Like many people I’m here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I’ve been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?
I personally can’t wait to see it all burn. This last year especially has shown me how many people are just getting fucking sick and tired of centralized, corporate bullshit, even if they aren’t consciously aware of why (things like issues listing items on Marketplace due to false auto-removals, no way to contact a human being for help with a business issue, spam, bots, unintentional bans/excessive moderation, etc.) At the end of the day, when the average person starts to complain about shitty UI and too many ads, you know a platform has peaked - and it’s happening everywhere. Social media has had its time in the sun. I want it to fucking crumble now.
Automation in the realm of customer service drives so much of the enshitified experiences. If I’m not talking to a robot/chat engine, I’m talking to a human with such overbearing rules/scripts they might as well be a robot. And I know they hate it as much as I do.
The otherside of this, is that when I encounter a kind human who has actually been empowered to solve problems I tend to leave glowing feedback and share the experience.
Office Space got it right 24 years ago. “I’m a goddamn people person.” First people they cut, and it just got harder for the customers.
It’s so sad how awful the end user support has gotten. Even when you’re paying Big Money to big hardware makers who make you pay for support packages, you’re talking to Malaysia or India or a few in South America. Pinching pennies into dust when they’re making money hand over fist for the support contracts. When most end user engineers are only opening tickets when it’s dire problems due to how awful the experience is.