The cycle continues:
- Hey you guys can have everything for free
- WTF this is expensive to provide, I think I’m gonna start taking advantage of you guys which someone will pay me to do
- WTF where’s everyone going
- WTF I’m still losing money and always have been
- Screw you guys, screw everybody, I didn’t want y’all anyway
- (fades into irrelevance, gets bought by someone and stripped for parts)
Idk it’s not as pithy as Cory Doctorow’s version I guess
Anyway we’re at step 5 at this point
honestly I’m not convinced step 6 is inevitable. I think enough people are okay with whatever reddit does.
Enough consumers are okay with it, but the core geeks and nerds that created, curated, and moderated the content have jumped ship.
The cruise line is still sailing and there are still drinks and snacks so nobody has noticed the staff have jumped ship. There’s management, low level volunteers, and thousands of kids, moms, and dads.
But sooner or later people are gonna get tired of snacks and flip their shit when management tells them the people who know how to make the steaks have just all fuckin ✨ inexplicably disappeared✨
That’s a fantasy we all hold here because we don’t like Reddit. Reddit doesn’t care that nerds have gone and normies are left behind. People keep using the site and throwing money at “super upvotes”. They’ve floated on the stock market and are doing well. The site is nowhere near dying like Digg. Deep, cerebral, meaningful content might have suffered; but hardly anyone cares as long as they get to see recycled memes, making judgemental comments on other people’s relationships, porn and politics. Their main content is lowest common denominator shit, and it always has been. Facebook is far more shitty and is still going strong. I’m sure Reddit will be fine without us and with their ongoing enshitification, no matter how much we fantasise about their demise.
Content curated by “the core geeks and nerds” might appeal to “geeks and nerds”, not to those consumers.
They want “consumer” content. And if one day they get tired of it then I doubt any amount of “steak” would have stopped them leaving anyway, since that was never what they were looking for. It’s not like reddit has to be the only place they visit in the internet, nor is the internet their only source of consumption. Just because you go to a snack bar does not mean that’s the only place you go for meals.
The key capitalistic trick is to time your step 2 just when you have a critical mass on your platform. Upper management has understood that our shitty paywall will remove x% of our users from our platform. But if (100-x)% of our users can pay $y annually, we can sustain our business model and make $z of profit each year. PR will take care of all the backlash but it’s all calculated.
Tangentially related- I fucking hate discord
Discord is fine for chatting, voice, and iterating quickly on projects. I have no idea why people want to think it’s a forum. That’s ridiculous.
Its pretty awful for all those things if you care about privacy or can’t signup for an account
Iirc strictly speaking you don’t need an account to use it, but most servers disable that option for anti spam reasons. But if you’re setting up a server for friends they can chat from a browser without having to sign up first
We use it for our friend group, as we have pub nights, group meals, vacations etc. we also all do each other’s cat care when we’re out of town, so we have a channel devoted to pet photos etc. works well enough for us.
Unpopular opinion: I never liked discord for chatting either. I found it strangely confusing trying to keep track of logins for each group
Edit: I am indeed thinking of slack
thanks to them for making my deredditification that much easier!
The only way they get my clicks now are when I Google something and they come up.
They really keep making sure that I don’t end up there.
Too bad. Hey, crazy idea: let’s create an open alternative for reddit with good content! Maybe something in the fediverse or so.
