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.
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?