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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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
Any proof you can offer on this, except for your hunch?
deleted by creator
I doubt doubt it, but damn it makes sense
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.
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.
I’m willing to bet it is somehow connected to BlackRock.
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.
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.
laughs in tencent
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.
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.
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.
Like Mel Brooke’s The Producers yet with more to lose and even more stupid.