I just said this yesterday or two days ago when they announced they were going to start paying people for content, but it truly is amazing how Reddit can find another significant thing that will hurt them as a business and move forward with it.
It seems like they’d run out of things that could significantly hurt their business, they just keep finding something else.
Soon they’re going to be down to basic features, And they’ll be like hey look so hyperlinks don’t work anymore. And then that’ll be the end of the press release.
Their “business decisions” are insane right now.
It’s very difficult to see this procession of self-mutilation technologically in another light other than deliberate corporate suicide. Like is someone going to benefit if Reddit goes bankrupt? Is that what’s happening?
If that’s the case, maybe reddit thinks if they do the same things Musk is doing to Twitter, it will appeas the Musk and he will want to buy reddit. I mean soon it will have everything that Twitter has: more bots than actual users, more ads, more pointless shit to make crypto boys wet, and fewer eyes on the page due to required signups and logins.
Not with a 500-character post limit, it’s not. If it decides to change from Instagram in a Twitter suit to Instagram in a Twitter suit in a Reddit flying saucer…?
That’s kind of how instagram has worked… went from Photo Twitter with filters, to video, then to a Snapchat rip-off, then to a TikTok rip-off. Each time they pretty much forgot about the previous functions and promoted the new style and penalized the old one in the algorithms.
I’ll have to take your word for how Instagram has developed, since I have used Instagram for a total of about 15 minutes, and found it confusing and unpleasant. And it’s definitely a good argument for expecting them to shift ground and go for what’s left of Reddit, (maybe after they’ve mopped up what’s left of Twitter, which might not take long, since Twitter is busily mopping itself up).
When I say “Instagram in a Twitter skin,” I’m going off articles saying that Threads uses Instagram’s algorithm, which seems a little less likely to change than the user interface/general style…? I can try to find my exact sources, if you like. It seems like Meta might have business justifications for adding a separate Reddit-replacement service, though there could be equally strong reasons to morph Threads for that purpose. I’m morbidly interested in seeing how it develops.
The main difference between Reddit and Threads is the length and formatting possible for posts. Reddit of course has no limit, but Threads is inspired by Twitter, of course, and Twitter historically did 140 characters and now 280. Threads’ limit is 500. Then, Reddit has subs/communities of course while Twitter is focused on following users and hashtags. It’s a somewhat subtle difference but is significant. So, all Meta would have to do to make Threads like Reddit is to have a system for communities, and relax the length limit. (I don’t actually believe they’re interested in that, btw).
Algorithms for feeds actually do change a fair bit over time. For instance, YouTube’s has changed a lot and used to recommend a lot more new things based on what other people who watched a video also watched, and now it recommends a lot of videos you already watched. Facebook went to a lot more ‘a friend of yours liked’ type posts. Twitter did too, apparently. I wouldn’t be surprised if they use the IG algo as a starting point but adapt it to Threads over time.
It’s truly shocking. Like all the Twitter stuff that musk is doing, seems in some way connected to his ego and they seem like genuine mistakes that he’s making because he’s completely out of touch and an a******.
But with Reddit, it’s like I can’t follow the logic of these decisions at all, I can’t tie back these obvious blunders to any sort of logical troubleshooting decision making process for their company.
Please, the Speztic has been fighting to cram his rectum docking nose deeper into the Elongated Muskrat’s anus every chance he’s gotten. He’s the epitome of every single one of Elon’s cucked, arse barnacle followers, the only difference is he also had a world class platform to burn to the ground in retarded mimicry of his waste of a good wankstain idol.
I hate that this take seems like the conspiracy take but also is totally plausible. Just look to the example of the Arab spring and how instrumental social media was for organizing. By fragmenting all social media it’s a lot less likely you see a massive resistance if shit goes sideways.
This might be the top-down view, but the bottom-up is Telegram forums, Mastodon, Lemmy, and similar distributed hard to close down spaces.
“Divide and conquer” is a valid strategy when one can conquer each part separately, “guerrilla warfare” is the aftermath of failing to conquer the divided parts.
If this is the case, I guess it makes sense why these bad, seemingly “money-losing” changes aren’t going to be felt by the company or CEO. Soon as they go public, the elite that pushed these changes will buy up the amount they promised, spez will take his payout, and they will have “union-busted” another prominent social media platform used for progressive ideas and discussion.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this r/conspiracy-tier theory is really the only explanation for this beyond ‘spez is dumber than a rock with brain damage’.
We just don’t have as much firsthand information about Splez because he doesn’t try to make himself the center of attention on his platform and the news.
It’s just Huffman, an Elon simp, deciding he wants IPO money and that the best way to make it is to blindly follow whatever Twitter does. Because, you know, Twitter’s so hot and profitable right now.
