this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Spez here thinking that the content hosting is more important than content generation. Reddit's value to the community or advertisers is a result of the users, not Reddit Inc.
The big difference between Reddit and Facebook/twitter is that they were content moderation companies and they failed because they didn't invest enough in it to keep the platform from going toxic.
Reddit has free content generation, free content moderation and they still can't make a fucking profit.
I mean to be fair, I imagine when communities were in blackout things were looking dire. I haven't been to reddit since, but I imagine things are pretty much back to normal? So it's clear he can sort of spit on the reddit userbase how much he wants. People will still come back.
Noooo, it has not returned to normal at all. When the protestors left, a flood of other people came in to take their place. It was enough to create a noticeable shift in tone. I would now describe reddit as a whole as barely left-leaning. Almost every sub moved a couple notches noticeably rightward.
It has cancer. Prognosis not good, when monetization was the root cause.
Uh, if what your saying is true, that sounds like an absolute victory for Spez. He never wanted good communities, he wanted communities he could market to. Having the idiot right wing that buys Chinese hats that says MAGA is absolutely the audience he wants.
In fact, if you're all correct and the old social media is just straight going to the right wing and the left wing goes underground to techie sites like Lemmy, their voices will get magnified. Which is already happening with bud and Starbucks. Oh we are fucked...
Thing about the internet is the spaces are not set. You can't conquer a country like you can in real life, because none of the space actually exists. It's all numbers of users, because there is a finite number of them, and they can only hang out and contribute in so many spaces.
They move into one, another shrinks. People come here, this one grows. That's all. Think of it less as some kind of strategy game and more of fluids flowing and interacting in a complex system.
Sure, but some places do have more influence on the public discourse than others. Lemmy will remain relatively uninfluential until it becomes more user-friendly, and/or more well-known. So any left wing stuff here is going to have less of an effect than it did on Reddit or other such places, for now.
I feel like once good Lemmy apps exit betas and go to the App Store it’ll be bigger. Memmy is great, super user friendly. Once people can get access to it without jumping through hoops (TestFlight, not that complicated but maybe more than what the average user is willing to do), and once the app is ironed out (already most of the way there), it’ll be a much easier shift for a lot of people
The over-politicization here is annoying tbh. I still use Reddit for two things. To check on a reality tv show's subreddit and to check Cricket discussions. I hope they move somewhere else, but neither are let or right wing. It feels like you're seeing something you don't like and attribute qualities you don't like on to it.
How is this comment any different from a right wing person saying:
Because the right absolutely does buy maga hats and scam commemorative coins. The left does not buy Mao anything. Because we're not a cult.
I get it. I’ve seen both left and right do that tbh. But what does it have to do with Reddit?
Right buys MAGA hat and is a cult so reddit is going right wing?!
If you're not participating in politics, politics is certainly participating in you.
I get it. This country/society that we're in is basically the Titanic, and any one person trying to push it in one direction does almost nothing. But almost nothing is still better than nothing.
The iceberg is a little off our starboard bow, so I get a little offended when people imply steering left and right is the same thing. Each of us in a democracy has an obligation to try to improve our society, because the alternative is the world going to shit. The bare minimum of that is knowing what's going on, having an opinion about it, and voting.
Public discussion is an increasingly important part of that. The idea that it's not polite to talk about politics and people fully ignoring "politics" is how we got to the shitshow we're in today.
It’s the same with Twitter. Apparently it has gone really right wing since Elon took over. But I’ve not noticed as I mostly follow football, tech, and music stuff.
Elon himself has gone really right wing, and coming out in public with some of the same hate and nastiness that Twitter showcases. There was a stink a while back because companies were seeing their ads posted next to full-on neoNazi content, which is absolutely the last thing a large company wants when they pay for advertising on a social media platform. I'm glad it's not affecting you personally, but it's part of why people are trying to move to p. much any other platform.
Wow that’s pretty nuts. I knew about him but not the advertising issues.
I do have a Mastodon account and tried to switch but the vast majority of Twitter accounts I follow aren’t currently on there.
Hopefully the other federated platforms take off - I used FidoNet and BBSs in the 90s, and the decentralised Fediverse very much reminds me of those days.
I hear you on Twitter, I think the only reason they're not going down even faster is that there are people there who are staying for other people. Facebook has that advantage as well. I don't think Reddit has that kind of specific-person pull, but it's too early to tell.
The Twitter advertising thing comes up in the news coverage because it's subject to quantitative analysis, and because advertising is Twitter's main source of $$$. People can point to dropping ad numbers and say "this is how much worse Twitter is than before Elon bought it." And I find it extra funny that Huffman is using it as an example of how he can make Reddit profitable by trashing it, because Twitter is most definitely not profitable, and no one but Elon thinks it's going to become profitable any time soon.
How funny would it be if it leads to a shit show where actual journalists start demanding their fair share of advertising generated off their articles?
Reddit can beat mods because of money, but these giant media conglomerates both have money and are hurting their own advertising numbers because 99% of redditors never read the article. They have motivation and opportunity to get legal