I’m not trying to convince anyone to go back i promise, quite the contrary actually cause I think spez plans to just decrease the cost of the API and act like it was a bargain deal sacrifice while not solving any of the issues at all
But, when I think about it even if spez did actually listen and reverse all changes I don’t think i want to go back to Reddit cause from what Ive seen Lemmy is just friendlier and less :Be Corporate Friendly: I would honestly love it if Lemmy did a project like r/place one of these days so we could see what the internet is actually like instead of what happened in 2022 (I really did enjoy what a bunch of communities did but when the mods started abusing their powers to make it corporate r/place lost so much meaning) but i am curious since i’m not going back is there anything Reddit can do to make you go back to Reddit?
This is exactly correct, and herein lies the problem: how do you monetize content creation from people you don’t pay?
Louis Rossman said it best: when you look at a lot of content platforms, you realize their business models don’t make sense. The people managing these companies are riding on VC money knowing full well there isn’t any long-term return. They want to cash out and dip.
This is why I feel like a Federated, user-maintained system is probably best for the long term sustainability of a community. People want a place to enjoy something or someone? Let’s make it happen, by our own means
Agreed. The community MUST own it’s own platform or else they’re just renters that can be evicted the minute someone thinks they can make money from them.
This also isn’t just an online issue (though my view is US-centric). There’s been a lot of talk about the decline of a ‘3rd place’ and its loss impacting social gatherings. You have your house, work, and then your social spaces, and there’s a very big lack of social places where gathering and relaxing are acceptable without also having to engage in buying permission to be there.
This carried over into a lot of people going online to find the same social gatherings, and then seeing the gathering places turned into profit centers for the owners without any discussion with the users of the space, and now they’re finding that they don’t have anywhere to go be social, and the online places that filled that gap are now vanishing as well.
Now I’m not a sociologist (just a simple country computer janitor), but it strongly feels like a lot of the hyper-tribalism and aggressiveness that people are exhibiting are a direct result of having all the social spaces torn away and turned into profit centers, with zero regards for the people who visited or contributed to them.
It just makes everyone more isolated and willing to hop on to whatever the next big ‘social trend’ that some algorithm drops in front of them, and I think at this point it’s pretty unarguable that what the algorithms are doing is not always benign. You gain a place to belong, even if what you’re belonging to is abhorrent and toxic.