Asklemmy

They’re aiming to maximize profit

Their profit centers are advertising and selling api access to content libraries

So they don’t want you to see posts with long narratives, extensive image galleries, long videos, etc. there are some exceptions to this of course like YouTube and other streaming services that embed the ads and as a result want long videos that engage the user. But Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, Insta, etc want page views. Once you take venture capital you’re fucked, they demand a return on their (typically massive) investment and will insist you sell your soul to advertising ghouls. All the socials did that long ago

That way they get maximum impressions and can serve you the most ads. They also get more data on you quickly and can use analytics to develop a profile for more targeted advertising which is more lucrative. The dream is that you view a post for 10-30 seconds, react quickly (like or upvote or whatever) then move on to the next one. This is also why they tweak their algorithms to promote garbage content. They want content that grabs an audience. R/stupidfood, fightporn, diwhy, conservative, politicalcompassmemes, etc plus the spattering of news where people react to headlines without readings are the dream to them. Why do you think they let the_donald fester when it was obviously breaking sitewide rules every single day? Because it drove engagement through ragebait. “Oh did you see what they did now?”. These are Reddit centric but the other networks are largely the same, a push to prioritize content that is ugly and rage inducing to drive engagement. They completely disregard the potential social impacts of this. Maybe it makes people more angry and more irritable, more impulsive, less empathic, more divisive, etc. but they’ll hide behind “we are giving the people what they want” because they have a complete disregard for ethics and no regulatory oversight at all.

Wrt Reddit specifically at the same time they do want some engagement with commentary because they want their cake and to eat it too. But they want this for the benefit of being able to add an additional revenue stream with selling API access to commercial clients. The biggest example is LLM stuff like chatgpt. If you need to train your AI language model you needs tons of naturalistic colloquial writing. Reddit is a perfect place for this. I mention chatgpt because they were using Reddit for this already and Reddit had mentioned them numerous times to the point that they’re clearly pissed about it. They think chatgpt owes them money as part of their success. They realize they missed that boat so this is likely another driving force in the api changes.

Additionally the content drives traffic. Reddit specifically shows up organically in tons of twitter searches and this is because of the massive amount of content they have. Other social networks have this content but they don’t make it as accessible and searchable so they’re not as concerned here.

The solution is to continue to decentralize. Imo lemmy/kbin are good but as an old head I think we need a return to the late 90s/early 2000s internet where communities were completely decentralized from each other. If the administration of your community goes to shit then only your community is fucked. This whole thing where a “platform” for communities lowers the bar which is nice but if the administration fucks up a lot of people get fucked over and a lot of communities get wrecked

Tldr advertising is cancer that will do anything for a few more dollars even if it’s destructive, the us government does basically nothing to regulate them, and we actively tolerate and invite it to our lives so expect it to get worse