snarfback

I feel bad for this laughter…

I recall getting my first email address through school in 1993 or so.

I remember having minimal presence on the Internet until perhaps 1997 - when I worked in a highly technical environment and internet communities were still very nascent. People had to search out how to find meaningful communities online. If non-technical people had access to anything like internet communities, it was usually some angelfire cookie cutter site.

Then friendster, myspace, fark, somethingwful,diig, facebook, reddit and many others rapidly expanded the options. People without the knowledge or inclination got into spaces that started with nerds nerding out.

I see this recent split as something like a natural evolution of the people who would’ve originally been on fark when the user numbers were sub 50,000 and fb- was new, or who were skeptical of facebook because it was only for college kids, or who originally started reddit seeking the spaces they’ve always sought. Maybe non technical people will eventually take up these spaces - but those people have NEVER cared about the intracacies of their online privacy…or where their data is stored…or their cell phone data…or any of that. They cheered on The Patriot Act and they don’t care about net neutrality.

This is nothing particularly new.

Unlike the Great Library at Alexandria, the information contained in many reddit threads is actually available in other places and can be recreated - often by the same person if necessary and relevant.

I understand people not wanting to have that information deleted, but I think the analogy is a bit heavy. For many, it’s a balancing act where the fundamental disagreement with reddit’s cultural evolution outweighs the desire to participate in the knowledge repository.

I think many people were comfortable with their ideas belonging to the communities that spawned on reddit, and they viewed reddit’s ownership as a necessary technicality for the platform to exist. Once reddit clarified that they intended to act on that ownership, many people no longer wanted to participate.

I think they have that right.

More importantly, who owns our thoughts in this space?

so, as a rough back-o-the-envelope estimate, what i’m hearing is that apollo, rif, sync, etc would each be charged about $20M, so a total of $60M - $70M they’d make if the 3rd party apps all decided to run with the new API pricing. I don’t know what the AI guys would be charged, but lets say an order of magnitude more - $600M - $700M. All told, these API changes - if everyone paid in, would result in ~$1B in extra revenue.

if 85% of people who use reddit continue to do so, and they convert many of these people into their paid app…maybe they get half of that?

so Spez et al get to add $500M to annual revenues, make the potential investors happy, and all it costs is quality?

they’re 40 years old now instead of 23 or whatever…they want money.

if we assume that Musk made some of his moves to really sell his data / meta-data in ways users might not love, I would assume reddit and spez have been doing the same thing and are getting ready to step that up.

reddit is twitter is facebook is cnn is fox is msnbc. engage as you feel comfortable.

I suppose each to their own, but I wasn’t an intensely committed redditor outside a few select communities, and that mostly recently. I mostly lurked and used the site to aggregate news and gather a rough idea of the major zeitgeist reactions. I may continue to do that occasionally - like I occasionally do with facebook these days.

I can’t see myself really wanting to comment on the selected forums I was participating on - and have found myself reading posts, thinking of a response, and consciously choosing not to post because I just don’t want to generate content for reddit any longer, even in my limited capacity.

I think one of the most valuable things about this situation is that it lays bare the relationship between users/mods and admins/employees/owners of reddit. I think most users and mods lived in willful delusion that they kind of owned their own data and communities, and admins/employees/owners just sort of maintained infrastructure and me money from ads and unspecified backend data stuff…

It’s now forced that ownership question into the open in stark terms: users and mods don’t own their data or thir communities and their sweat equity, as it were, is not valued by the admin/employee/owner group when it really comes down to it.

That’s something I miss about my old bulletin board home; I could never imagine the admin team strong arming users over shit like this. It’s antithetical to the very ethos of the place - hell, I still send them $5 / month for old times sake to keep the servers up.

Reddit sold out years ago and it’s really just now hitting the fan.

Holy Shit - talk about being out of sync with your userbase and community…

THAT statement might kill the heart of reddit as much as anything else.

Next up: CEO of MSNBC wants to turn the unhoused populations of major cities into dog food and has a lot of respect for Ruppert Murdock’s journalistic integrity.

I think this is partially resulting from the bias of people here, who more than likely care about the community involvement aspect of online forums/platforms. If the forum I used to live on 15 years ago was still well trafficked, I likely wouldn’t be exploring these spaces the same way.

The reality is that reddit today ISN’T what it was 10 years ago when it killed a lot of forums. It is now a platform, like facebook, that has mass appeal and is going to therefore operate to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Maybe a lot of “redditors” support the strikes, but I’d believe that a majority of people who use reddit don’t.

People want their feeds. They want their dopamine. They want their predictable comments and hot gossip. That’s what people are in larger groups. That’s who reddit is now designed to appeal to.

I think about this kbin/fedithing as a chance to reboot online conversation in an environment that is different than what reddit has become, but I don’t expect reddit to change in any way other than to continue to become boring and ad-data driven.

I’m just some dude observing this space and migrating from reddit - but I looked at Beehaw when all of this started and I immediately thought it was an idea begging to turn into the internet version of Animal Farm. If the goal is to moderate and ban based not on what is said, but on the interpretation of what someone thinks was said or implied…in a straight text based communication medium…?

That’s a problem waiting to happen.

If there are interesting things happening there - and I never tried to join so I couldn’t say - I think they may well become an echo chamber full of cliques.

I don’t know what this space will turn into, but I personally like the idea of a semi open ended reboot.

I personally think you should message them if you think it will make you feel better, but I wouldn’t expect anything to come of it. I assume the mods are aware of the implications of their actions and are choosing to reopen with that impact in mind.

In my opinion, reddit was an interesting experiment 10-15 years ago that grew stagnant and somewhat boring. The people running it have chosen, with intention, to make the site as suitable as possible for their financial goals. I don’t like it, but it’s their right to do so. The issues which have recently boiled over were always present, and I just don’t think you can put the Shit Genie back in the bottle RandyBoBandy.

Reddit will lumber on, it will probably go right behind Facebook and many users will continue to use it. The more creative users will likely flock to platforms like this and create something new that will take a longer period of time to go through a similar cycle.

I may leave my account intact over there. Maybe I’ll occasionally pop over to see if it still works like I do on fark.

I think the fun part of reddit is over.