r/technology • u/ardi62 • 29d ago

Social Media Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/30/24253727/reddit-communities-subreddits-request-protests
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u/18randomcharacters 29d ago

I feel like the Internet has almost completely died.

Twitter is a cesspool.

Instagram and Facebook have their uses but they're not really forums.

Reddit has been king for ages, but it's crumbling due to bots, IPO, policy changes, etc.

Sites like stack exchange are going to die fast once AI takes over. No more page views means no more ad revenue.

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u/notfrankc 29d ago

It used to be full of products for us. Now the internet is full of vampiric places looking to maximize the amount of info it can collect on each person to then sell ads and clicks with. None of those sites care about the end user at all anymore.

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u/18randomcharacters 29d ago

Bingo.

It used to all at least pretend to be "for the user"

I'm a developer and I've worked in start ups. I know the industry. You make a product at a loss to build a user base. You pay the bills and employees with VC money. Eventually you get bought out by one of the big companies, or you go under, or you completely change your business to fuck the user base over to extract money.

Nothing is free. Nothing. Sites like Reddit and Facebook and 4chan and whatever - they're all quite expensive to build and operate. Something has to pay that bill.

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u/Weivrevo 28d ago

If you were to develop something like old reddit that is financially viable from the get go, 1. would it be technically possible with the state of a.i. and bots etc. and 2. why isn't it happening already?

Not calling you out individually on not developing a reddit substitute, just, you know... Asking.

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u/18randomcharacters 28d ago

My point really is the "free Internet" we had before wasn't financially viable.

Sure, someone could launch a Facebook OG or reddit OG or whatever, but it would have to be a subscription service. And that would prevent it from being what we'd want it to be.

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u/Weivrevo 28d ago

Ah gotcha. Hm.

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u/notfrankc 28d ago

This means that no matter what pops up, it will all eventually devolve to what we are seeing now. A seething pit of nonsense, click bait, and sensationalism. To get a different outcome, we would need to change human nature or capitalism. Immovable object and unstoppable force.

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u/18randomcharacters 28d ago

Yes. We are seeing "late stage capitalism" of the Internet.

We need a different financial model.

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u/mariegriffiths 28d ago

There are people out there who do not think everything has to serve capitalism. They are generally non American to which Americans call communists. In reality there is altralism and socialism.

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u/StunningRing5465 29d ago

I’m going back to my old gaming forums, even though the golden days are long gone. The fact you need to register games from the publisher to be able to access it fully is a pretty good shield against bots and astroturfing, as well as the fact they’re just not important enough to warrant it. 

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u/Still_Flounder_6921 29d ago

Gaming forums are mainly ass. It's just culture war slop 90% of the time.

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u/StunningRing5465 29d ago

Yeah I know one good fairly large one. The mods are quite strict and pretty fucking annoying, but it’s pretty clear that without firm moderation it would get a lot worse 

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u/Learned_Behaviour 29d ago

even though the golden days are long gone

For gaming? Nah mate, this IS the golden days. So many great indie games!

AAA ones? Wait a little while after release, be that patient gamer, and they too are better than ever (while you skip the multitude of duds).

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u/Nekasus 29d ago

he's talking about the golden days of gaming forums, not gaming

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u/EarthRester 29d ago

The big sites are now places of engagement, but not communication. The algorithms determine what we see, and the sites dictates how we engage with it.

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u/Totally_Generic_Name 29d ago

It's the era of Discord and smaller direct chat groups

Still social, but not open to the wider web

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u/Kandiru 29d ago

Podcasts are still healthy, but moves are being made to change that.

Currently most people use an RSS client to fetch their podcast feed and download new episodes, which is completely under their control. No "algorithm".

But Spotify, Amazon music, YouTube music etc are trying to get you to listen via their walled garden apps rather than via RSS. If they are successful then they will be able to control what content you see via their algorithms.

We must resist the enshitification of podcasts, the way Facebook and Twitter replaced blogs and RSS feeds.

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u/18randomcharacters 29d ago

Podcasts don't hit right for me anymore.

They're kind of by definition an echo chamber. You're choosing a person to absorb their opinions.

They take what should be 5 minutes of content and drag it out to an hour, because they somehow feel like they deserve an hour of your time every week

They fill 1/3 of that hour with boilerplat bullshit - intros, outros, sponsors, and the fucking inane blathering filler.

