The VC money is drying up and the current social media funding paradigm is breaking because of it.
It's a bit like witnessing the Dot Com bubble burst again tbh.
It's about time we moved on to a better way of doing things anyway, I'm pretty good with moving away from the old ad-based, exploit your community for profit model, personally.
It'll be interesting if any of these "owned by the people" platforms will establish themselves the same way the private social media companies have in the past. Mastodon is probably most successful when it comes to a decentralized platform but it's not the there for me at the moment when it comes to the user base.
You can argue that it's not supposed to be Twitter or whatever but you can't deny the usefulness of everyone being an user under the same address or the wealth of information that comes with being giant. Decentralized platforms have an inherent handicap since there will always be moderation that's up to the admin so every instance will differ in some way (and let's not get to the technical problems that at least here are prevalent). It's harder for companies, countries and other official sources to establish themselves because they subject themselves to moderation of a private third party and jumping from instance to instance, forgoing the extra work it is, is just disruptive and confusing to their audience. They could always start their own instance but that's also a lot of work compared to just creating a Twitter account. There might be some business angle here though but it all just seems too convoluted at least for now.
Maybe internet will be just different and less-centralized in the future. At least it's good that the profit seeking private companies have less power.
The internet used to be more decentralised. There were lots of smaller websites, blogs, forums etc, which people discovered via word of mouth, search engines, and forgotten things like webrings. It's only recently that big monolithic social media platforms took hold.
Tech is often cyclical, we could now be swinging back to a more decentralised web, but with the benefit of newer technologies. Right now it's almost a new "wild west" as new platforms appear and new ideas like federation are experimented with. Some will rise, some will fall, some will go off in the corner and do their own thing. While all that happens it's going to be a bit messy, much like it was in the 90s with the initial rise of the web.
I hope you're right, sounds quite exciting!
Could you describe what "webrings" were? I've read about them in a similar thread, but couldn't find any info on them.
I’ve been online since circa 1993 and for the first decade or so, discoverability was a challenge due to the lack of efficient search engines like Altavista or (later) Google.
Webrings consisted in individual website owners (e.g., on Geocities) placing one or more banners at the bottom of their webpage linking to other like-minded sites, typically in quid-pro-quo manner (I link to you, you link back to me), or to a manually-curated directory of like-minded sites.
This was when “surfing the web” meant exactly that - you would surf from one site to another using hyperlinking within web communities. Bookmarking was then how you kept track of the most interesting sites you came across.
Now there is hardly a need for hyperlinking and bookmarking, since much of the content is centralized on a few platforms, and search engines take care of the discoverability of niche content.
Phew I feel old remembering webrings lol. Crazy to think how much the internet has changed since those early days thirty years ago.
Anyone else remember Infoseek? It was my favorite search engine because you could select to search within results to refine your search down to a single page of relevant results.
Thanks. I now realized, how I came to that conclusion: Last time this was discussed the person called it "link ring" and that didn't not yield any reasonable results.
Edit: And because notifications for comment replies are deactivated by default I didn't even notice the person has corrected their wording. Still learning how to kbin :).
Also all the people who think Usenet is just an obscure piracy mechanism.
Usenet was the greatest medium for discussion back in the early Internet days, and I'm excited that it's finally being recreated in the form of this Fediverse thing.
So back when search engines were in their infancy, webrings were kinda a big deal. Essentially, they were collections of topic-related websites that agreed to mutually link to each other so that people could find content related to the pages that they were visiting. They kinda died out after Yahoo bought webring.org (where most webrings were controlled) and replaced all the webring control pages hosted there with Yahoo pages, and by the time they let go of the domain contemporary search engines had mostly rendered webrings obselete.
However, there are definitely still webrings around. The official site of maia arson crimew (the hacktivist who made the news for leaking the no-fly list to select journalists) belongs to two webrings, for example. I can definitely see them making more of a comeback among computer enthusiasts if search engines enshittify themselves more.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing while writing that comment. But I can't shake how cool it is to have every hobby, no matter how small or big, under the same roof, one click away. Someone should to make a search engine that serves this purpose and works well...
Reddit has been pretty good at not walling off content, but think of all the forums that died and went to hell, being tortured in the afterlife as a facebook group, where all the knowledge people spend time writing down, all the questions being answered, are trapped in the facebook ecosystem, where it's close to impossible to find. This is by design too I believe. I used to be a mod on a hardware forum and we had rules that you needed to search before asking. The opponents to this rule said, that if people just searched, then the forum would die out (it didn't) and I'm quite certain that information on facebook is hidden away, to keep engagement going, by having the same shit being asked and answered over and over in perpetuity.
I like the idea of going back to forums, but with the added benefits of federation. It's the best of both worlds in my opinion.
I miss the phpBB days. I was on some great forums and content was curated by people who were passionate about the topics. There were serious spaces, silly spaces, helpful spaces, and malevolent spaces. Google still did a decent job of surfacing real, user-generated content back then. You could always refine your search further to find niche information and that just doesn't work anymore. Everything is brand names and every company is trying to make their brand a verb.