Regulatory Capture is when corporations install favourable politicians and former employees into positions that enact policies and regulations favourable to the goals of industry (profit).
I think what we’re saying here is Corporate Capture, where malicious players have captured major corporate entities in an attempt to neuter platforms that are used by the masses in an effort to control the messages given to the population.
People start talking about revolution, and suddenly the mediums used to enable free communication are removed.
Thanks for putting my thoughts into easily digestible words. Enshittification isn’t natural, it’s deliberate. Any CEO 's who throw up their hands and say they’re all of ideas are just trying to pull the rip cords of their golden parachutes, given to them by people who want us to believe it’s unavoidable.
Was not breaking something that hard? No, but it doesn’t pay as well.
Well, TikTok has China, who would love nothing more than to destabilize the US further to increase their global power. Had it not been for COVID, they only needed to wait since tRump was doing his best to help them out. I suspect this is why it’s only TikTok they want to ban anymore; it’s the only social media platform they can’t directly control.
This has been happening to reddit over the last decade and was only accelerated when reddit was used to facilitate a short squeeze on the market and caused a bunch of “market makers” to lose a lot of money. They couldn’t control reddit back then, but they sure can once it’s public and they fulfill their fiduciary promises to reddit.
I don’t use TikTok but it seems like young people use it to get the word out whenever they are treated unfairly. Huge portions of Reddit, IG, and YouTube are TikTok reposts now.
Agreed that Threads is sinister, but I think a lot of the reason politicians dislike Tik Tok is that it’s exporting massive quantities of American users’ data to China. US politicians don’t really take it seriously enough to believe that teenagers could use it to start a revolution, but they are pretty sure the Chinese government can use it to spy on Americans.
It’s all going to plan. A wealthy investor has paid a lot of money to shut down popular platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Knowledge is power and they can afford to, and have the incentive to keep us in the dark. Can’t have us poors rising up against inequality if we have no soapbox to stand on.
But seriously, why aren’t we talking about this more? We’ve seen some fairly significant mass movements gain real traction on Twitter and Reddit in the past few years and, simultaneously and nearly instantly they are both quickly scrambled and made completely useless for that purpose.
Reddit is 1000’s of communities. It’s just as wrong to say that it isn’t progressive and intelligent as it is to insinuate it’s all one big community in the first place.
However, it’s really not a secret that reddit’s majority (at least used to) lean left harder than any other social media. Intelligent is maybe subjective and not accurate, but they were at least more progressive than most other social media sites.
I mean, Twitter? Dude (may as well have) lost 45 billion dollars and is still a hundred
-billionaire now with a circle jerk site of “supporters” rather than people talking about how much his cars suck and how unethical his business practices are.
It fits with existing patterns depressingly well. The issue is, it’s generally very subtle.
E.g. Murdoch once even admitted on camera what he does. He “suggests” what he thinks should happen to politicians. Those that either agree, or follow his “advice” start getting negative stories about them dropped from his papers etc. Conversely, those that disagree get their positive stories dropped more. Once a few politicians have had their careers ended by it, most of the rest fall into line, it’s only minor favours. Until it’s not; and all the previous favours suddenly risk looking very bad in the press…
No laws broken, no overt threats given, but the more it happens the stronger it becomes. It eventually helped cripple BBC news, in the UK, among many other problems.
Reddits behaviour fits this pattern too well. Something has been offered in the background. Initially, it was for small favours, but it’s now reached a tipping point. I suspect they are hoping that they can fire sale the whole user driven system (everything must go [at once]). People fatigue on the constant news, and there’s nowhere new to flow and reorganize.
Hard to prove that type of stuff. It could just be incompetent leadership but it’s starting to feel like it’s something more given how many back to back missteps they’ve had recently.
I’ve played with this idea in my head on several occasions. It does seem rather insane how all social media sites are self destructing and making business decisions that are questionable at best. Given all the uprisings across the globe in recent years, it would not surprise me if there were various investors and governments who would pay good money to destroy those platforms. Also the sudden and complete self destruction of both Reddit and Twitter right as we’re about to head into the 2024 US presidential elections, seems rather suspect as well.
The other idea I’ve been considering is that both Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists who are throwing a massive childish tantrum and burning it all down simply because the users on their sites made fun of them.
I’m leaning into the theory it’s someone in power in Saudi Arabia. A member of their royal family is heavily invested in Twitter, owns shares and fronted Elon a big chunk of money for Twitter and they would surely like to crack down on social media in pretty much every middle eastern country, what with those pesky women protesting by not wearing their hijabs and protests and riots happening over there in the past decade. The first thing they do when there is trouble is shut down twitter, shutting it down permanently makes things easier for them.