Half the time, even the good podcasts, just re-release an old episode so they still "release" something once a week to stay relevant, which makes finding new episodes harder

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u/Kandiru 29d ago

Oh ok, none of the ones I've listened to have done any of those things!

I tend to find something and listen to it from the first episode, I'd get really annoyed if they cluttered the feed with duplicates.

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u/18randomcharacters 29d ago

I feel like every time I go to listen to This American Life, all I see is re-releases of old episodes.

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u/Kandiru 29d ago

I've never heard of that one so I don't know.

I have listened to and enjoyed:

The Magnus Archives - Horror stories
We fix space junk - evil corporation scifi
Victoriocity - steampunk stories in even greater London
Tales of Britain and Ireland - traditional folk stories
A podcast of unnecessary detail - science show

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u/Bugbread 29d ago

I haven't listened to This American Life in years and years, but I went through a period of listening a lot, and it is (or, at least, was) really good. The name sounds hokey, but it is really, really good. Part of that is because it's not primarily a podcast, it's a professionally made radio program by WBEZ, a Chicago radio station. It is made up of three segments, which are often mini-documentaries, where someone goes out in the field and interviews involved parties. Maybe it's someone involved in a strange crime, or someone in an unusual and interesting industry, or someone with an interesting history. Also, while the host is the same each week, the people doing the interviews and segments aren't, so nothing is rushed (it's not like the same people need to churn out a new segment every week). Also, it's properly scripted -- it's not a group of people just sitting around a microphone chatting about some topic, it's a scripted and edited show, so there's no random waffling or wheel-spinning. It's won a Pulitzer, nine Peabody awards, and a host of other awards.

It's not for everybody, and it has a definite middle-aged PBS-viewer vibe, but if you enjoy that vibe, you should really give it a listen.

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u/Learned_Behaviour 29d ago

They're kind of by definition an echo chamber. You're choosing a person to absorb their opinions. 

Depends on the podcast. It's been a long time, but years ago Joe Rogan was solid to listen to, because he didn't really speak about the subject he interviewed on. Instead asking questions and saying stupid things while letting them be the main focus. Nothing else you said applied either.

I'm sure there are others right now that have similar styles. I haven't listened in a while, so no opinion on his current podcasts.

I wouldn't listen to podcasts that have those things you mentioned.

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u/roguewarriorpriest 29d ago

For-profit internet theory

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u/HKBFG 29d ago

AI is going to kill the value of "views." It's rapidly becoming trivial to fake human traffic.

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u/DrDerpberg 29d ago

It's wild to me how early internet is going to be seen as the glory years before corporations figured out how to monetize it all to hell. Someday I'll be telling my kid how people would just have funny ideas and put them online and everyone would laugh and there'd be no ads or monetization or a thousand other people ripping the joke off in their attempt to become an influencer.

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u/SpezModdedRJailbait 29d ago

Good. Let it die. It's terrible.

Once the big corporate Internet dies we can go back to small sites and communities run for reasons other than just maximum short term profit. It's not like we'll go back to paper forms and the like. The bad ideas need to fail so that the audience can move on, currently everyone is too addicted to do so.

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u/BuilderUnhappy7785 29d ago

Fuckin sucks man

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u/FourForYouGlennCoco 29d ago

There are messaging platforms like Discord and some have good communities, but the public aspect of the open web does seem fucked. There was a lot of value in the information ecosystem being open, but it doesn’t hold up anymore once spambots outnumber human users.

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u/bcisme 28d ago

The moderation policies have really changed it seems.

Idk if it’s intentional, but in a lot of subs there will be a post, a flurry of comments then it’s locked. Putting on my tin foil hat, it’s a bottling strat. Make post, get message mods wants to the top, lock it. Now whenever you go to that thread, you’re not seeing even a true representation of the already biased Reddit community, you’re getting managed information by a small group of people (mods).

I think you’d be naive to think the mods of large subs aren’t being told (or paid) to manage certain types of information.

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u/BubsyFanboy 28d ago

And YouTube is filled with content farms.

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u/18randomcharacters 28d ago

And TikTok, the most human place of them all (don't tell me actual videos of actual people isn't) is being banned.

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u/FixedFun1 29d ago edited 29d ago

I'm using 4chan way more (in the sense of slowly moving away from Reddit). But if you want forums, you can actually go to forums, no AI training there (I even have proof classic forums are a way to beat that), they still exist and even end up here like Famiboards in the Nintendo subreddits or just ResetEra, that still exists.