This recent rebellion between platforms and communities has been interesting to watch. Communities are not locations in cyberspace, they're still people. Now, with the fediverse, thanks to open-source developers and the kind souls who coughed up some dough for server costs, we now have more choices of where we congregate online. I love threaded topic-based conversations so something like this place is exactly where I want to be. I think this unrest may level out in our favor, but if there's a potential for evil, some arrogant jackass will take it, so I don't expect it'll be an easy journey. Enjoying the wild west feel you pointed out, very 90s!
On the other hand, I think Fediverse is perfect for companies that want to be closer to their customers, as rare as that may be.
Another possible use case if Fediverse become popular enough is potential for companies like Nintendo setting up their own instance as the new Miiverse or something.
I wouldn't count on big companies ever going that route, to be honest. The decision-making people there will likely never trust Lemmy or similar software enough because it's not like them - not proprietary, not closed source, so they'll keep wasting money on making their own shitty websites with their own shitty forums if they ever want to give their communities an official place to hang out.
I can see it but there needs to be a big player first to set an example. Maybe it's Facebook or influencers suddenly flocking in. It won't be fast though.
Don't think of Mastodon like 1000 separate social media sites. Think of Mastodon, think of the Fediverse, like email. Lots of email goes through gmail, and maybe gmail works better with gmail. But email is more than gmail. But despite AOL's best efforts, despite google's best efforts, email is also yahoo, and outlook, and Proton, and MailChimp, and your college email address, and whatever mail server your company spun up, and if you feel like it whatever mail server you setup in your basement. And yes, email has had more complications over the years as google tries to strangle it. But it's the real open platform, and the Fediverse can join it.
I agree that investors requiring demonstrable returns has played a role in this cycle. Steve Huffman is desperate to show profits ahead of Reddit’s IPO, and Musk is desperate to recoup his $44B investment in the blue bird.
However, I believe that there’s also another consideration. Many of today’s platforms started out with a somewhat idealistic intent. Jack Dorsey wanted Twitter to be an open protocol, though never quite achieved his vision. Aaron Swartz contributed to the open design of early-days Reddit. Facebook was meant as a non-profit university community builder. Google had (and abandoned) a “do no evil” motto. Etc.
The original user-first approach of these platforms created organic growth and encouraged ambassadorship by motivated users who became frequent contributors, unpaid moderators, etc.
Over time, however, people moved on (Dorsey, or very sadly Swartz) or got greedy from success (Huffman, Zuckerberg). The focus shifted from user-first to advertiser-first. Platforms like Reddit still used a loss-leader approach of losing investor money on frills such as API because it helped sustain growth for a while longer.
But once critical mass was reached, there was no longer a need to coddle the most enthusiastic and long-time users. They had exhausted their usefulness. The platforms could finally embrace the advertiser-first model in which the user, not the content, becomes the product.
So here we are with the worst of both worlds. Reddit could have offered a reasonable paid API plan that would have allowed the thriving third-party ecosystem to retain the power users and contributors. Instead, it went all-in with a walled-garden approach buoyed only by advertising money, even if it means that the content quality dwindles. Twitter also went “private” in the sense that an account is now required to even view the content, and aggressively promotes its paid plan to users –who are still subject to interstitial ads and promoted content– even for basic hygiene features such as 2FA.
As for why Reddit, Twitter, and Discord shit the bed at almost the same time, part of it has to do with VC pressure (as mentioned by the parent), and part of it is they are the same generation (more or less) of social networks and are reaching an equivalent stage where buyout (Twitter) or IPO (Reddit) is the next logical step.
The writing is on the wall that a paradigm shift is in order. The pendulum has considerable momentum, though, and will allow the centralized, walled-garden web to thrive for a while longer, just like Facebook survives catering to mostly an audience of unsavvy boomers. But the swing back will gradually enable alternative models to grow that are based on open platforms and federated content. We’re just very, very early in this cycle.
Oh, and sorry for the long-ass essay, I got a bit carried away.
Yeah this. We're all boarding the ship before it sails out for new lands. It'll be a bit before we finally depart... but it's nice to get a cozy seat here while the city we've been living in begins it's chaotic descent into what MySpace became lol.
It's about time we moved on to a better way of doing things anyway, I'm pretty good with moving away from the old ad-based, exploit your community for profit model, personally.
Yes, you're exactly right with that. Even if Reddit at the moment lacks a major competitor which actually threatens to take its place but rather, numerous smaller competitors, I guess the resultant peace that comes with everyone being divided after fleeing the website is something that I can't deny I have been real happy with. I have found this peace through coming to Kbin. If it stays small, I will continue to enjoy this peace, and if it actually overtakes Reddit, then let us be known as the veterans of Kbin/Lemmy.
That used to be true until they made the insane move of self-hosting all of the images and videos using i.reddit and v.reddit rather than continuing the previous practice of everyone posting all of the media to imgur and youtube, etc.
They just had to own everything themselves, even if it meant giving themselves running costs that would inevitably climb to youtube-like expenses because of all of the media streaming.