People keep laughing at how dumb execs are. Like they are dumber than the average person. They aren’t. They pay lots of money to very smart people who tell them what will happen. It’s just much easier for them if people think they’re dumb instead of malicious. Because again, they have smart people telling them how to play this.
Didn’t they come out and say early on when they firsr introduced rewards that they’d made enough money to cover their server costs for many decades? Whatever happened with all that?
Reddit is overall quite left leaning, with a lot of its communities being some of the biggest hubs for lefties on the internet (antiwork comes to mind, all the LGBT subs, majority of the big politics subs also heavily lean left).
I don’t think it’s that crazy a “conspiracy theory” to say that this could be intentional sabotage. IMO it’s what’s happening with Twitter also, I think the alt right is paying big to take down left leaning social media so they can control the flow on information. I know Musk and Spez are profoundly stupid but I don’t think they’re stupid enough to genuinely believe in their recent business decisions. I think these decisions make a lot more sense when viewed through that lens.
They got officially fact checked a few times and that put the fear of god in them, since their whole schtick relies on ignorance.
Yeah, actually. This has completely derailed what has historically been a powerful platform for progressive and leftist movements going into a US election cycle. Same with Twitter. Meanwhile, the MAGA propaganda machine at Meta chugs along unfettered.
I can’t see any other motivation. There is certainly no economic incentive to run either business as they have been, but running the companies into the ground as a means to control or destroy opposition communication platforms definitely makes sense.
To be fair the awards system was complete dogshit and just became a rich man’s upvote and a way to financially brigade comments.
I remember the days when /r/the_donald gilded hateful comments/posts to game Reddit’s frontpage.
Awards well and truly jumped the shark when the admins took Reddit Silver, a meme pic that people would often post to mock the act of gilding, and make that into an award that offered the recipient nothing other than a silver crudely-drawn emblem by their comment.
Normally I’d support the removal of this feature, but it’s blatantly obvious they did it because Reddit’s top payers abandoned the site and because they were fed up with watching “fuck u/Spez” posts getting gilded.
Someone always benefits when public companies go bankrupt or lose value, so yes.
Honestly, the part I don’t get? That they didn’t wait to start self sabotaging the business after the insiders had been able to offload their positions in an IPO.
Like, the usual way to do this would have been:
IPO at status quo
Redditors buy shares
Insiders sell shares and open shorts
Reddit begins to implode itself
Redditors hold bags, insiders laugh from their yachts
Who, at this point, is going to buy into reddit’s IPO?
Remember the legitimate threat to the status quo of capitalism that came from the GME/robinhood/etc moment, not to mention antiwork/fuckwork. Think about how prevalent discussion of the remote work/4 hour work week/UBI have been on Reddit’s front page.
If a general strike was every close to happening in the last decade, it would have been organized and circulated on Reddit.
Pretty crazy about the paying people for content, hadn’t heard of that. Seems like a great way for content to get dumbed down to appeal to the lowest common denominator and fish for free money. Oh well, I’m sure reddit has honorable intentions and is doing this solely to benefit its average user.
I don’t understand how this change hurts them. Is it that it makes their premium subscription less enticing? I never had premium or used awards, so I don’t get it.
Ha, yea, like the producers, except that they were working toward tanking the show for a defined payday, and Reddit it’s killing itself before the IPO to give itself a smaller payday?
Paying their users for content is actually a good thing on paper. In fact, it counteracts the largest argument over API charges that I had: That they were gonna make more than per MDAU via ads, but have the audacity to keep all of it, while not even giving the users that provide it nary a crumb.
The problem with this is: What is a fair price for user generated content? What is a fair redistribution based on DAUs and activity? Is there even a fair model? How could you guarantee it when there will be cabals to provide content at a certain level, as was seen when blogrings tried it in the late 2000s?
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer, because reddit will always give the least amount they can endure, especially as they are not profitable. And when they are, they will bargain down because they need cheap UGC to function. Such a system is probably going to be unfair by philosophy and design.
I think even on paper paying users for content without any sort of regulation, standards, or guidelines will rapidly lower the quality of that content.
There are already so many accounts, and I’m not even talking about bot accounts, that focus on saving front page posts, coming back in 3 or 4 days, and reposting those posts.
I can only see the low effort post situation deteriorating once Reddit starts paying karma farmers.
I just frantically searched for like 15 minutes trying to find what the hell I was talking about, haha.
My bad for saying “announced”, there was no official announcement, there are actually lines of code in the reddit apk that outline a Contributor program that allows users to convert their karma/awards into real money:
"Fake internet points are finally worth something!
