This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.
Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it’s only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.
This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don’t really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we’re (along with other competitors, we’re not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.
spez and Musk burning their services to the ground
Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn’t really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don’t have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Man, we don’t live in the age of quality products anymore, if we ever actually did. Cable television was one of the most successful industries for decades. Almost everything produced for it is cultural ephemera, meant to be consumed in the moment but discarded from memory immediately after. Look at how many fucking seasons of Survivor there are. Perhaps it’s in human nature to crave things that entertain in the moment but leave no lasting impression. I can’t say. But I can say that reddit’s been like that for a long time now. Maybe at one point it wasn’t, but they seem to believe that it’s more successful the shallower the level of engagement. And they’re probably right. Reddit will continue to make itself more palatable to corporate advertisers as the internet is slowly reinvented as “Television 2.0” and it continues its trend of being purely a glorified water cooler to post whatever inane reaction you have to whatever the current social media controversy or celebrity scandal occurred that week. What worries me is that people think companies can’t behave like this and profit, when history indicates the opposite, or that websites like Lemmy are immune from the possibility of just becoming equally banal, worthless places, just ran on donations instead of advertising dollars.
History is no longer a very good tool when it comes to analyzing the tech space. It simply moves too quickly, everything that happens is unprecedented in its combination of specific mechanism and social circumstances.
But we’ll see I suppose.
It used to move quickly. We’re not in the wild west of social media anymore. That was the period from around 2006 to 20016. There’s a handful of huge corporations in the social media tech space that “won the war,” so to speak. What’s the most recent shakeup? Tumblr died because Yahoo decided porn was too dangerous to keep around. Call that one a nail in the coffin of the once mighty Silicon Valley giant and original search engine. But as for new social media sites, the most recent one is TikTok, and that one has been around for years at this point. Lemmy, Mastodon, Threads, etc. are just reinventions of existing architectures. There’s nothing new, really. Just people trying to recapture the appeal of already existing websites. The internet is slowing down, hardening into forms that will potentially last the rest of the century, like what happened with television and radio.
The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions. I would posit that 3rd party app users provided disproportionately more valuable content than the official app users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
I don’t think reddit is going to just die. But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
It took me a minute to acclimate to Lemmy and I tried browsing via the official app while I did so. Let me tell you, it was awful. I got over reddit about 2 days after RIF was gone.
Old thread, but as best I can tell, old.reddit.com is still going strong. No forcing you to sign in, no padding out the ass.
The enshittification proceeds apace. Fuck u/spez.
I’m a bit late, but it can be bypassed by using old reddit.
Someone should answer the phone because we all fucking called it.
What’s next in the Reddit bingo?
The removal of old reddit?
Limiting the number of posts we can see per day as a normal user?
Buy upvotes?
The slippery slope logical fallacy doesn’t count when there is actual factual evidence.
The slippery slope is only a fallacy when you’re making leaps. To go from enacting exorbitant API fees to removal of old Reddit is a logical step so doesn’t make for a fallacy. Intent also plays a part for the same reason. If you can prove that enacting exorbitant API fees was for the purpose of restricting user access then limiting number of posts for users not logged in is a logical step. Slippery slope gets a bad rap but it can be a valid point and not a fallacy when done properly.
People get “slippery slope” wrong. Not every sequence of events is a slope.
The idea of slippery slope is that one small action is said to kick off an unstoppable chain reaction. It doesn’t just mean that A leads to B. It means that A inevitably leads to B, even if it didn’t intend to, and B happening can’t be stopped once A happens. And maybe even the people that wanted A don’t want B but can’t stop it, because we’ve slipped and we’re sliding uncontrollably down the slope. That’s the whole concept, that we’re stuck sliding.
Reddit doing one restrictive action, and then later choosing to do another restrictive action, probably doesn’t apply. There’s seemingly no slope, just an easily foreseeable sequence of events.
Buy upvotes?
The sad part is, I can absolutely see this happening. Not as an outright “gib money get updoot” but something more roudabout but effectively the same thing.
“Be heard louder with Reddit Premium! Your comments on posts will be displayed closer to the top for others to see!”
To reiterate, the above is just something I mocked up. May not be upvotes, but still rigging threads by paying Reddit money. I just wouldn’t be surprised at this point.
It’s sort of what World of Warcraft did with gold.
The gold farms were making TONS of money selling illegal gold in much the same way upvote farms are making a killing.
Upvotes are free for them to give, and they would have a money printer on their hands.
If you install the duckduckgo browser and turn on app tracking protection, you’ll see just how much data is harvested from mobile apps, which is genuinely scary.
This is why these sites are pushing the mobile app. It’s much harder to prevent trackers through an app than it is through a web browser.
I called this happening right when Spez said he wanted to emulate elon. The other shoe has dropped
I assume eventually all subreddits will be locked to non registered users on mobile…and PC
I’m now only on lemmy and YouTube. Never got into tictok or Facebook, left and deleted reddit and Twitter. I’m in a happy place.
I wish there was a way to accelerate widespread adoption of Lemmy.
Reddit has been awesome, but the community deserves a decentralized platform free from bullshit like this.
It’s probably for the benefit of Lemmy that the grow is slow, it gives the servers plenty of time to upgrade. It’s already been struggling somewhat with the influx of new users, it may have become totally unusable with 100x, 1000x the user’s etc.
Be patient.
He’s just trying to protect people from inappropriate content. We all know how harmful inappropriate content can be for children unless it’s paired with targeted advertisements, which mitigate the danger.