The money Reddit got from TenCent is starting to run out and TenCent is wanting a return on their investment. So Reddit will tighten the screws and monetize harder because the board demands it.
Exactly this. Looking at the top response it details it's hard due to a ton of costs like operating costs and hosting costs and stuff, but with federation these costs can be spread around so that it's more manageable for each individual instance (as content doesn't need to be viewed from the original instance but gets spread around).
The mass-scale casual interaction producing flashes of surprising relevance can't happen when the conditions aren't pulling in so many people that the 1 in 300 million person with the answer doesn't casually happen across the question that only he/she can answer. That's the unique content from Reddit.
Link aggregation, message boarding, messaging, all that stuff is merely tech that lots of other places have. Reddit's moat is the user presence which other platforms can't just replicate. Reddit needs to die first so that 1 in 300 person stops going there and goes to other places and somehow runs into the question there, hopefully in a way that they turn up in Google search.
Is the fediverse where that happens? Seriously asking because I'm no expert on it. It doesn't seem like the concept can scale distribution at that level. There will be pockets of interaction, but not everything is shared everywhere.
While you're correct, it's just a clunky term. I think some other way to refer to the whole thing will probably come along soon, and in a few years, people will regard saying fediverse the same way we look back on people talking about "surfing the information superhighway" or whatever.
“Internet” is closer to a lot of existing English words than “fediverse,” though. “Fediverse” might get familiar over time, and it might make more sense to non-English-speakers, but I think it’s a more exotic construction than “internet.”
Yeah, but we used to call it the information superhighway and the worldwide web. Internet IS the good term. It may well be that fediverse sticks around so long that we all get used to it, but at the moment, eh. I think if someone somewhere suggests a good alternative, we'll all likely jump on it.
Dang I totally forgot all about that term. Been awhile. Well it eventually reduced to "surfing the net".
The thing about the internet, is it was the thing to make it only one net. Previously there were weird systems like bitnet, VMSnet, where you had to juggle email address encoding standards to get balkanized college campus networks to talk back and forth to each other.
"The web" became the subset of the net, that worked with web browsers. Only one thing.
Was there a "The Facebook" period? Or was that just a movie name?
So then we passed through a period of brands. Reddit is a brand. It is not altogether surprising that people would refer to the fediverse in terms of brands. Lemmy, kbin, beehaw, whatever.
Email and the web had/have specific protocols associated with them. The fediverse has multiple protocols. We're using ActivityPub, which seems to have won as a standard. It isn't exactly catchy or smooth flowing off the tongue.
Ok, if we try to brain crunch all these previous trends, here's what it's going to be called, if it hasn't been already:
THE VERSE
The difference between the fediverse and the universe will be forgotten. Linguistically, people will not keep up with that detail. Only old timers / early adopters will notice that linguistic change.
Possibly, 'verse' will come to be seen as short for multiverse.
Yup. Moreover, i want clients and implementations that help summarize and reduce doomscroll behavior. Social networks have value (imo), but they also have a cost and i'm tired of paying that. Reddit built a habit in so many of us to go back to it during any downtime, doomscroll more time than we wanted or expected, become overly invested in karma, arguments, etc. Reddit also has zero incentive to fix any of this, as it was perfect for engagement. Reddit is Facebook is Twitter, and i'm tired of those applications drugging my brain.
I definitely do not want Reddit. I want the value we got from Reddit, without the cost.
Buddy, doomscrolling is your own issue. Are you old enough to remember "doomscrolling" cable television for hours at night? We're all choosing to distract ourselves from something else or we're just bored. It's nothing new.
I mean, if you're having trouble stepping away from something, it almost sounds like you're describing an addiction problem. Everyone should make it a practice to step outside themselves for a moment and assess all their habits.
You're not seriously suggesting that a platform prevent its users from using it, are you? LOL where have I seen that in the news this week?
You're not seriously suggesting that a platform prevent its users from using it, are you? LOL where have I seen that in the news this week?
Jeez, this feels quite hostile.
I'm a developer. I'm working on this problem myself. You can craft features which promote a behavior or inhibit it. For example focusing only on live oriented features, making sure that posts show up constantly and with little ability to see what previous came, i would argue, focuses behavior on addictive FOMO. Features that help summarize historical posts to leave you with less of a feeling of FOMO does the opposite. Quite difficult to get FOMO if the summary of posts only changes once every 5 hours, right? You should see the ideas here. All of which i want to explore.
Features promote behavior. Some drive engagement, some reduce engagement. I seek features which reduce engagement by way of inhibiting FOMO and promoting the feeling of being informed on what it is you were seeking.
I'm suggesting a platform which focuses on features that help users avoid what i feel are negative outcomes. Which is wholly different than saying that all platforms need to do this. Why is this controversial to you? Should i, and users like me, not be able to use a platform which tries to eradicate (as best able) FOMO? Is FOMO other people experience somehow essential to you?
You can have whatever platforms you like. Just because an option exists does not mean it is hostile to your preferences. To me your reply seems short sighted, entirely focused on your individual use case and ignorant of a wide array of methods people want to use to interact with these products.
I am focused on my slice and my pie. You can have yours too, it's okay.