Now redditors can earn real money for their contributions to the Reddit community, based on the karma and gold they’ve been given.
How it works:
Redditors give gold to posts, comments, or other contributions they think are really worth something.
Eligible contributors that earn enough karma and gold can cash out their earnings for real money.
Contributors apply to the program to see if they’re eligible.
Top contributors make top dollar. The more karma and gold contributors earn, the more money they can receive."
Seriously, spend a bit of time looking into Gamestop / superstonk. It explains all of it. And you may get some real money out of it.
DRSGME.org will work if you don’t wanna use reddit, r/superstonk.
There is a lot to digest but it may change the world as we know it.
I didn’t want to use Reddit, so thanks for providing the other site. Direct registration does make a lot more sense, I didn’t even know there was a separate agency underwriting my stocks, but if the transfer agent at a particular company can transfer the stocks to your name, why is that not yet part of the system?
I know I’m not being super clear but that’s because I buy my stocks through a third party brokerage and don’t really understand the details.
I guess my question is why is direct registration not the norm (I’m guessing advantageous capitalism) and is direct registration a new movement?
That is the perfect question. It should be the norm for long term investments.
I don’t know when it was but the large banks/brokers lobbied and made it against the law for companies to tell (or even suggest) there investor to DRS.
The only down side I know of is that when selling, shares have to be paired with a buyer, which isn’t instant (may even take a couple days).
But the up side is they cannot lend your shares to short them against you. Also, if the price was to go brrrrrrrrr and be in the hundreds or more (cough cough millions) brokers can sell your shares for you, at any price, and say it was for your safety as the stock was volatile.
Yes! Or more accurately “lend” them to someone who will.
Even if you have a broker that promises not to there is minimal regulation to stop them and if they get caught the fine is a (small) fraction of the money they make on that transaction (which is just a cost of doing business). I believe this was shown in r/superstonk just by someone looking at the sec filing.
That’s crazy, it feels a lot like the fractional reserve scheme or also when banks can lend the money out and you get a ridiculous interest rate back on the money they’re making off of your money.
I’m going to look into shorting the stock you buy though, since I don’t know about that one yet. Thanks!
I just said this yesterday or two days ago when they announced they were going to start paying people for content, but it truly is amazing how Reddit can find another significant thing that will hurt them as a business and move forward with it.
It seems like they’d run out of things that could significantly hurt their business, they just keep finding something else.
Soon they’re going to be down to basic features, And they’ll be like hey look so hyperlinks don’t work anymore. And then that’ll be the end of the press release.
Their “business decisions” are insane right now.
It’s very difficult to see this procession of self-mutilation technologically in another light other than deliberate corporate suicide. Like is someone going to benefit if Reddit goes bankrupt? Is that what’s happening?
Reddit’s incompetence is so mind-blowing it’s unreal. Even a crackhead can manage Reddit better than spez
You mean Musk? Because it seems that whatever insanity that Musk does, Spez wants to copy verbatim
Nobody said musk was competent 🤷♂️
Sure but the crackhead part.
coke or meth?
Yes.
First one, then the other
that explains both the elogated moskowrat and the ex-mod of r/jaibait.
All that needs to happen now is for meta to launch a reddit clone that steals away all of reddit’s users
Maybe Elron can buy reddit and finish destroying it
Wouldn’t surprise me if he did buy reddit
If that’s the case, maybe reddit thinks if they do the same things Musk is doing to Twitter, it will appeas the Musk and he will want to buy reddit. I mean soon it will have everything that Twitter has: more bots than actual users, more ads, more pointless shit to make crypto boys wet, and fewer eyes on the page due to required signups and logins.
He said a few months ago that he was interested.
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Good ol’ Elon… delivering the coup de grâce.
Give it a few months
Pls no
Considering how successful Threads has been, they’d be stupid not to try. So they probably won’t.
Threads is horrible. Aside from being “not twitter,” it’s a waste of time.
I have a bad feeling Threads will turn into this. I mean it’s literally called threads. Kind of up ends the “threadiverse” name.
Not with a 500-character post limit, it’s not. If it decides to change from Instagram in a Twitter suit to Instagram in a Twitter suit in a Reddit flying saucer…?
That’s kind of how instagram has worked… went from Photo Twitter with filters, to video, then to a Snapchat rip-off, then to a TikTok rip-off. Each time they pretty much forgot about the previous functions and promoted the new style and penalized the old one in the algorithms.
I’ll have to take your word for how Instagram has developed, since I have used Instagram for a total of about 15 minutes, and found it confusing and unpleasant. And it’s definitely a good argument for expecting them to shift ground and go for what’s left of Reddit, (maybe after they’ve mopped up what’s left of Twitter, which might not take long, since Twitter is busily mopping itself up).
