A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.
I've always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn't invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I'm probably on here too much though!
Same. Never cared about Twitter, but I like new internet stuff, so I got on Mastodon. Never used it and forgot about it for years. Came back to it with all the Elon stuff and realized the instance was dead, so I created a new account on another instance to never use. The point is, like you said, Lemmy is something I will actually use if the community continues to grow and sticks around.
They saw Lemmy becoming successful, corporate mistook Lemmy with Lemmings, and decided to go out Lemmings style.
...jokes aside, Cory Doctorow has a great text about that, called "Tiktok's enshittification". It's a four-steps process:
In my opinion it's also the result of management being disconnected from the platform that it manages, and not knowing fully the implications of their own decisions.
Some people have come up with the word "enshittification" to describe the basic cycle of modern web services.
The cycle consists of three parts:
I am under the impression that the term was popularized, if not invented, by Cory Doctorow. See his many writings on his ad & tracker-free website; https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/
All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.
The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet's history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the "next best thing".
Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It's only just getting started, you watch.
Note that they are cashflow negative because of expensive advertising features.
Twitter is pretty cheap to run for base functionality and if you open up dev console and see all of the resources Twitter is requesting its like 90% ad stuff and suggestions.
That's just bandwidth, though. What about database load? A big part of Lemmy's growing pains come from slow database queries. It doesn't take much bandwidth to send you the content, but the server has to do a lot of work to figure out which content to send you.
You can't lose money forever, not as a business. What's great about the Fediverse is that it makes social media something that can be done as a hobbyist project. Money is nice, but the hobbyist isn't necessarily out to make money.
The line has to go up.
The issue is that big companies have shareholders, and those shareholders don't demand that the company stay solvent, but that they achieve year-over-year growth. Even minimal growth like 2-3% over LY is considered a failure to most shareholder groups, depending on the size of the company. So eventually they have to squeeze every last drop out of the userbase/product to keep the line going up, so shareholders don't sell and bail.
Now, with Twitter there's a whole litany of poitical tin-foil hat theories I can shout out, but this isn't the place for it.
Reddit, Facebook, and Twitch: it's money.
Reddit is getting as much money as it can shored up with Venture Capital before it brings out it's Initial Public Offering (basically going public for people to buy stock in). High IPO, more perceived value, more space for advertisers, people are going to buy in. EDIT: I believe this is why they're making their API pricing so high (hence the whole current Reddit situation right now) so that they can get more ads viewed.
Facebook: I don't even know why people use FB, but im going to guess it's just ads.
Twitch: Again, Ad revenue. Slam as many first-party ads as you can so you get the money from advertisers. Keep the space clean and homogenized so Pepsi doesn't feel bad about putting ads in a video before a hot-tub streamer. (not that they're a bad thing, just using an example)
Everything comes down to the line. And it has to keep going up.
Just to add my thoughts to your Facebook point:
I don’t use Facebook much but I do have an account for the sake of keeping connected to distant family I’d otherwise never speak to again. The rare occasion I’m directly contacted and open the app to see what’s up, legitimately every other post, sometimes several in a row, is some kind of ad or sponsernd Post. Legitimately my entire timeline is one massive ad reel, I cannot fathom how people keep using the platform. Literally anything else would be better
I don't think all that many redditors are moving to Lemmy. Judging by the stats on join-lemmy, there are only several thousand monthly Lemmy users, which is nothing compared to reddit which had tens of millions daily users
When I joined lemmy.ml and beehaw.org, the stats on join-lemmy.org were just over 100/month.
Now it's at 1K/month for beehaw and 1.6K/month for lemmy.ml
There's also a HUGE list now, where as when I joined last week there were maybe 8?
Small numbers, ya, but Reddit still hasn't done anything. I am sure July 1st will bring a huge wave of people who are still sticking with Reddit since apps still work.
I came here from Reddit in preparation for it getting whack... ready to make a jump to something closer to how old school reddit was. I think we'll see a lot more people who are like minded coming over too.
Counting methods are probably different, Lemmy stats only count users that posted at least once in the interval. I assume Reddit counts anyone who opens the site.
