t in the business to try and make money but your pointing it out does really highlight that their motives are profit driven above all else and merely short-sighted and intended to improve quarterly gains Rather than actually being organized.
I guess it turns out that allowing profit to be the only motive it’s just generally bad, right?
Edit: speech to text.
That helps. Thanks. Maybe I should drink less anxiety juice, ie coffee.
Edit: I had to look it up because I wanted to provide the link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Add self interest, profit, and group think to incompetence as well. That is the problem with most conspiracy theories. Unless there is clear proof, there are usually many more likely explanations.
This ^^. It turns out that Elon is just a narcissistic idiot who doesn’t actually have good business sense, at least in the software world. The types of things he’s been trying are better explained as someone who wants Twitter to make more money but doesn’t understand how people actually think and behave and doesn’t realize that these decisions will alienate users and destroy the product. Spez decisions seem similar, although on the whole I think he’s less of a people idiot than Elon, and is probably just under tons of pressure to improve the financials right now and is making bad short-sighted decisions as a result.
Great take on this. Elon is a lot like the dog who caught the car. He has no idea what to do now.
The most level-headed take I’ve seen on both of these topics in long time.
I do think there were financial backers of Elon’s that are hoping to kill certain online platforms and see Elon as a useful idiot, though. I’m thinking specifically of people like Thiel and the Saudis
This has happened with other online platforms constantly over the course of the internet’s history. It’s why there is an enshittification meme that everyone is learning about.
This time it happened after some years where a critical mass of society has coagulated on those platforms, so the effect is more dire.
A sinister conspiracy is certainly… much easier to believe in than the existence of two rich idiots.
LOL
Point taken.
Reddit and twitter have never been “free speech”
If you want free speech as in complete anarchy, host your own webserver in international waters.
Don’t feel it is a conspiracy as such, in that I don’t think it is coordinated between different social media companies, but it is true that damaging the ability to inform very large numbers of people about what’s going on is incredibly useful to right-wing interests.
So though there’s still a lot of organising & educating online, now people need to seek out information to find it - they’re far less likely to accidentally stumble upon it whilst learning about their hobbies, following a band they’re into, or seeking advice for some personal situation.
In the absence of robust networks for persuading people to back right-wing ideas, disrupting everything else is the next best thing.
But, I also suspect that many of these companies have not been as profitable as anticipated, that there aren’t good ways to make them so, and that they cannot see how to remain functional in the face of imminent developments, so they’re wildly scrambling to wring out some profit, slash costs, and flog off infrastructure before the whole thing comes crashing down & they’re left holding useless, expensive messes.
A well measured response. Thank you. My concerns have been around the benefits that this would have for the far right. Maybe this will make it harder for so many people to stumble towards the far right as well. I suppose I can hope, right?
It really just might be idiots with too much money. Musk makes changes willy nilly without much peer review in the similar way the Titanic sub rich guys did before it imploded.
Then Steve Huffman was like, “Hey, I wanna get investors and money! Screw the people, the whole site is mine to play with like Elon does.”
Money corrupts, man. It’s overly worshipped by society because of its necessity and now here we are. It’s a whole other system for the rich vs the poor.
But to go along your route of thinking, I’d still say no because powerful social media is even powerful when the people who use it are heavily propagandized. (especially by Russia) So when communities fracture into safer sites, propaganda loses its grip and has to work harder to spread influence.
when communities fracture into safer sites, propaganda loses its grip and has to work harder to spread influence.
This is my hope!
Reddit & Twitter going to shit in the same time frme does make this theory seem plausible. Imho, we can usse this as an oppurtunity for people to decentralize. There will be teething problems, but decentralizing is actually safer for all those trying to organize and autocratic power.
It is definitely my hope that this leads to a decentralization that gives us a more robust and resilient system.
It’s not a conspiracy, just a coincidence.
And from what I can tell, much of it comes down to all of these sites being VC funded back when loans were cheap, and those VCs wanting their money back now they’re not. Suddenly Reddit has to actually make money with a product that’s not really equipped to do so.
I don’t think there is a conspiracy that involves the RAND corporation, or the reverse Vampires.
I do think that Elon Musk is an idiot who failed upwards his whole life, and mistakes that for business acumen. I think his tweet to buy Twitter was originally a joke, but then the SEC got involved and he was forced to buy at an inflated price. Recall he did everything he could to get out of the deal; Twitter literally sued to enforce it because it was a much better deal for shareholders than anything they could do organically. When you realize he never really wanted it in the first place, his actions make more sense.
