JonEFive

Businesses valuations and a business’ success overall unfortunately don’t always correlate to what the business seemingly has to offer. In this case, reddit is not going to be sold as a community website, but rather a marketing tool.

It’s as the saying goes - if the service is free, you’re the product. I think there will be a decline in active users and overall engagement, which I suspect might lead to fewer ad impressions. Spez is banking on the fact that eliminating third party apps will make up for that.

So long as there is a critical mass of users - which there will be for the foreseeable future, and so long as Spez only goes half Musk and doesn’t turn the site into an alt-right paradise, I see reddit potentially becoming profitable. Advertisers who have been scared away from Twitter/X might be looking to go somewhere safer and might find that in Reddit once all this controversy blows over.

And it will blow over in terms of relevance to advertisers. The API controversy doesn’t concern the average person. Even a CEO being a petulant child is barely worth mentioning to most.

Reddit users assumed that the site was for them. Spez has made it clear that it is not, that it is for advertisers. As much as I hate to say it, there will be plenty of people jumping on the Reddit IPO from that perspective.

I’d say a significant decrease in valuation just before IPO is some consequence. Not enough to truly impact Spez personally mind you, but it’s something.

I’m more satisfied with my experience here personally. I don’t scroll for hours, I read a couple articles, maybe comment on them and move on. If I come across something interesting that isn’t already posted in my community here, I’ll actually post it because it might actually get some engagement.

One reddit, my post would either be removed by overzealous mods or generally ignored. I had one instance where I posted a question on r/askScience. I searched before I posted but couldn’t find a post that asked the same question. A mod removed it saying that it was too similar to other posts. When I asked which post it was similar to, the mod said “You need to search for yourself, we aren’t librarians” then muted me for 10 days so I couldn’t respond. The sheer ego trip of the matter just appalled me. I thought that a community about scientific inquiry would be a bit more open, but nope - just as toxic as every other sub.

They don’t care about the users who are making a fuss. In fact, they want those users to leave. They want the complacent social media users who can be easily monitized.

It isn’t “arbitrary” though. ActivityPub is just a baseline protocol that supports interoperability. Apps like Lemmy and Kbin build upon that framework, but also implement their own unique features and interfaces.

There’s definitely value to being able to specifically search for Lemmy instances or things coming from Lemmy as much as any other fediverse app. But to your point, that could be handled through a filter on a much larger whatever set of data.

Is this particular individual the unfit mother?

Hey cool, my first opportunity to block a troll on the fediverse!

New barely newsworthy post appears.
Reddit staff: A MILLION BAJILLION UPVOTES!

It’s a lot like Twitter. Twitter was doing alright prior to Musk. Their user base was as strong and plentiful as ever. There have always been shitty users and toxic corners but Twitter did their best to downplay that and highlight the better parts of their platform. They did their best to walk that fine line between moderation and censorship.

But with Musk spending $44bn so that he could meme without consequence and restore accounts of politically powerful people to gain favor, along with him gutting all of the departments that did the moderation, the site has gone from a legitimate place to interact to a well known cesspool of toxicity that users and corporations are starting to shy away from. Turns out that getting rid of moderators might not be such a good idea.

There are still a great many users on Twitter who are actively participating and that won’t change anytime soon. But the ratio of good content to bad has changed and Twitter’s reputation both as a company and as a platform has been tarnished. Twitter isn’t going anywhere, but many people have grown weary of the antics and moved on. And that’s what we’re seeing of reddit right now. The only difference is the simultaneous mass, organized exodus of users from reddit vs the more gradual enshitification of Twitter.

depends on the desires of the majority of the community I would say. If the majority of the community says they want to change the community, then who are we to disagree? I'd vote for the change. Unfortunately for that vote, I haven't been on Reddit since before the blackout. The only reason I'll be going back will be to delete some/all of my posts.

Plot twist: The AI can detect pirate speak and uses these posts to write dialogue for a pirate character based on a prompt.

Can't wait for the pirate bluebeard to speak about where his buried API is.