I think you’re right that a lot of users are going to grumble and resume business as usual due to a lack of alternatives.
But I would be very wary of assuming a rosy future because the site has not come to a crashing end a mere one week after a protest. This is the tech world, where a platform’s lifespan is subject to the whims of each new generation of users. There are always going to be young guns aiming to take you on and alienating your user base is something that users will remember if it becomes a pattern. Huffman’s attempt at reality distortion has been quite a mask-off moment for me.
And I 100% expect more undesirable changes are in store when it goes finally goes public. There will be even greater pressure for changes that don’t add value to the users but to increase revenue for shareholders. Which is the only group that seems to matter when a business matures to a certain point. Watch this space for new rounds of upcoming layoffs.
There may not be a viable alternative today, but this will absolutely not remain the case. That is the point the chickens will come home to roost.
Source: I was a 10-yr Redditor that loved Apollo, who subsequently deleted his posts and has not been back. I’ve sought out multiple alternative venues (including this board) to replace my habit. No more reliance on a single venue to serve up content. I’m not saying I’m representative of the majority, but FWIW, I am at least one of the people y’all are opining on.
I mostly agree with this take, given the pattern of social media so far. Facebook turns into grandmas exchanging recipes, the kids move on to Instagram, that gets boring, so they move to TikTok… and I expect something to replace that. MySpace and Tumblr probably belong in this list somewhere also.
Will Reddit follow the same pattern? I’m not sure. If it does, I think it’ll have little to do with recent events. It’ll just be them being seen as old and boring and there’ll be something new to take its place. It won’t be a direct replacement as Lemmy and such are trying to do. It’ll be something else that fits the same niche.
On the other hand, the niche seems not that attractive, for perhaps obvious reasons: it’s hard for Reddit to make money off their users. Facebook, etc. knows every little thing about their userbase and so they’re easy to monetize. Reddit doesn’t have that. So maybe there won’t be a replacement because no one finds it financially attractive.
Put another way, users are Lando Calrissian, who made a deal with Darth Vader, who, upon changing the terms at his whim, instructs Lando to pray he doesn’t alter it further. Pushed past his limits, Lando revolts and ultimately flees his beloved City in the Clouds.
I don’t think it’s really about advertising vs. users paying. Amazon was a (successful) example of enshittification and the users always had to pay for products. The main thing is are you trying to get to quickly a point where you turn a profit even if it means only being able to grow slowly, or are you going to spend 10+ years becoming as big as possible without worrying about making a profit before then. You can do that even if the users actually have to pay money, as long as you’re undercutting your competition with the theory that you can lock in the existing ecosystem before you run out of investment.
Sorry, I meant advertising specifically in the case of Reddit.
Amazon was definitely subsidizing the user experience. They had negligible or negative profits until something like 2015. So things enshittify when they decide enough of that and turn the screws.
But you’re right; that is a minor hole in what I said on the other thread, which is that products don’t enshittify when users have to pay from the beginning. Instead, I’ll say that products enshittify when they were subsidized from the start. Social media has it worse since you pretty much have to charge nothing, and also have a high content/advertising ratio to draw people in, but even Amazon has the problem since they were happy to undercut the competition early on.
Eventually the subsidies disappear, and the experience gets worse.
This whole thing has also highlighted the precariousness of digital resources. Several folks have said that their search results take them to Reddit, and what’ll happen to all that on the day the thing goes under? I know there are digital archivists out there madly trying to save stuff, but what a mess. I know that the vast, vast majority of stuff there probably isn’t worth saving, but who knows what will be a charming insight in the future into a specific period of time?
Of course, data retention like that has its own issues (like what happens when the writer doesn’t want to be associated with that data anymore), so it’s weird. At least with letters, the sender or receiver had to choose to keep them. The internet is a centralized, quasi public resource and hub. So who gets to decide whether that cringe post I made as a teenager is worthy of archiving for historic value or if it’s just plain embarrassing to me? (Not to mention the kind of thing like the address incident I had that I mentioned in another thread.) Sticky indeed.
Wow. I hadn’t realized you’d gone that far. I myself have not. I only use Old Reddit, and there are communities I’m a part of that have no alternative yet. They’re smaller and more specific, usually about a specific work of fiction or a specific creator. Some have discussed what we’d do if things get really bad (e.g. Old Reddit goes down), but there’s not yet a decision on where to go. And the subs are small enough and need so little moderation that the mods aren’t really affected. So we are all kinda isolated from the changes.
That said, I’m also enjoying the John Oliver stuff. Spez wants to accuse mods of ignoring the people and threatens to take over subs? Well, the mods put up a vote to see the will of the people, and asked if they’d like a new rule that you can only post ___ about John Oliver. In every single one, that decision is a runaway hit.
What’s more, Oliver has shown his own approval. One of the subs said you could only post “sexy” pics of Oliver, so he tweeted a bunch of examples they could use. Of course, the goal is that he will mention the issue on the show, giving them more visibility than the news articles.
Plus, maybe if it’s another rich white dude, it will give pause to those who seem to reflexively side with the guy with the most money.
Still, I can’t lie. I find myself checking out the bigger subs that aren’t still protesting. Not as much as before, but I still do it. I admire you that you were able to completely quit.
(Though, out of principle, I would never delete my posts.)
I deleted my content out of principle — the notion that “if you’re not paying for something, you’re the product.” Beyond that, maintaining all that content felt like leaving pieces of me at a place I’ve committed to leaving. Those pieces of me feel like tethers that could draw me back. And honestly — I can’t say I feel any loss having done so. There is a little bit of content I’ve saved locally that I’ll repost either here or maybe start a webpage of my own, but that’s not much. That said, I haven’t taken the final step of deleting my account yet.
Will you elaborate about principles associated with not deleting your content? (not to be read with any snarky tone, rather just curiosity and genuine interest).
It has to do with standing by what I say. I already will not delete a comment if I know someone has seen it, because it’s like rewriting history. If I say something that gets me downvoted, that stays. If I’m a jerk, I have to apologize. If I’m wrong, I have to correct myself (often using strike through). No deleting history.
So, since that’s already how I handle things in general, it feels wrong to delete stuff otherwise. Maybe if I actually thought any of my comments would help Reddit do bad stuff in the future, but I really don’t. It’s not “content”, i.e. actually useful beyond the time it happened. It’s just a history of what has gone on before.
Besides, I hate it when companies erase their history, too.
Note, this doesn’t mean I think you’re wrong or anything. I’m just explaining why I won’t, even if I do leave.
Since Reddit will not post advertisements on NSFW subreddits, a number of them are opting to flag their community as NSFW. Some are allowing porn to be posted, some are not. It looks like r/videos (with nearly 27 million subscribers) has switched but still only allowing John Oliver videos, but r/interestingasfuck (12 million subscribers) has gone all in and it’s a complete toss up if the video you’re about to watch is actually porn or not.
Some of the mods who set their subs as NSFW have been removed.
I saw on r/modcoord that someone got a photo of their butthole upvoted enough to hit r/all. And that was when I decided to delete the app from my homepage to cut down on mindlessly scrolling. Next up will probably be posting gore, so I want to be careful about which subs I visit.