cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37870004
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
Size and commercialisation generally go hand in hand. After all, how do you keep something running with infinite users submitting infinite content for free?
This is a big issue for everyone, it’s important that the fediverse understands that size might some day increase the importance of sensible business models or proactive funding initiatives to counter the growth. This doesn’t mean harmful profit models necessarily, but it does mean keeping revenues under control for individually run nodes or for archiving services for old fediverse domains that might not exist forever.
Wikipedia is proof you are wrong, it is possible to run large-scale services with no profit
They do ask for funding from time to time, though. It’s definitely not cost-less running a big website.
yes, of course, but it’s not a business model. Which means decisions aren’t driven by profit. The issue isn’t about money, it’s how/why it flows
Just like having buying and selling things is not necessarily capitalism, an organization that gets and spends money is not necessarily a company.
Reddit awards was how the servers were funded back in the day, so it was possible to keep reddit non-commercial.
RIP Aaron Schwartz
Swartz*
Imho, “submitting content” is the language of commercial sites. Like we are working for free for a business. But people post their ideas, hang out with friends, and share their art and code freely because they want to connect with other people. Some people have the means and knowledge to maintain a server allowing that to a limited number of people. It costs money, sure, and time, but this is also a thing people do for fun, sometimes with the help of voluntary donations.
I mean, I agree. “content” is extremely an airquote situation, as an abstraction. I also dislike the term, but need some kind of catch-all for describing the ever increasing demand the fediverse has for space and processing. It’s a real problem, though one that many people (not me) are actively working to solve and I’m grateful for that work.
My concern about fediverse space has more to do with inter-connected federation storage issues, such as caching content from other instances. Having seen how even small instances balloon in costs, it has completely scared me away from even attempting to host a small instance. I might have this wrong though, but I’ve heard horror stories about space requirements due to the caching-heavy nature of the federated internet.
Oh yes, that is a real concern if the fediverse grows big. I wonder of a fedi CDN is theoretically possible, or if we by design are stuck with pushing the same content (I wish we had a better word) to thousands of instances in parallell?
The way I feel though, is that I’d rather have the decentralized non-commercial social media, even if that means that my instance has size restrictions to limit costs. Maybe we have been conditioned to assume that it’s trivial to send large 4K videos as a baseline standard, when that is actually quite expensive. Idk, what is the way forward, frugal content, or cdn efficiency without losing control?