When I say “Instagram in a Twitter skin,” I’m going off articles saying that Threads uses Instagram’s algorithm, which seems a little less likely to change than the user interface/general style…? I can try to find my exact sources, if you like. It seems like Meta might have business justifications for adding a separate Reddit-replacement service, though there could be equally strong reasons to morph Threads for that purpose. I’m morbidly interested in seeing how it develops.
The main difference between Reddit and Threads is the length and formatting possible for posts. Reddit of course has no limit, but Threads is inspired by Twitter, of course, and Twitter historically did 140 characters and now 280. Threads’ limit is 500. Then, Reddit has subs/communities of course while Twitter is focused on following users and hashtags. It’s a somewhat subtle difference but is significant. So, all Meta would have to do to make Threads like Reddit is to have a system for communities, and relax the length limit. (I don’t actually believe they’re interested in that, btw).
Algorithms for feeds actually do change a fair bit over time. For instance, YouTube’s has changed a lot and used to recommend a lot more new things based on what other people who watched a video also watched, and now it recommends a lot of videos you already watched. Facebook went to a lot more ‘a friend of yours liked’ type posts. Twitter did too, apparently. I wouldn’t be surprised if they use the IG algo as a starting point but adapt it to Threads over time.
Penn and Teller, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Musk and Spez
Hey, Penn&Teller are really good at what they do, and have been doing it for longer than either Twitter or Reddit existed.
It’s truly shocking. Like all the Twitter stuff that musk is doing, seems in some way connected to his ego and they seem like genuine mistakes that he’s making because he’s completely out of touch and an a******.
But with Reddit, it’s like I can’t follow the logic of these decisions at all, I can’t tie back these obvious blunders to any sort of logical troubleshooting decision making process for their company.
Perplexing
The logic is the same as Twitter, Spez said so: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-blackout-protest-private-ceo-elon-musk-huffman-rcna89700
Ad revenue down 70%, who wouldn’t want to emulate that!
Fucking wat Spez been sniffing gas straight from the pump or wat?
Please, the Speztic has been fighting to cram his rectum docking nose deeper into the Elongated Muskrat’s anus every chance he’s gotten. He’s the epitome of every single one of Elon’s cucked, arse barnacle followers, the only difference is he also had a world class platform to burn to the ground in retarded mimicry of his waste of a good wankstain idol.
The logic is to destabilise public forums ahead of upcoming elections, so the wealthy can consolidate more power.
I hate that this take seems like the conspiracy take but also is totally plausible. Just look to the example of the Arab spring and how instrumental social media was for organizing. By fragmenting all social media it’s a lot less likely you see a massive resistance if shit goes sideways.
This might be the top-down view, but the bottom-up is Telegram forums, Mastodon, Lemmy, and similar distributed hard to close down spaces.
“Divide and conquer” is a valid strategy when one can conquer each part separately, “guerrilla warfare” is the aftermath of failing to conquer the divided parts.
If this is the case, I guess it makes sense why these bad, seemingly “money-losing” changes aren’t going to be felt by the company or CEO. Soon as they go public, the elite that pushed these changes will buy up the amount they promised, spez will take his payout, and they will have “union-busted” another prominent social media platform used for progressive ideas and discussion.
Fun fact, most of the money Musk spent on Twitter was underwritten by stocks in Tesla, which have drastically shrunk in value since the purchase.
TSLA has mostly recovered though.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this r/conspiracy-tier theory is really the only explanation for this beyond ‘spez is dumber than a rock with brain damage’.
We just don’t have as much firsthand information about Splez because he doesn’t try to make himself the center of attention on his platform and the news.
If only his common sense applied to running reddit.
It’s just Huffman, an Elon simp, deciding he wants IPO money and that the best way to make it is to blindly follow whatever Twitter does. Because, you know, Twitter’s so hot and profitable right now.
Haha, right. Insane.
Regulatory Capture is when corporations install favourable politicians and former employees into positions that enact policies and regulations favourable to the goals of industry (profit).
I think what we’re saying here is Corporate Capture, where malicious players have captured major corporate entities in an attempt to neuter platforms that are used by the masses in an effort to control the messages given to the population.
People start talking about revolution, and suddenly the mediums used to enable free communication are removed.
Thanks for putting my thoughts into easily digestible words. Enshittification isn’t natural, it’s deliberate. Any CEO 's who throw up their hands and say they’re all of ideas are just trying to pull the rip cords of their golden parachutes, given to them by people who want us to believe it’s unavoidable.
Was not breaking something that hard? No, but it doesn’t pay as well.