This argument that a social media platform not doing evil things also exclusively means it cannot attract an audience in some other way is a false dichotomy.
Seconding everything here — hostile/destructive platform design is so normalized for users (of Reddit and in general) that designing services that don’t encourage doomscrolling/“anger-tainment”/FOMO/etc feels completely foreign to them, or even impossible. But it’s gotta happen, otherwise we’ll just repeat the worst parts of Reddit (and other platforms) all over again.
@UnshavedYak for real. It's so refreshing not having to see loads of wasted awards on the most facile, idiotic comments. Or the obnoxious avatars people made in place of their pfp. It seems so hyperbolic but it genuinely feels great not having to see all that anymore.
Just to say, I 100 percent would pull RIF up in downtime but doomscrolling is not ubiquitous; I would pop into really specific communities to read about specific interests and shit that didn't expose me to current events. I am an extremely politically plugged-in person, despite avoiding it almost entirely on reddit (unless I was in the mood), but I found shit like RIF actually allowed me to be more selective about what content I want at any given time. That kind of fine-tuned control of my information intake, of course, is completely lost on New Reddit with its barrage of random recommendations.
Yea and i don't mean to imply this is something everyone needs to see as a problem. Plenty of things are addictive for some and not for others. Even regardless of addiction, i just want (to explore) a set of features that is kind of anti-reddit. Explore anything that can help me feel like i didn't miss anything, while not needing to visit more than once a day, once a week, etc. That i felt informed but that the random stuff was filtered out. etcetc
From a developer, often these features don't scale well either. Either complex to define (if customizable) or too costly to run, but Fediverse tweaks that a bit. We have the potential to have smaller servers with less concern for scale, etc. Fediverse has potential here, for me at least
That's exactly what I was thinking. Even with federation off it feels like it's already turning into a smaller version of what we had before. Not so much with post content or comments per se, but more for the already established "power users" and recreation of the exact same garbage, popular subs. I can't believe how many people I've already blocked that I got sick of seeing on every single post.
The idea that Reddit is staging some nefarious conspiracy to "poison" fediverse spaces ... is losing the whole plot.
OP's straight up writing fanfiction trying to cast a site they just left as villains in some swashbuckling coming-of-age story. It's a nine-hour-old account, and they're already embracing the Us vs Them mentality and trying to sell it with prose.
I don't know how OP managed to pick fights within a couple hours of signing up for their account, but I'd suggest that if they left Reddit for "toxicity" only to immediately find it here too ... maybe they're carrying it around with them?
I'm 99% sure OP has made multiple accounts to try to sell their 'ex-Redditors are evil" schtick. I saw a post this morning from someone with a similar name pretty much saying the same thing.
Yeah I'm sure you've got it from my stalker, who has defenders that say he wasn't...stalking? Huh, funny how people have such a deranged difference in what means what to them.
Painting Reddit as a monolith in general is a problem, too. “Reddit is toxic?” Some subs, sure. But certainly not the ones I subscribed to. Some of them might have had bad actors here and there. But they were usually dealt with by the mods.
In the end, the only toxicity that drove me away from Reddit was the toxicity from the CEO.
Do you just love living a life, where you think you know everything and place people in some little organizer that you define people as, personally? Because you're doing exactly the same thing as you're claiming as to what I'm doing, just to make yourself look better and righteous.
That's the kind of mentality I see all around Reddit as also. Nobody is accountable for their own behavior, it's always the other person's fault and it's always the other person who is the toxic one. Somehow. Someway. Despite condemning evidence to the contrary for all to see, how it's all of the people pegging rocks at them. It's exactly how it is in school, with bullying, only it's amplified online. Does it make you feel superior? Does it make you feel better? What is the precise reason do you feel, that you have to behave this way?
I'm pretty confident it is some insecurity within you that you shroud so well, but I can see the cracks already just by your reply alone. May I advise that maybe you should take some time outdoors, instead of like, making up characters out of baseless assumptions to satisfy your pseudo intelligence?
I criticized you for jumping to conclusions and fabricating narrative to support them. And apparently you got so offended by the criticism that ... you went and did it all over again, targeting me, committing even harder to the bit.
You just wrote a bunch of wild fanfiction about me and then tried to have an argument with that imaginary version of me. Might as well just yell at ghosts in the shower if you're that desperate to feel like you've snatched some petty victory from the jaws of self-inflicted defeat that is this thread.
You're the problem with your own experience.
This response is hugely excessive for the "provocation" and yet I'm sure you'll storm off imagining that I'm the big meanie here and you were some completely reasonable and utterly justified saint of good behaviour - for absolutely going off on someone who gently mocked your very serious demands for everyone to be nicer to you and meaner to the people you dislike. And you've done that to everyone who wasn't fawningly positive towards you in this thread - that you started by being hateful and childish towards a site you just left and the userbase of the site you just joined.
Even with the tiny sample size I can see why you have so many encounters with "toxic" people. You antagonize and attack people, then pretend they were the toxic ones if they defend themselves.
