First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?
First all the bs with Twitter and Elon, then Reddit having an exodus to Lemmy (not complaining lol), then Twitch. Are we like, in an alternate self healing dimension or something?
The twitter/elon thing is hilarious. I honestly do think he accidentally got himself into quite the pickle and now his pride is keeping him there. As for reddit and twitch, I don’t assume these are the surface-level-dumb moves that we think they are. My guess is that this is a calculated means of rolling out the changes they actually want by:
Internet users love to cancel shit, but at the same time, are always looking for the next thing to cancel. So as much as people hate twitter or facebook or tiktok or youtube or windows or nintendo or chick-fil-a or whatever, they’re all just looking for an excuse to forget all about it, and continue using their product as quickly as possible. And corporations know that, so they’ve worked “giving them that excuse” into their plans.
Very well thought out post and I agree with everything you’ve said. I still remember the outrage with Whatsapp and how everyone was moving to Signal. Once everything died down, people went back to their old habits and what was familiar to them.
An aunt asked me if she should delete her WhatsApp. I told her no. I knew most of the family would stay on WhatsApp even if they were virtue signaling now. Nowadays the WA group still has 40ish people and the telegram stayed at 20ish and my aunt is on both. I think that’s what most people do. They look around, stand up, breathe heavily, their heart rate goes up by 1.5% and they sit back down.
For a minority of users on reddit, there’s a line. For me, it’s forcing me to use new reddit. If that happens, I just have to quit, I can’t stand it. I don’t want to quit, I have a lot of subreddits I read.
But I saw the stats for the old school users vs new reddit/app users, and we’re outnumbered. Reddit knows they might lose thousands of redditors but they don’t care because lots will just switch to their toxic app and if they lose 5% of the stubborn old folk then so be it.
I’m ok with it. I like the tighter cozy feel of fediverse. there’s less antagonism and bloat.
Give it time.
That is to say, to the extent that we can, let’s be careful. We already see the same shit everyone criticizes Twitter for starting to show up on mastodon. It’s often not the platform that causes problems, it’s the people.
I think there needs to be a set of “commandments” for civil discourse on the internet. One specific rule I’ve made for myself but never heard anyone else mention is: don’t dogpile on downvoted comments. I think everyone feels a pull to do it, they see a controversial post that they agree with, they see the top few comments are more of the same…so they scroll down to the lowest voted replies, expand them if they’re hidden, get enraged by someone’s stupid world view, and jump into a flame war.
Some might lump that in with “don’t feed the trolls”, but I’ll counter with a second rule: it’s better to just not reply to someone than to accuse them of being a troll or a bot. There exist people who live with a wildly different set of information from you, and thus often have wildly different worldviews. And that’s ok. And if it turns out they actually are a troll or a bot, as long as you’re replying, they’re winning.
I agree. If someone makes an upsetting post, I ignore it. As far as my experience, engaging in it will only harm me. I see no value in responding. I even did a test. On RIF (it’s possible this is sitewide on all apps), if a post was in the karma negatives, I would have to click on it to see it. About 95% of the time, I agreed that I did not need to read that garbage, so I chose to ignore without expanding them. I appreciated all the pioneers that had to read that garbage at first and downvote it.
Anyway, there’s no sense in spending my leisure time becoming angry at internet strangers. I rather move on and engage in things that make me happy.
The stubborn old folk are the ones responsible for creating a significant portion of the content on Reddit. While they may appear to be in the minority, without their content, casual users will be less inclined to use Reddit.
I’ve been wondering about that. You know if there’s a youtuber with 10 million subs, you’d think they’re a big, important star on the platform? And then you find out that youtube gets 80% of their ad revenue from kids watching Baby Shark on a tablet, and your 10 million sub youtuber actually isn’t that relevant at all.
Well I was wondering if there’s a reddit equivalent to that. Like maybe reddit gets 60% of it’s revenue from Indian cricket fans and we don’t even know about it. I’m sure sports fans in general are a lucrative userbase. And then places like /r/funny… basically imagine who would be less likely to use an adblocker and old reddit and the app, without caring too much. That’s low-effort content that basically runs itself.
At least, that might be what they are gambling on. I do agree with you that the old guard are very important for developing good content. I just don’t know if reddit cares about good content anymore.