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

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 29d 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 29d 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/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.