It's not hard to miss that you've just happened to call me all of the things that other people have told you about yourself in this thread. Hell, this whole little speech would have been far more appropriate as something someone said to you, if they were trying to hurt your feelings; so given how off the mark it was when directed at me, it's easy to wonder if maybe you're projecting a little here.
reddit must have sent out a "remove the NSFW or we remove you" to all the subs that are still set to NSFW. I saw the same story for PICS and even the cyberpunkgame sub
Also, the Kbin dev expressly stated he isn't ready for a massive migration, and the current influx has caused him no end of stress. We want to keep him around and not drive him insane.
I appreciate the concern, and it seems to me that kbin is no longer just one person ;) Currently, kbin is a team of wonderful people who handle development work, devops, project management, and more. Additionally, Piotr helps me with administering kbin.social. There will be significant changes here soon, things are happening quickly. But to be honest, I wasn't fully prepared for such substantial growth, and it will probably take some time before everything stabilizes. But... this is just the beginning ;) What's important is that the snowball starts rolling, regardless of whether kbin, Lemmy, or Mastodon gains the most users. We all win in this situation.
Kbin is PHP/Symfony, but people are writing tools in various languages, not to mention clients. I haven't looked at the client repositories, but I assume that some, if not all, of the codebases for them are Java.
The thing that helps Kbin the most is that it is, by far, the easiest to understand. Googling "Lemmy fediverse" gives a bunch of various links to other Lemmy instances, which are presented in a way as if they are separated from one another. Kbin appears as one site, one location for content aggregation. Although that "goes against the idea" of decentralization, most users are currently looking for their "one home to replace their old one home". The more users flock to one area and learn how it works, the more things will begin to take their proper shape, so to speak.
A feature we'll definitely want to have with kbin in the future is the ability to migrate accounts to other instances. That would mean that even though we're centralizing on kbin.social right now, people could move to other instances and spread the load across the fediverse without losing their history
I'm still learning the ins and outs of this place and the others, but part of me thought that was the feature of being federated. User accounts could seamlessly transfer from one instance to another.
Looking further into it, it looks like that feature exists for content, but not so much for accounts.
Kbin doesn't have the ability to sort comments by top. To me, that is the #1 most important feature, and not having it when it's easy to do shows some real ignorance. The reason I come to these sites is to see the best comments on news of the day.
12 years ago reddit would crash all the time. To make it worse they always told me I was the one who broke reddit personally by putting a message on my screen. My bad yall.
Yeah, I always thought it was a little unfair when it popped up telling me that "Briguy24 broke reddit!". But I never held it against you, don't worry :)
To each their own but sometimes it's nice to just scroll through comments and see the varied replies instead of just fed the top/earliest on some posts. Imo it increases user engagement.
Brother, acting like a douche to people who are working and paying for you to be here shows some real arrogance. You're not a customer here. There's no ad revenue, no data collection, no money. If you want it so bad then do it yourself. Beauty of the fediverse is you can go make your own instance that does what you want it to do.
Even with the donations I doubt there's that much of a profit to being made. Servers are expensive, and there's no way that servers are the only overhead that ernest is dealing with.
His own knowledge, skills, abilities, and time are almost certainly worth more than he is receiving in donations. Dudes a skilled programmer/developer and is putting serious work into this. If he was putting his time and effort into freelance work instead he'd be building a heck of a nest egg.
The way a lot of dot-com startups work, they have high fixed costs -- stuff you pay no matter how many users you have, like programmers -- and low marginal costs, stuff you pay based on how many users you have.
That means that it's good to be big, because you can spread those fixed costs over many, many users. One programmer writing software used by five hundred million users can make a lot more money than software used by five users. The resulting effect is called economy of scale.
So the typical model is to take in a lot of investor money, operate at a loss, and lose money while offering a very compelling service to grow the userbase as quickly as possible.
Once you're big enough, you can spread your costs around many users, so it's easier to make money. You switch from growing your userbase to making money from it. Because you aren't trying as hard as possible to draw in new users, the service is probably gonna get worse from a user standpoint.
If money becomes tight, then it's harder to get investor dollars to operate at a loss with to grow userbase.
My understanding is that due to elevated interest rates in the post-COVID-19 situation, it's more-costly to get investment money. So that will tend to push companies from the "growth" phase to the "monetization" phase.
That affects a bunch of companies, including Reddit.
"That means that it's good to be big, because you can spread those fixed costs over many, many users. One programmer writing software used by five hundred million users can make a lot more money than software used by five users. So the typical model is to take in a lot of investor money, operate at a loss, and lose money while offering a very compelling service to grow the userbase as quickly as possible.
Once you're big enough, you can spread your costs around many users, so it's easier to make money. You switch from growing your userbase to making money from it. Because you aren't trying as hard as possible to draw in new users, the service is probably gonna get worse from a user standpoint."
This kind of reminds me of how Legos are made. Creating the plastic molds from a molding machine to make a single Lego is extremely expensive, but if you make millions of Legos in mass production it reduces costs to make them dramatically to a point where the Lego Group has basically no operating costs to make them anymore. That turns Legos into an investor's dream.
if you make millions of Legos in mass production it reduces costs to make them dramatically to a point where the Lego Group has basically no operating costs to make them anymore
That's how economies of scale work in general, across many, many industries.
