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Why Reddit Is Destined to Turn to Crap
(www.motherjones.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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Great read, thank you for sharing. I know it’s about Reddit, but I’m going to indulge a digression inspired by the article. One of the questions that’s been rattling around in my head ever since I wandered back onto Facebook in December after a 2.5-year hiatus: when is a social media platform “dead”?
My Facebook feed feels like it’s in its death throes, with a handful of hearty souls occasionally posting their own thoughts or pictures or jokes, and like two fun communities that are reasonably active, while the overwhelming majority of content in my feed (other than ads and promoted reels and whatever) is friends of mine simply sharing screenshots from Tumblr/Twitter/Reddit without commentary.
I understand that my feed, full of people and organizations I voluntarily friended over the last…oh god…19 years (?!) isn’t necessarily representative of Facebook as a whole. But it seems like the enshittification, the erosion of Facebook’s most basic utilities—it’s not even good at event planning or photo sharing anymore; it was way better at both of those things in 2012—disincentives using the platform for anything beyond the most anodyne resharing of other peoples’ hot takes culled from other platforms.
Is Facebook dead? It seems like it sucks for promoting/advertising small local businesses, which was one thing it seemed pretty good at ~10 years ago. It sure isn’t good for keeping tabs on your actual friends, and hasn’t worked well at that in a long time. So what does it do? What’s Facebook for in 2023?
(Bigger question for me personally is when to leave it for real, and if I’ll ever have the courage to actually deactivate when, for better or for worse, Facebook efficiently captured a huge majority of my contacts between 2010 and 2015, and I feel a certain amount of anxiety about walking away from that entirely.)
The first people to jump ship are going to be the ones who already desire something "better" than the current environment. Those who haven't yet jumped ship are the ones who are not (yet?) dissatisfied enough with the current environment to make a change.
If enough of the "early leavers" manage to coalesce around the same new space, then that new space is instantly noticeably "better." On the other hand, because those early leavers are a very small proportion of the place they are leaving, the old place doesn't change much. Even if the rate of that change does increase, that rate change may not even be very noticeable (although I have already heard of an uptick in pro-company rhetoric at reddit).
As I recall, this is precisely what happened when Digg began its collapse, and many people abandoned Digg for Reddit. Reddit was instantly a much better forum than Digg had become. Now the same thing is happening again, well, not exactly.
Digg declined because it was a silo, and because corporate interests needed to monetize it. Corporate interests made decisions that they felt went in the direction of monetization, with disregard to the overall user experience. Reddit is also a silo, also operated by corporate interests, who are also making decisions they feel are in the direction of monetization, with disregard to the overall user experience. The difference today seems to be that the place people are jumping ship to is not a silo, and is not operated by corporate interests.
It'll be interesting to see where the fediverse goes, and how this landscape develops. With beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.it, it's clear that it would be possible for corporate interests to operate their own instances, and only federate with "approved" instances - a fracturing of the fediverse, and a "re-siloing."
In the past, it took a long time and was quite difficult for users to abandon declining siloes. The fediverse makes it so much easier for people to jump ship when that becomes necessary. Corporate interests take note.
I think you're right. It's been my impression that a lot of the people over at Reddit who don't care, are the ones who are reading, not writing. I've sadly gone back, to at least provide an alternative with a magazine I started, and it feels very uncomfortable now.