And Threads shows up right on cue with a stated deemphasis on news and politics. Meanwhile politicians are pushing to ban TikTok.
Well, TikTok has China, who would love nothing more than to destabilize the US further to increase their global power. Had it not been for COVID, they only needed to wait since tRump was doing his best to help them out. I suspect this is why it’s only TikTok they want to ban anymore; it’s the only social media platform they can’t directly control.
This has been happening to reddit over the last decade and was only accelerated when reddit was used to facilitate a short squeeze on the market and caused a bunch of “market makers” to lose a lot of money. They couldn’t control reddit back then, but they sure can once it’s public and they fulfill their fiduciary promises to reddit.
I don’t use TikTok but it seems like young people use it to get the word out whenever they are treated unfairly. Huge portions of Reddit, IG, and YouTube are TikTok reposts now.
Agreed that Threads is sinister, but I think a lot of the reason politicians dislike Tik Tok is that it’s exporting massive quantities of American users’ data to China. US politicians don’t really take it seriously enough to believe that teenagers could use it to start a revolution, but they are pretty sure the Chinese government can use it to spy on Americans.
Depends on the country. All over Europe politicians are using TikTok to promote their political views…
It’s all going to plan. A wealthy investor has paid a lot of money to shut down popular platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Knowledge is power and they can afford to, and have the incentive to keep us in the dark. Can’t have us poors rising up against inequality if we have no soapbox to stand on.
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But seriously, why aren’t we talking about this more? We’ve seen some fairly significant mass movements gain real traction on Twitter and Reddit in the past few years and, simultaneously and nearly instantly they are both quickly scrambled and made completely useless for that purpose.
Take a look at the Hong Kong protests. Twitter was a huge way to show the world what was going on. But also full of shills and bots sewing discord
Honestly at this point I can’t tell if I’m happy or sad about things like Twitter going away. It was full of horrible discourse and bots and misinformation, but also helped a lot of people. Back in the day it was insanely helpful for directing large areas affected by disasters.
I just don’t see the good uses of these platforms ever coming back from all these primadonna CEOs
That’s interesting, but there’s one problem: are they really that coordinated?
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Not to divert too much from your point, but Reddit was a progressive and intelligent community? Thanks for the laugh haha
Reddit is 1000’s of communities. It’s just as wrong to say that it isn’t progressive and intelligent as it is to insinuate it’s all one big community in the first place.
However, it’s really not a secret that reddit’s majority (at least used to) lean left harder than any other social media. Intelligent is maybe subjective and not accurate, but they were at least more progressive than most other social media sites.
Any proof you can offer on this, except for your hunch?
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I mean, Twitter? Dude (may as well have) lost 45 billion dollars and is still a hundred -billionaire now with a circle jerk site of “supporters” rather than people talking about how much his cars suck and how unethical his business practices are.
It fits with existing patterns depressingly well. The issue is, it’s generally very subtle.
E.g. Murdoch once even admitted on camera what he does. He “suggests” what he thinks should happen to politicians. Those that either agree, or follow his “advice” start getting negative stories about them dropped from his papers etc. Conversely, those that disagree get their positive stories dropped more. Once a few politicians have had their careers ended by it, most of the rest fall into line, it’s only minor favours. Until it’s not; and all the previous favours suddenly risk looking very bad in the press…
No laws broken, no overt threats given, but the more it happens the stronger it becomes. It eventually helped cripple BBC news, in the UK, among many other problems.
Reddits behaviour fits this pattern too well. Something has been offered in the background. Initially, it was for small favours, but it’s now reached a tipping point. I suspect they are hoping that they can fire sale the whole user driven system (everything must go [at once]). People fatigue on the constant news, and there’s nowhere new to flow and reorganize.
I doubt doubt it, but damn it makes sense
Hard to prove that type of stuff. It could just be incompetent leadership but it’s starting to feel like it’s something more given how many back to back missteps they’ve had recently.
Everything is a Machiavellian drama nowadays and some people are determined to be the rebel heroes.
I’ve played with this idea in my head on several occasions. It does seem rather insane how all social media sites are self destructing and making business decisions that are questionable at best. Given all the uprisings across the globe in recent years, it would not surprise me if there were various investors and governments who would pay good money to destroy those platforms. Also the sudden and complete self destruction of both Reddit and Twitter right as we’re about to head into the 2024 US presidential elections, seems rather suspect as well.
The other idea I’ve been considering is that both Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists who are throwing a massive childish tantrum and burning it all down simply because the users on their sites made fun of them.
Whichever ends up being true Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists regardless.
Musk would’ve had to agree to making himself look bad, which I don’t think he would’ve done.