On a somewhat related note, your Lego example is more gloriously intricate than you may realize. So, you're spend a lot of money to make a machine to produce Legos at close to zero cost. What happens if someone the next city over thinks they can make a better machine and undercut you?
One way to protect yourself is with the law. You set up intellectual property protection for your Legos and sue everyone who makes "Lehos". This works for a while.
But problems come up. Intellectual property protections have a time limit. They also have a jurisdiction limit, as some guys in a different country, say, Xhina, don't respect your country's laws and start making those Lehos.
What do you do? How does your company survive?
Well, you can leverage the other valuable part of your company, the brand reputation, to do things that Lehos can't, like make deals with other intellectual property holders to make themed Lego sets. So, you strike deals with Disney to make Star Wars and MCU sets, with Warner Brothers for those Harry Potter designs, with Microsoft/Mojang for Minecraft Legos (because they're a perfect fit). That's something that some random plastic injection mold company in China can't do. You're motherfucking Legos, not dipshit Lehos. You can do that, as well as open company stores and theme parks that are tourist destinations.
So, Legos survives, and not just that, but prospers.
Actual Legos are fairly cheap. You can get a box of 790 for $60, which is like $0.07 per Lego. The expensive sets are the licensed sets. They pay for that licensing fee somewhere. A Star Wars themed republic fighter tank is $40 with 262 pieces, which comes to about $0.15 per piece.
Definitely some greed in there but when you're a recognized brand with the ability to license you can get away with that because you already have the contracts so nobody can compete.
This is a great write up, but what I don’t get is why do these companies stick to these idiotic measures instead of turning to their users for help in an open dialogue.
Like, I get that Reddit needs to make profit, and I actually wouldn’t have minded paying for Reddit premium to use my api key with Apollo. Instead Reddit made me and I’d guess a lot of people like me leave and never want to return. Just left with a lingering bitter aftertaste.
Did they think that they wouldn’t get enough funding that way? Well then how about giving it a test run to see if it works? Didn’t work? Well how about asking your users what they might be missing and what they might want to be more happy to subscribe, and adding features/addressing those issues? Working with developers to establish a revenue sharing agreement? There were so many alternative paths.
No, apparently nfts and shitting on your users is where it’s at.
Have a conversation, run polls, A/B test, etc. And be transparent while you’re doing it. These tools are nothing new when developing a service. Why ignore everything?
I mean, is it really just a competence/arrogance thing alone?
I think it's more of an ego thing. The people with healthy egos probably never end up as execs in companies as big as Reddit, and the people that do are likely driven by something else other than the desire to actually build a platform that respects its users and works well in cooperation with them - "I'm smart, I'm sexy, I know better than these plebs making us money".
Yeah, there seems to be an inflection point in the lifecycle of businesses nowadays where the leadership loses any interest in what the company actually does. The products it makes or services it provides are considered almost irrelevant.
Exactly this. Companies like Reddit these days are so disconnected with their userbase it's insane. Of all the millions of things Reddit could do to make their platform a better place, they choose to basically remove the services that everyone liked (the 3rd party apps) and not only that, lie to their users (as with the case of Apollo "blackmailing Reddit for $10 million") and double down on them. It sickens me how ignorant they can be, but I guess that the hard lesson we can all take away is that with money and power comes corruption.
Have a conversation, run polls, A/B test, etc. And be transparent while you’re doing it. These tools are nothing new when developing a service. Why ignore everything?
I mean, based on how dramatic the increasing in price the API was, I wouldn't be surprised if Reddit already knew what the public reaction would be, considering they'll probably also receive considerable hate for even contemplating the decision. Of course they just didn't give a second thought and just went with it.
I stopped using reddit after spez's AmA. If all of this would have been handled in a more mature and open way, I would probably have moved to the reddit app, complained about it for a while, but kept usind reddit. But after what happened in the last weeks, reddit is no longer something I want to be associated with.
For lack of a better description, I simply don't 'like' reddit anymore. It's like a friend who treated you like shit.. Sure, you could still go to a party together and have fun, but it's just not quite the same anymore.
It's not so much about what they did, most people understand reddit has to make money at some point. It's the how that is driving people away imho. At least it is for me.
considering they'll probably also receive considerable hate for even contemplating the decision.
Honestly, when Christian first brought up “maybe subscriptions for Apollo to offset API costs,” I was fine with that. I get that we were receiving a service for free that cost the company money, and I was fine with paying a reasonable amount for that. I just don’t get why they had to make the costs so unreasonable that even subscription based wouldn’t cut it.
I mean after the whole "spez shadow-edited someone else's comment to put words in their mouth" thing, what you're describing sounds a bit too ethical for reddit as a company.
This is not true in most cases.
It's not about being profitable, it's about always making more and more and more and more - the so-called growth.
