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Goodbye, Reddit: How the Internet’s Front Page Is Eating Itself
(joanwestenberg.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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I think that this article is accurate and sensible.
There's a point that I'd like to add, that the author doesn't mention: user trust.
The main value of an online platform is the user trust, as it dictates the users' willingness to help building it instead of vandalising it. In Reddit's case it means people writing well-thought posts, moderating communities, reporting content, using the voting system, etc.
And user trust is violated every time that a platform takes user-hostile decisions. Like Reddit has been taking for almost a decade; with 2023's APIcalypse being a big example of that, but only one among many.
And when user trust is violated, it's almost impossible to come back. John Bull explains this well, with the Trust Thermocline; but the basic idea is that those violations pile up invisibly upon a certain point, when they suddenly become a big deal and the platform bleeds users like there's no tomorrow. And once it reaches that point it's practically impossible to come back.
So perhaps we aren't watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we're watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.
Yeah that's my main problem with the article, it argues "as if" it was all but inevitable. As if something could be done. As soon as you have for profit motivation of social media, it's all but inevitable that enshittification ensues. That obscures the real problem.
You want a website that is run non-profit for users and somewhat democratically. But they shy away from that conclusion.
Also, I think the unaccountable moderators really are a problem. You end up with major subs like r/politics or /worldnews getting camped by people who just happened to get there first, and then being forever unaccountable for bias or stupidity. And then you get sitewide bans if you subvert the bans from the tinpot dictators camping on what should be community-led spaces.
Yeah. Worst offender is r/climatechange which is still moderated by a "both sides" climate skeptic. It's practically aiding genocide / omnicide.
Unfortunately lemmy doesn't have good solution to fracturing and default instances either.