I’m leaning into the theory it’s someone in power in Saudi Arabia. A member of their royal family is heavily invested in Twitter, owns shares and fronted Elon a big chunk of money for Twitter and they would surely like to crack down on social media in pretty much every middle eastern country, what with those pesky women protesting by not wearing their hijabs and protests and riots happening over there in the past decade. The first thing they do when there is trouble is shut down twitter, shutting it down permanently makes things easier for them.
They’d be arrogant and stupid enough to call for it, that’s for sure
I don’t know how you could more organically commit corporate suicide than the way they’re going about running Reddit recently.
I’m willing to bet it is somehow connected to BlackRock.
laughs in tencent
This.
People keep laughing at how dumb execs are. Like they are dumber than the average person. They aren’t. They pay lots of money to very smart people who tell them what will happen. It’s just much easier for them if people think they’re dumb instead of malicious. Because again, they have smart people telling them how to play this.
To prevent score manipulation, voting is now a premium feature.
Didn’t they come out and say early on when they firsr introduced rewards that they’d made enough money to cover their server costs for many decades? Whatever happened with all that?
They probably blew all of the money on Spez’s pay and NFTs.
Reddit is selling NFTs (avatars), not buying them.
Did they? Do you have a link to that? I’d be very interested in that. The whole situation is so bizarre
Maybe it covered their costs for old school reddit pre built in image/video hosting when it was essentially just text and thumbnails?
Now that they’re no longer relying on imgur (which is doing it’s own thing) they have to host their own images which is EXPENSIVE.
In other words, they digg their own grave.
I think it used to say on people’s profiles something like “This user’s gold has paid for x hours of server time”
Line must go up. Doesn’t matter if it’s sustainable or if a bag was gotten in the past
Reddit is overall quite left leaning, with a lot of its communities being some of the biggest hubs for lefties on the internet (antiwork comes to mind, all the LGBT subs, majority of the big politics subs also heavily lean left).
I don’t think it’s that crazy a “conspiracy theory” to say that this could be intentional sabotage. IMO it’s what’s happening with Twitter also, I think the alt right is paying big to take down left leaning social media so they can control the flow on information. I know Musk and Spez are profoundly stupid but I don’t think they’re stupid enough to genuinely believe in their recent business decisions. I think these decisions make a lot more sense when viewed through that lens.
They got officially fact checked a few times and that put the fear of god in them, since their whole schtick relies on ignorance.
You can’t convince me spez if alt-right. He is what led to reddit becoming so left leaning.
Yeah, actually. This has completely derailed what has historically been a powerful platform for progressive and leftist movements going into a US election cycle. Same with Twitter. Meanwhile, the MAGA propaganda machine at Meta chugs along unfettered.
I can’t see any other motivation. There is certainly no economic incentive to run either business as they have been, but running the companies into the ground as a means to control or destroy opposition communication platforms definitely makes sense.
Paying content creators, but not mods? That’s hilarious
To be fair the awards system was complete dogshit and just became a rich man’s upvote and a way to financially brigade comments.
I remember the days when /r/the_donald gilded hateful comments/posts to game Reddit’s frontpage.
Awards well and truly jumped the shark when the admins took Reddit Silver, a meme pic that people would often post to mock the act of gilding, and make that into an award that offered the recipient nothing other than a silver crudely-drawn emblem by their comment.
Normally I’d support the removal of this feature, but it’s blatantly obvious they did it because Reddit’s top payers abandoned the site and because they were fed up with watching “fuck u/Spez” posts getting gilded.
I never used the awards, did awards actually affect the prominence of a post?
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Orange checks.
How much until all the links open on an internal browser like in LinkedIn?
Someone always benefits when public companies go bankrupt or lose value, so yes.
Honestly, the part I don’t get? That they didn’t wait to start self sabotaging the business after the insiders had been able to offload their positions in an IPO.
Like, the usual way to do this would have been:
IPO at status quo Redditors buy shares Insiders sell shares and open shorts Reddit begins to implode itself Redditors hold bags, insiders laugh from their yachts
Who, at this point, is going to buy into reddit’s IPO?
Oh right, that is definitely how they should have done it.
This is exactly what I mean, this route of self-destruction makes zero sense.
Maybe the same investors who bankrolled Musk’s takeover of Twitter?
It wouldn’t surprise me if the investors behind the scenes aren’t already interviewing spez’s ouster without his knowledge.
When an organization is collapsing, everything they do onward is and will be wrong, at that point, it’s better to just get out as fast as possible.
Remember the legitimate threat to the status quo of capitalism that came from the GME/robinhood/etc moment, not to mention antiwork/fuckwork. Think about how prevalent discussion of the remote work/4 hour work week/UBI have been on Reddit’s front page.