Let's take the case of reddit inc. Their revenue grew from just $25 million in 2016 to over $500 million in 2022. If they can't make a profit with that, I don't know what to say (I'd say the leadership buys a new ferrari every month, probably). According to this thread, reddit operating costs were around $35k dollars back in 2011. Even if you were to multiply that by a factor of 10, it's still just a couple million dollars per year. Multiply it by 100, and still They. Are. Fucking. Profitable. As. Fuck.
No, the problem is not profitability and paying the bills. Fuck no. The problem is them wanting more than what is remotely reasonable, and of u/spez being a greedy fucking pig and wanting not simply a big, but instead a spectacular cashout in their coming IPO. Well, fuck the greedy little pig boy and fuck reddit.
For some reason Reddit has 2000 employees. That's a huge expense. If I were in charge of Reddit, I think the first thing I'd be doing is conducting those "Exactly what would you say you do here" interviews and figuring out why something that should be a relatively simple and mature forum website needs so many people working on it.
Social media companies are especially doing this whiplash switch from aiming for growing the userbase to making money. And for them, there is another factor that makes it even more important to use money for growth when it is available -- network effect. Basically, for certain services, the role of the service is to facilitate communication between their users. While it's not quite true that all users are equally-likely to communicate with each other -- an elderly user who only speaks Italian and a schoolboy in Kansas who only speaks English might not have a lot of desire to communicate -- in general, users of the service get their value from the service by communicating with each other and each additional user is one more person with whom a user can communicate. This means that it's much more-desirable to use a service with a large userbase than one with a small one, because you can communicate with others. The value of the service as a whole, if everyone were equally likely to communicate with everyone else, rises roughly as the square of the number of users. That's because the value to each user is proportional to the number of users that they can talk to, and that is true for every user -- multiply one by the other, and the value of the service as a whole is proportional to the square of the userbase size.
Social media work by connecting members of their userbase. So for them, they have a huge incentive to use money for growth whenever they can get a hold of it as far as they can.
The services that are especially likely to respond to capital being cheaply available are companies that have a business model that does this, even moreso than a typical dot-com. And sure enough -- Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube derive their value from connecting members of their userbase, rely on network effect as well as economies of scale. And just as they dive really deeply into spending cheap money to grow when they could, when money ceases to be really cheaply available, so they will have further to swim out when it ceases to be.
My understanding is that due to elevated interest rates in the post-COVID-19 situation, it's more-costly to get investment money. So that will tend to push companies from the "growth" phase to the "monetization" phase.
This is basic economics. Increased interest rates mean companies will pay more for every dollar they borrow. This includes venture capital. Cheap borrowing is one of the reasons real estate values skyrocketed over the course of the past generation. Cheap money increased demand, and inflated costs. Do this long enough (maybe an economic collapse or recession between), and the house you bought in 1980 for $50k is now worth $400k.
Every company utilizes borrowing a lot more than you might think. From infrastructure, to payroll, borrowing money plays part in most activities of a company. It's pretty complex.
This is the second time I've seen something on kbin trying to dress the reddit migration to the Fediverse up as some hugely patriotic thing.
We don't need that, we don't benefit from it. This is how you create demagogues. Don't infuse nationalism into the Fediverse. That is super problematic and I think you're going to be in for a rude awakening when you see how much more European the Fediverse is than reddit was.
I did, actually. My instance has a saved copy of the post, I replied to it there, it forwarded the information to Kbin.
OPs point is dumb. Lemmy and Kbin are separate platforms that happen to be interoperable because of the backend protocol they’ve decided to use (which Kbin added relatively recently in the grand scheme). The Fediverse is made up of many of these platforms that are doing the same thing. There is nothing wrong with referring to the platform one is using.
Well said. If you want to mean all the things connected to ActivityPub, you say Fediverse. If it’s restricted to lemmy, use lemmy. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. OP saying it borders on ignorance may have to think about it.
I use lemmy. I don’t really care for nor use other Fediverse services like Mastodon.
Wouldn't every viewed copy anywhere then be a saved copy of the original post? Does that distinction even mean anything when it's still posting specifically to the original instance?
If I reply in a Lemmy.world thread, I'm still posting on Lemmy.world even if I'm viewing from Kbin.social.
As a comparative example to old and dying social media, it would be like finding a link to a celebrity's Twitter comment on Reddit and you saying you saw the person saying that on Reddit, which would be extremely misleading to anyone listening, thinking that the celebrity had posted it on Reddit.
It’s not posting comments specifically to the original instance. If the instances defederate I can continue to post comments, and people on my instance can see and interact with them.
Once somebody subscribes to a community (or magazine if you’re on the rifle site), ActivityPub acts like dynamic, synchronizing RSS. Everybody interacts with local data, an instance isn’t simply acting as a proxy when interacting with a different instance.
No, you're posting on kbin.social. You're never ever doing anything directly on a remote site. You view on k-so, you vote on k-so, you post on k-soc, and you comment on k-soc. Your actions are then, at some later point (which may be microseconds, or it may be hours, depending on traffic levels on both k-soc and the remote website), relayed to the remote website so the two copies of the community can be synchronised.
They're not redundant functions. They're... Mixed up on kbin right now, because things were originally built with the up button boosting content, but that's incongruent with how Lemmy does it, so it was changed.