I also think Steve Huffman is a fraud who can’t see that Elon Musk is a miserable failure and looks to him as a mentor, so he is turning out to be just as petulant as Musk.
Spez is trying to tie up what he thinks are loose financial ends to make (what he thinks) is an appealing IPO.
Elon is feeling the pinch as Twitter continues to bleed advertising partners and users and it becomes more apparent it will not make back either his purchase cost or Twitter’s existing debt. He’s the spoiled son of a rich mine boss and has no idea what he is doing. He is used to having far more capable people running his companies for him.
The mine went bankrupt in '89, just a few years after Errol bought shares in it. The boss was someone else.
*fall guy
Businesses do not become unprofitable in two years, they were always shells and someone sold it to a pansy.
Mines can absolutely become suddenly unprofitable. You don’t know how much good stuff is in the ground until you dig it up.
I’ve seen people shoot gold into the walls of a mine to make it look like there’s something left in there. Only those new to the industry would fall for it.
There are absolutely ways to find out the likelihood of how much is left. They’re either patsies or idiots who didn’t listen to their geologists.
Somehow I don’t think Errol Musk knew that much about the geology. Allegedly he bought the shares on a whim without first visiting the mine, which was in a different country.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy as much as it is the natural consequences of extreme wealth and narcissism, fueled by the necessity of continual quarterly increases in profit.
The idiocy of the ultra wealthy creates a feedback loop because they’re convinced that their wealth is proof of their brilliance and so they copy each others terrible ideas.
It isn’t the forgivable stupidity from lack of education, but from being surrounded by sycophants and profiteers coupled with a profound alienation from the rest of humanity.
Unfortunately, all of that is harder to fix than prosecuting a conspiracy.Spez said in an interview he admires Musk. If you haven’t noticed yet, the corporate world is just 1 giant game of follow the leader.
“Oh X laid 13% of their staff off? I’m gonna do that too even though I don’t really need to”
“Oh Twitter charged ridiculous amounts for their API and didn’t crumble? Me too”
Remember when Google was doing those dumbass interviews where you have to figure out how many manhole covers in NYC or whatever? Every tech company and their mom was OBSESSED with those types of questions even long after Google figured out how useless they were.
Remember when you paid outright for things and everything wasn’t a subscription model?
Thankfully Twitter is actively dying now, but if they somehow manage to turn it around we are all fucked. If they show people will stay around while you strongarm them into paying AND having limits to save server costs that is going to be adopted by basically everyone.
So conspiracy probably isn’t the right term, although there are common factors that are causing - or at least influencing - a lot of these trends.
With inflation being a major issue, central banks are reacting by increasing interest rates. These rate hikes have the effect of making credit and borrowing more expensive.
This is significant because central rates had been low (nearly 0%) since basically 2008, with quantitative easing (cash printing) pumping billions of additional dollars into the stock markets in particular.
The effect of loaned cash being effectively free is an explosion of activity from investor hedge funds who were willing to take huge risks on speculative projects. This fuelled the massive boom in tech startups across the 00s.
The trouble is, many of those startups weren’t profitable, they were ‘potentially profitable’ and fuelled by credit. Or they had the underpants gnome model of profit where the means and mechanism of the ‘???’ stage would be figured out later (WeWork).
Investors were happy to fund those losses to create products that controlled markets (Uber) or amassed huge userbases that could be flipped from potential to profit in the future (Reddit).
Only now the rates have gone up, and credit is suddenly expensive. Business models that rely on running at a loss suddenly aren’t viable, and those startup investors that owns chunks of those businesses are now insisting on actual returns on their investments.
You can see the effects all over social media and tech, but Reddit (urgently need to get profitable for a stock launch, need the stock launch for funding) and Twitter (basketcase debt load at the worst possible time for debt) are the most obvious examples.
Techbro austerity means worse products for consumers or aggressive monetization policies which users will likely dislike. So not a conspiracy, but decades of reckless investment by hedge funds that have been caught with their pants down by interest risk.
Thank you that was extremely insightful.
I think it’s worth remembering that we never really had ‘free speech’ on either website in the first place. Both sites had rules regarding the kind of content you could post (including against hate speech which is a good thing imo). You can see now that Musk has loosened some of the rules it’s made advertisers wary of associating with it. I would go as far as to say that I don’t think true free speech is possible under a capitalist model. As long as there are shareholders or advertisers to appease, there will be restrictions regarding speech (which may or may not be a good thing).
Twitter, Reddit, Meta, YouTube, et al. - these platforms have one singular goal, and that is to serve you ads and generate income off of your harvested personal data. If there exists a conspiracy, its goal is to remove all barriers to that end.