The Twitter exodus (which is still limited) was because all of the problems at Twitter were sudden. Huge staff cuts meant lower quality, way more bots, and of course, the owner's mercurial impulses.
Reddit is a bit different. It's more of a boiled frog situation. A little tweak here, a little change there, all definitely for the worse (and Reddit is going down hill) but so far nothing seismic. Even the number of users affected by the third party apps thing is pretty small because most users just looking at memes and sharing news just use the native app (my wife does).
I'm not sure whether that really results in an exodus.
Look at Amazon: it just gets worse and worse, but have people stopped buying from it en masse? Nope. It's getting worse, but ever so slowly.
Everybody just wants money now. Some of that is reasonable, these companies tend to work if not with a loss, then with quite unpredictable margins.
Now that tech investors have found a new bubble - AI - they are no longer willing to sponsor old-fashion internet stuff and wait if it ever turns a profit.
Especially since many got used to becoming all that richer during the pandemic, and are looking to keep those numbers rising.
But there's also some sudden hatred of porn, and I don't know where that is coming from. Tumblr, Imgur have limited it completely, OF wanted to, Reddit probably will, coedcherry shut down. The owner of coedcherry said it was really a sudden 180° turn of the banks to no longer wanting to do anything with porn, and nobody knows why.
It's especially bizzare considering how these platforms keep assuring us that we'll still be able to post and see blown off heads and all kinds of other nasty stuff, it's just the titties that are being banned! Eh?
The porn thing comes from sex trafficking. No one wants to be caught accidentally financing it (as no one would ever want to because it’s Fucking horrible).
I have a sinking feeling that these moves are not about money, but more about power and manipulation. If you squeeze these user bases such that the savviest users are forced out, those more likely to ask "Why?" about damn near anything, you will own access to a group of people that can be influenced to think/do/buy whatever the top management and/or majority shareholders want. If you lose a few million users, what does it matter if they were dissidents to your goals?
Not money per se, but the oil of the 21st century: data.
I guarantee it's primarily about improving their ability to harvest and sell user data.
The valuation of a lot of these sites was grossly inflated by the market, so when the largest shareholders saw their billions halve and know what the future holds, they start doing things to temporarily boost their profit margins and sell off the company.
Outside social media, we also have Netflix pulling their own BS, and then lesser know sites/services that are near and dear to me are RARBG shutting down and Mullvad VPN removing port forwarding on July 1st. It's been a rough month for me in my little online sphere.
I don't think Mullvad's port forwarding decision can be compared to Reddit's greed. They were getting in trouble with law enforcement for providing tunnels to illegal websites, so they had to either identify those customers or stop port forwarding if they didn't want to get the entire company shut down.
On one hand, I can name sites that, in 2023, either screwed over their user base, or just went under.
I have been considering a domain name to access hypothetical home servers as of late, just so I don't have to worry about shit like this.
twitter was overvalued. reddit has made a lot of questionable business decisions over the last decade or so but their recent API change will be their death knell. it feel like a cash grab. I personally only use Twitch to watch Bob Ross reruns :P
Although there's a lot of protesting going on over at Reddit right now, I really don't think it can be compared to twitter. 6 months from now, I doubt things will be all that different at Reddit. A small number of users (relatively speaking when compared to their total number of users) will leave, and that's probably it.
That's my guess. I started on old Reddit 10+ years ago, but now use only the first party apps. They're clunky and sluggish, but good enough if you just want your doom scrolling fix.
I'm glad this drama alerted me to Lemmy, though. I probably would have joined one sooner had I known about them.
Facebook dies due to privacy concerns and misinformation. Twitter under threat because Elon. Imgur just deleted their NSFW content. Reddit with its API pricing. Twitch executives also getting greedy. Youtube has been going down for years.
It feels like we're seeing the natural life-cycle of social media companies in real time.
The time of free money is over
Good maybe we can start going back to communities taking care of each other instead of hoping some central authority eill do it for us
The reddit exodus is comparatively very small. Tens of thousands of users, many of which will not stick around. Reddit has millions of users (hundreds of millions?). They barely notice.
true enough, but I don't think i'm going to care that much as long as the community stays big enough to stay somewhat active. I feel much more engaged in the community here than I ever did on reddit.