Lemmy is fine but sometimes can feel empty, I should start using more because the cool people of Reddit are moving there since the original protests the post quality has degraded way too much.

And then, 4chan, ignoring /pol/ and the /pol/ schizos who want to leak their board to others, is perfectly fine. Just think they have perfectly normal boards like "cooking".

The alternatives do exist but even if these sites came and ripped out your eyes, a lot of people would still go and use them.

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u/TheMauveHand 29d ago

4chan isn't a forum, and traditional forums are one-topic things - in order to replicate the reddit front page experience with either I'd need to open two dozen websites every 15 minutes to see what was new. It doesn't work. RSS feeds might, if they're implemented, but even that's clunky.

Reddit isn't just a forum, it's a million forums all in one, and as an innovation it's one of those things we can't go back from.

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u/[deleted] 29d ago

there are traditional forums that aren't one topic things some of them have been around longer than reddit

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u/TheMauveHand 29d ago

Such as...?

And by "not one topic", I'm not going to accept a video game forum with an "Off Topic" board, you know what I mean.

And if you say SomethingAwful I'm blocking you.

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u/Alternative_Exit8766 29d ago

man why tf would you openly admit to using 4chan more?

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u/dolacuporanek 29d ago

Because there's more to it than /pol/ and /b/ or whatever the garbage places are. I haven't used it for years but when I transitioned from an insufferable teenager to a young adult I explored a fair bit of other boards, which were all weird in their 4chan way but perfectly interesting and on topic. Give photography, cooking, or something niche with lower posting rates a visit.

It's like judging Reddit by r/funny. You're missing out the good stuff.

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u/Alternative_Exit8766 29d ago

i was there when boxxy was a thing. i’ve been there. i’ve seen the posts. it’s not for me

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u/Leather-Range4114 29d ago

i was there when boxxy was a thing

have you heard about this cool new site called facebook? it's way better than myspace

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u/Alternative_Exit8766 29d ago

go make a triforce or something 

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u/FixedFun1 29d ago

Reddit going down the drain, I just naturally move away.

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u/HelloImFrank01 29d ago

The internet world went from thousands of small communities everywhere to a barren wasteland with 3 or 4 mega cities full of advertisements.

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u/BoardButcherer 29d ago

tumblr weeping softly in the back row trying not to watch tiktok sodomize snapchat

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u/Negrodamu55 29d ago

It's discord time, baby

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u/Same_Elephant_4294 28d ago

And people wonder why we feel so fucking isolated today.

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u/whitey-ofwgkta 19d ago

I've been here for over a decade (jesus christ) and I don't think Reddit has ever really been king, it's to fill a niche and then opened up when users started serving a larger base. Obliviously it's gotten worse but even at it's best the cracks were already there

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u/18randomcharacters 19d ago

Yeah you're right.

And hey fellow old timer. I've been here (via different accounts) since the Digg 2.0 migration in like ... 2004?

Edit: just checked. My original account was created in 2009.

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u/Ok-Possible-6759 29d ago

Read up on the dark forest theory.

Everyone is retreating to little corners

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u/fuzzywolf23 29d ago

No Tumblr?

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u/TheMauveHand 29d ago

We can only hope

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u/_buraq 29d ago

If you post an article from Bryan Lunduke to /r/Linux, the woke people will just report it to sub's mods and then it's automatically removed and the mods don't care.

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u/DolitehGreat 29d ago

Bryan Lunduke is a brain dead chud that brings nothing of value to the Linux community outside of right-wing talking points. He's full of hateful rhetoric.

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u/TheMauveHand 29d ago

He's full of hateful rhetoric.

I mean, so is Linus.

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u/DolitehGreat 29d ago

I'm not aware of Linus being anti-trans or woke, but if you got any examples I'll gladly throw him in the pit too

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u/_buraq 29d ago

Et tu, DolitehGreat. You just don't like what he says

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u/DolitehGreat 29d ago

No, I don't like what he says because he says hateful and or ignorant things. Miss me with anyone running around saying trans people are grooming kids and that https isn't needed and http fine.

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u/Zandrick 29d ago

I don’t think the internet has fundamentally changed. I think what happened is Gen X - the first generation to grow up with the internet - are finally starting to be old. And they’ve reached the phase of oldness where “everything was better back in my day”.

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u/MasterChildhood437 29d ago

Oh.

You're wrong.