If a general strike was every close to happening in the last decade, it would have been organized and circulated on Reddit.
Billionaires do each other favors.
Pretty crazy about the paying people for content, hadn’t heard of that. Seems like a great way for content to get dumbed down to appeal to the lowest common denominator and fish for free money. Oh well, I’m sure reddit has honorable intentions and is doing this solely to benefit its average user.
could be coke-fuelled manic behaviour. or maybe meth. Whatever it is, spez is coming unglued.
I don’t understand how this change hurts them. Is it that it makes their premium subscription less enticing? I never had premium or used awards, so I don’t get it.
It’s what’s coming next.
It’s pretty entertaining to watch though, like a train wick in motion
I’m definitely enjoying it, the self destruction of both Twitter and Reddit.
It’s very Animal Farm-esque watching them degrade in real time, and continue to destroy what they built
This is what happens when you outsource your strategic management decisions to ChatGPT
There’s no way that chat GPT could make decisions this outlandish and nonsensical though, could it?
Still not using LLMs yet myself
Like Mel Brooke’s The Producers yet with more to lose and even more stupid.
Ha, yea, like the producers, except that they were working toward tanking the show for a defined payday, and Reddit it’s killing itself before the IPO to give itself a smaller payday?
Get out of my head man!
Paying their users for content is actually a good thing on paper. In fact, it counteracts the largest argument over API charges that I had: That they were gonna make more than per MDAU via ads, but have the audacity to keep all of it, while not even giving the users that provide it nary a crumb.
The problem with this is: What is a fair price for user generated content? What is a fair redistribution based on DAUs and activity? Is there even a fair model? How could you guarantee it when there will be cabals to provide content at a certain level, as was seen when blogrings tried it in the late 2000s?
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer, because reddit will always give the least amount they can endure, especially as they are not profitable. And when they are, they will bargain down because they need cheap UGC to function. Such a system is probably going to be unfair by philosophy and design.
I think even on paper paying users for content without any sort of regulation, standards, or guidelines will rapidly lower the quality of that content.
There are already so many accounts, and I’m not even talking about bot accounts, that focus on saving front page posts, coming back in 3 or 4 days, and reposting those posts.
I can only see the low effort post situation deteriorating once Reddit starts paying karma farmers.
I must have missed this. Do you have a link?
I just frantically searched for like 15 minutes trying to find what the hell I was talking about, haha.
My bad for saying “announced”, there was no official announcement, there are actually lines of code in the reddit apk that outline a Contributor program that allows users to convert their karma/awards into real money:
"Fake internet points are finally worth something! Now redditors can earn real money for their contributions to the Reddit community, based on the karma and gold they’ve been given. How it works:
Here’s the link to the article:
https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-contributor-program-3343397/
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Seriously, spend a bit of time looking into Gamestop / superstonk. It explains all of it. And you may get some real money out of it. DRSGME.org will work if you don’t wanna use reddit, r/superstonk. There is a lot to digest but it may change the world as we know it.
https://www.drsgme.org/
I didn’t want to use Reddit, so thanks for providing the other site. Direct registration does make a lot more sense, I didn’t even know there was a separate agency underwriting my stocks, but if the transfer agent at a particular company can transfer the stocks to your name, why is that not yet part of the system?
I know I’m not being super clear but that’s because I buy my stocks through a third party brokerage and don’t really understand the details.
I guess my question is why is direct registration not the norm (I’m guessing advantageous capitalism) and is direct registration a new movement?
That is the perfect question. It should be the norm for long term investments.
I don’t know when it was but the large banks/brokers lobbied and made it against the law for companies to tell (or even suggest) there investor to DRS.
The only down side I know of is that when selling, shares have to be paired with a buyer, which isn’t instant (may even take a couple days).
But the up side is they cannot lend your shares to short them against you. Also, if the price was to go brrrrrrrrr and be in the hundreds or more (cough cough millions) brokers can sell your shares for you, at any price, and say it was for your safety as the stock was volatile.
Wait a tick. if I buy 100 shares of Microsoft from a brokerage, the brokerage can still short those shares that I have bought?
Yes! Or more accurately “lend” them to someone who will.
Even if you have a broker that promises not to there is minimal regulation to stop them and if they get caught the fine is a (small) fraction of the money they make on that transaction (which is just a cost of doing business). I believe this was shown in r/superstonk just by someone looking at the sec filing.
That’s crazy, it feels a lot like the fractional reserve scheme or also when banks can lend the money out and you get a ridiculous interest rate back on the money they’re making off of your money.
I’m going to look into shorting the stock you buy though, since I don’t know about that one yet. Thanks!