To me, day 1 here, it feels like a niche subreddit about something you enjoy but that's the whole platform. The federation and the ability to have multiple of the same communities moderated differently is intriguing idea to me. I think reddit's troubles began ultimately with it's popularity. More content, less quality, more of an inclination of reddit for monetization. This is going to be an interesting month that will test the capabilities of this idea we are participating in. I feel like it is entirely possible but I hope that not too much strain is placed on each instance operator and their mod team. I want to be somewhere to anonymously socialize without being the commodity. I do have some concerns about Lemmy, primarily, it's lack of a privacy policy and a tos. Really my concern is, if I delete my account for example does it and my content also get deleted? What's the data retention policy? We are seeing this federation could easily be made into a archive like what pushshift for reddit l became which was a major frightening idea that everything you ever posted or commented was archived without your consent or knowledge. This truly is the wild west right now. It's exciting and I'm glad to be here. Just want some understanding of what we are signing up for. Lemmy's dev did say there is no logging of your IP address anywhere except web server logs which is to be expected.
Dying? Twitter is very well "alive" despite everything that has happened. I don't know what will happen to Reddit and Twitch but I doubt these platforms will "die". They aren't dying really. Just becoming worse over time. People will continue using these platforms up to a certain degree.
Agreed. By the same definition fb has been dying for almost a decade, but I'm still forced to use the messenger app since all my friends are on there.
With great power comes great irresponsibility
-big corps
From everything I have observed, businesses are hunkering down for a recession in the next fiscal year. It explains the lay offs, the penny pinching, and puzzling decisions that look like business suicide.
For services that are free for users, advertising revenue and investment fund raisers are the only thing keeping them afloat. With banks like SVB getting seized by the FDIC, it's starting to scare investors. Advertisers are seeing the writing on the wall that people will stop spending as much as they used to. We are also probably seeing jacked up pricing across the board because businesses are taking what they can before it's gone.
So what's left? Squeeze users for money. Additionally, shed users that actually cost them money and these tend to be power users. The question, which everyone seems to be assuming is a foregone conclusion, is if this shedding strategy will end up killing the service. In reality, we don't know but the idealists would sure feel good if someone else ate their market share.
I'm just glad that federation is picking up steam in the social media space.
What's going on with Twitch ?
They were going to ban multi-streaming. Basically most streamers stream to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and I forgot the last site but Twitch was going to ban this so they could only stream to Twitch no matter if they were official twitch partners or not.
From Cory Doctorow:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Some of it is because we had a decade of cheap borrowing which has come to an end and many of these platforms were never profitable.
please can youtube be next?
I really want to stop using my google account and that's the only thing keeping me from moving away from it.
I think it's all part of a cycle. Right as a phoenix burns off the last of its light the eggs can be seen forming within the ash.
Twitter, Reddit probably won't be going away anytime soon but they could feasibly end up as the ashes of what they once were.
What's happening with Twitch? I haven't heard anything.
The post title implies it were prevalent. Which it is not. Three platforms is not a lot overall.
The reasons between Twitter and Reddit are very different.
Twitter was fine. It's on a single Person - Elon Musk - who bought Twitter. All changes after it were through them.
Reddit became a big platform. Now it's run not by a small team but by a big company with management and CEO. Supposedly targeting going public, and probably focusing no longer on usefulness and the service but on profitability and growth. An inherently, broadly, and very different mindset and goals.
Twitch is going to a 50/50 revenue split while offering nothing in return.
Twitch CEO had an interview a few days ago saying that most big creators get their revenue via sponsors, so taking 50% isn't bad. (dumb take)
Twitch announced a couple days ago they are putting HEAVY restrictions on any sponsor stuff, basically banning them all together. So now the 50/50 split is the only way to make money.
Twitch went back on their word yesterday, but the fact they already tried this, doesn't look good on them. Most large creators are moving away to YouTube/Kick/etc when their contracts are up.
Rich people like money, and will destroy anything to get it.
Logged into youtube today and discovered that the subscription page is absolutely fucked now. It only shows three thumbnails per row on my 13" laptop screen and they've removed the separation by date, so now it's way harder to tell if any of my subscriptions have uploaded today. Seems like everything is going down the shitter.
