There is nothing special about Reddit except its community and the content the community created. Its software is trivial. Unless Reddit reverses course, Reddit will join Digg, MySpace, and LiveJournal in the dustbin of social network history, and a new site, such as the user-funded Beehaw, or an old one, such as Digg, will take its place.
I would actually revise that to "Its software is trivial, and in some respects notably lacking."
A lot of the mods won't want to give up the power. That's why the original "protest" was only 2 days, it was never meant to be serious. A lot of users have left to come here, but there are way more who will never leave reddit, no matter how bad it gets.
But I bet that we're getting a much higher proportion of the users that make actual content and have real conversations. The ones that only type out two word replies or pick arguments over trivial things can stay on Reddit.
Yeah, for sure. A lot of people aren't looking for actual content or discussion though, they just want their cat pics and stale repetitive jokes. The fediverse will grow but reddit isn't going isn't going to die.
This is it exactly. The users and mods that are leaving and protesting are the ones who make the site what it is (was). Reddit corporate knows it too. If they didn't, I feel like we'd have seen some stats put out about how "these third party app users don't contribute".
I second this. The subs I'm subscribed to are losing a lot of quality, and human interaction is degrading. Doesn't feel like a comfortable place anymore.
Agree--I'm seeing a lot of what I called 'quiet quitting' lately. The regulars are posting a lot less, or not at all. I'm not ready to burn-it-all-down, because I want to be able to lure people over later when this is a bit more mature. But it already feels different there.
Yup. I just popped over there and even r/politics feels "thinner"--not as many posts, nor as many comments replying to posts as I would have seen a month ago.
Facebook was "in a death spiral" when their stock hit 80 bucks, it's tripled since and just had their highest DAU. I don't think Reddit is going anywhere any time soon.
Whether Reddit goes on successfully forever or goes down the drain next week I don't really care. Things like this have shown me the Fediverse is the future, that's where I'd rather make my "home" on the internet.
Regardless of how great a service like Reddit may have been, putting all of your eggs in a basket owned by a single company who's inevitable goal is to make money just isn't going to work out well. I'm not faulting a company for trying to make money, that's the world we live in and they're just playing the game. By continuing to contribute to services like that, though, we're only increasing their value, not ours.
The only chance we've got for an internet we actually want to spend time on is one that can't be controlled by a handful of corporations. Hopefully that's the Fediverse, but who knows.
Let’s understand that Reddit has spent over a decade enjoying its status as a world-leading platform while kicking the ‘we’ll figure out how to monetize later’ can down the road. Along the way, some important social questions have arrived and Reddit is still failing to show leadership in this matter. Let me explain:
So that’s what Reddit is supposed to do as a ‘platform.’ What about Reddit as a ‘company?’ Sadly, boardroom shenanigans have pursued Reddit throughout its entire lifecycle. Reddit lost the public-spirited people like Aaron Swartz, and gained trolls, hate groups, and the soap opera that was the Ellen Pao debacle. As Will Durant said: ‘A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.’
Actions this year by Reddit have pushed it much farther down the path of ‘less user-oriented.’ Worse, public statements and private actions by the company leave nothing to doubt when it comes to their intentions. “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive,” Steve Huffman the CEO of Reddit, wrote in a recent AMA.
Spez' decisions have ripped the guts out of Reddit's understood social identity and community intent. Those public statements and private actions by the company I mentioned earlier? They aren’t there to make Reddit a more human-centered place. Monetizing API use won’t increase Reddit’s stature as a ‘a safe space for all viewpoints.’ Like when managers decided to launch the Challenger space shuttle, “the concerns about the O-rings that ultimately led to the explosion were buried in a vast sea of thousands of other decisions … leading up to the ill-fated launch.”
Risks don’t rely on your perspective for existence. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away,” as Philip K. Dick famously said. This recent Reddit move to monetize APIs creates major cracks in its foundations of digital altruism and human-centered behavior. As I said last year with Twitter: “Twitter has every chance to prove to us that it can be a safe, responsible place for us to interact with our readers if they want to. In the meantime, it’s getting too weird around here. I’m mustering at the life boat station now, in case we must abandon ship.”
Creators have worked to create Reddit. Those creativities are actually important rather than the survival of Reddit as a platform. Another platforms would been created any time if they enjoy creating.
I was reading a previous article and it was him raging about the GPL being stuck in the 1980's, then another article it was him raging about the distro maintainers living in stone age. Now it's an article where he is raging about reddit.
Is it Steven Vaughan-nichols posting his own articles?
I hate articles like this, so let's go through it.
1: Fair, but it undermines how much you can tune Windows and MacOS, they are not nearly as set in stone as people think.
2: Completely true and based.
3: There is a Linux way of doing things, and there are many things that follow from that, like not being able to do advanced admin task without a command line, unlike on Windows. Lock-in also refers more to stuff like hardware lock in for MacOS not just the OS not having an option to change something.
4: Kinda fair, if you use the right distro with the right settings, but in my experience you still have to reboot semi-often.
5: I don't get this one, Wine is on MacOS and Windows has WSL(g), so I don't see how you are ahead on Linux at all.
6: This is kinda dumb kinda not dumb, Ignores the AppStore, WinStore, winget and other tools common on these OSs.
7: Ok, I'm good on this. People have some pretty sick Wallpaper engine and raindrop setups on Windows as well.
8: Nah, I don't know what you are talking about there mate. based on my last few install sessions for laptops there are plenty of stuff that is glitchy as all hell.
zdnet.com
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