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You have to do the bad things slowly, over time, so people forget each one before the next happens. Twitter and Reddit decided they could make everything worse all at once.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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That's due to VC money drying up because of the US Federal Reserve raising interest rates. Operating at a loss is no longer profitable, especially in the short term.
This isnt right, mostly because facebook was never great.
Reddit was great, but it could have been so much better. They left so much money on the table that users would have happily given them but they just kept missing the point and taking the site marching towards being of mediocre appeal to as many people as possible.
This isnt right, mostly because facebook was never great.
There was a period of time that I had numerous relatives who literally could not navigate the internet outside of facebook.
The wife of a cousin would literally start her session at the computer by typing "facebook" into google and then clicking the top result. That search on google in lieu of bookmarking it or typing facebook.com or literally any other way of getting to the site was the one thing she did on the internet that was not internal to facebook. FOR YEARS.
And yes I'm old, but I'm not that old. We're talking Gen-X.
During that odd period where the web was getting more sophisticated but people still joked about needing their twelve year old relative to fix their computer for them, many, MANY people thought facebook was great.
It was the same period of time when Apple was pushing hard on "Buy our very expensive, sleek looking, low-value, walled garden computers and everyone will know what a trendy creative counterculture person you are" as their marketing approach.
It was always going to go that way. Any social media site is going to go that way.
Even Lemmy will one day go that way.
Here's the program:
- Build a platform that people like using.
- As more people use it, the creators will need more money to keep it up.
- Realize there's much monies to be had.
- Hire marketing and sales people
- The platform becomes a company, sell to the highest bidder.
- The platform implements algorithms that make them more money.
- The algorithms make people hate the site.
- Do many unpopular things to kick out the real content creators that once made the platform thrive.
- The company is left with casual users that don't know anything about the platform, they're just there to find out what burger joint to go to in San Antonio or which caulk is best to use for an outdoor shower.
- The company is very successful because they can push anything to the casual user and they will accept it as advice instead of what it really is - ads or algorithms to enrage them (because thats where the real money is - social media platforms keep you online longer if they piss you off)
- Make huge profits for a while then become a latter-day digg
Is it possible to commercialize lemmy?
Capitalism uh... finds a way.
How is Lemmy paying for the servers they need to serve content? I have no idea, but someone is footing the bill.
I think some of the larger instances accept user donations. And smaller instances are just paid for by the owner.
I think eventually what we will see is companies hosting their own official instances where they have absolute admin/moderation privileges (which is bad) but they will wind up paying to host their own propaganda/tech support which is good. Probably governments too, which sounds like it sucks but they have a twitter and facebook pages already so its really no different.
Interesting. I'd welcome something like cable where companies would host content to push their brands.
Its not about welcoming it, we literally cant stop them from doing it. The only thing you can do is join instances that dont federate with corporate instances and thats where the schism will likely happen.
Volkswagen-Audi Group (VAG) wont want to federate with instances that also host hentai and cuck porn. So you will see a divide, between the corporate and heavily administrated instances (Administration that would cost money. Either adds, sponsorship or paid membership that you would let your kids have accounts on and "Free Fediverse" instances that would be far less restrictive.
Eventually the masses will want to follow the corporate and sanitised fediverse because these people have marketing budgets and can pay teams (have AI) generate content for their brand and the "free fediverse" instances will become the fringe groups.
For uh science, which servers host hentai?
But in all seriousness, even if they claim to not be affiliated with a corp, you still can't be sure. God knows a lot of us would sell out faster than reel big fish if they pulled a dump truck of money to our front door.
But seriously I need some fediverse porn.
Thats the thing, they wont have to pretend not to be. If all the big corporate instances federate with each other and only federate with instances that moderate their content to be largely in line with meta and their instance when that group has 2 billion members, it will be the default.
Free user owned instances will be isolated pockets of resistance. If the "reddit blackout" and the continual survival of facebook and twitter is any indication, casual users just dont care.
What about what happened to Reddit? It got popular, then got bought, then turned into shit.
In that case we were lucky enough to be told about it, but what happens when memes or lemmy.ml gets sold under the table?
does it matter? can't people do anything for the love of the game anymore?
Sure they can, but how long will their "just for the fun of it" mentality last when AWS bills are thousands of dollars and Taco Bell offers them $6 million for control of it?
Would they even tell us or would we just start seeing a bunch of Tacos Locos ads on hot?
I'm betting a non-disclosure would the first thing they'd have to sign.
Meta seems to be trying to commercialize ActivityPub, so maybe???
If I leave Facebook,I will lose access to all my high school and college acquaintances. People I may want to contact in the future, but don’t care enough about them to create other communication threads with.
Im the same, Facebook is like my address book. The only other thing I use it for is marketplace.
Does Facebook have statuses? I've never used it, so I'm not sure.
If yes, you can post your new preferred contact info there. Anyone who cares enough to talk to you will. Anyone who doesn't, won't.
You shouldn't anyway. Pretty much anyone have a Facebook account. I think is just smarter to use more platform and have fun being free to choose, instead of stay stuck behind a pay wall.
Being the first, so that it has a foothold on older generations.
Are we pretending Facebook is not a dumpster fire?
It is a dumpster fire, but it's also profitable
So is meth.
Meth is a product that was found, and then developed and improved in order to be better at what it does. The expertise demonstrated in the creation of Meth shouldn't be compared to Facebook, which is just the first product to come out of a market. Facebook hasn't developed further as a social media platform, it has developed further as a money making device.
You could say Alcohol is the Facebook of drugs. Drugs have developed over a very long time unlike social media, so the history is much greater for this case, but the point is that alcohol, despite not being the best in all categories, is the most popular drug simply because it's not as harmful as others (such as meth) and has been around for longer than the new, less risky alternatives (such as weed). I'm not considering coffee as a drug for this metaphor. Alcohol is making the most money not because it is good, but because the rest is mostly illegal, and/or less ingrained in social norms and traditions.
Point is, I kind of lost myself along the way and started rambling, comparing Facebook to Meth is not fair because Meth is not socially accepted while Facebook is, maybe compare Reddit to Meth, idk
I enjoyed this rambling analysis
5/5
This is a very confusing analogy.
Fam, you missed an awesome opportunity to say "Jesse wtf are you talking about?"