this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Why not? I’m sure some intern with red username would be tasked to find features that we like here, just so they could copy it to try to bring users back.
That would be an intelligent step to take, but since when has Reddit ever been able to implement new, user-friendly features? There have probably been plenty of employees who have recommended good features over the years, wherever they got the ideas, and been shot down. With Huffman throwing a hissy fit the way he is, I would say they're even less likely to successfully bring out new features than they have been in the past.
Users aren't the paying customer. Users are the product. Most people know this, but based on these comments, few people seem to actually understand the implication.
What it means is your user experience isn't catered to, and you have absolutely no expectation for conditions to improve or to be good at all. Worse: your experience will be intentionally worsened if that means it generates more money. This is why the official app is shit. It's not incompetence, or laziness. It's all part of the business model to manipulate your engagement. It's why we can't have unofficial apps that circumvent all that. It's why not all the comments are loaded by default (they don't generate money so please go back to browsing promoted posts). It's why you keep getting reminders to use things you didn't ask for. Redditors are being corraled. Cattle in a factory farm.
At the same time, I think consumers overvalue the amount of competition between products and services that happens at the product value (e.g. user experience) level. The reality is that marketing and leveraging monopolistic positions are often far more cost effective solutions for capturing market share.
So no, Reddit doesn't give a flying fuck how nice we make the fediverse, other than to see it as a threat to squeeze more money out of their users who might be tempted to a free-run lifestyle instead.
To be completely honest, unless they’ve already gotten patents (which would require them to disclose the specific algorithms, and is highly unlikely to be of any general features), they’re probably SOL. I doubt they have that in place already and I doubt they’re going to openly describe any secret sauce for patents.
What is more likely the case is the embrace, extend, extinguish approach whereby they’ll find what makes Lemmy stick in open source sense (I.E. Activity Pub protocol), “embrace” it by making Reddit interoperate with it, “extend” the protocol such that they could offer some unique features to draw users into their platform to leverage the unique features, and then “extinguish” the open source flame by abandoning the public protocol after they achieve what they want.
If and when you see Reddit adopt ActivityPub, be real careful of what comes next.