But boosting isn't really about sorting at all. It's about republishing content, so that it can be sent out to instances that have started following a group after the content was originally posted.
Perhaps more importantly why would one retweet a comment? Rather than a post?
The way content propagation works here is that someone using Website A follows a remote content source (either a user, or a group -- aka a "community" or a "magazine"), and the remote hosting website (let's call it Website B) sends all subsequent content from that source to Website A, where the requesting user can then view it. If someone from Website A was already following that content source, then they get to see all of the content that Website A had already received, and benefit from earlier users efforts. But if that person was the first from Website A to subscribe to that content source, then they only get future content.
It's very similar to a, well, a magazine subscription in that way. NatGeo isn't sending you their 150 years worth of back catalogue when you subscribe in 2023 (not that you should bother subscribing to NatGeo in 2023).
The 'boost' button republishes content, though. Posts, comments, whatever. Hitting 'boost' on a comment republishes it, and once republished the group actor (the little bot-like construct that functionally is the group) sees it as new content, and pushes it out to everyone following it. This means it will reach websites that started subscribing to the group after the comment was originally posted.
Boosting is how older content (where older basically means "from anytime before literally right now") spreads through the fediverse.
So this is one of those things like git, where you can't explain how it works on the surface to a normal person because it barely even makes sense if you don't know about the underlying plumbing. :\
Not awesome, but I guess that's what you get when you graft a reddit-like experience onto a fediverse that was more or less invented for microblogging.
Yea, i'm working on my own Fedi software and i'm struggling with the point of boosting in the link aggregator context. It's an odd overlap with Reddit-style reposting to appropriate subs, but based on the user.
It makes sense in the Twitter UX, but i struggle to find it's place in the Reddit UX.
I think boosts have potential to be used for crossposts, and the current implementation are just crossposts to your profile. Though they're likely here right now just because Kbin is a mix between thread and microblog software
Boosting is super important in all contexts in the Fediverse.
When am instance subscribes to a content source - be that a user actor or a group actor - on behalf of a user, it only requests future content. Back catalogues are not fetched by default. Boosting re-publishes the content, so that it is received by new followers.
With a group actor, the boost triggers the actor to reboot the content itself, sending it out to new subscribers to the group, and filling in that back catalogue.
Users who use the website that the community is hosted on have access to the full library of it. They need to boost stuff. And people who subscribe from remote sites need to boost older content that they've seen.
but relevant users cant see it, its never fetched for them to see it. Sure users on the home instance can see it, but they're on the home instance, it's already fetched for them. Ive run into this problem on here, where there is a lot of content on other instances that isnt visible from kbin. I have the option of visiting the home instance to see it, but it takes me completely off of kbin, I cant boost it from that page.
Someone just needs to follow. The community owner either needs to seed the community to big instances using accounts on them, or people who find the community via other instances need to subscribe and know that fresh content will come. Then they can boost older content from the hosting site.
Things take some conscious effort here. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.
"Then they can boost older content from the hosting site." No that's the problem. Like you yourself said back catalogues arent fetched. They can't see the older content to be able to boost it, they'll only see new content.
If my instance follows a community at time t = T, and your instance starts following it at time t = T+10, I can boost content posted between T and T+9 so that you can see it.
Meanwhile, if people on the hosting instance boost things posted from times earlier than T, we both get to see them. Then, once they're visible to us, we can continue to boost them for new instances to see.
If boosting is meant to be a solution to the back catalogue problem, then it's a horrible way to do it. You'd have to go through and boost every single post from before the hosting instance was followed, and then it'd only show up the user page of the guy who went to all of that effort? (or, realistically, bot).
If what I'm saying is accurate (and I'm still not sure because this is admittedly a bit too complicated for me) then it doesn't sound very useful since individual profiles aren't nearly as important in a forum context when compared to something like twitter, and especially when you can just upvote something and have that show on your profile. Unless I'm mistaken and anything you've upvoted doesn't propagate to another automatically instance while boosts do... but I don't think that's a big enough distinction to have two different buttons? You could just have an upvote also do that.
I see it as similar to the "save" function on Reddit, except it's public. I've started using it on things that I think I might like to read again later (and so by extension anyone who's "like me" would probably want to read it too).
i disagree, it's a great functionality that people should learn.. and here's the simple point.. you can BOOST a comment you disagree with, so that your argument AGAINST the comment will get more visibility.. reddit is dysfunctional, and this mechanism can help fix one of the problems reddit cannot get rid of.. this mechanism can help discussion, and fight against things like brigading..
think about it a minute.. someone makes a really TERRIBLE point that you can dismantle easily.. tear it down, and BOOST the hell out of it.. reddit cannot accommodate that.. keeping those two functions separate is critical..
this will help keep every thread from becoming a popularity contest that is entirely predictable, once people figure it out
edit to add: i've only been using this platform for a few days.. but i promise you, it works the way it's supposed to.. try it out..
NCD was one of my absolute favorite subbreddits, and one of the few communities I was truly sad to leave behind. It looks like it may be destroyed anyway. Hopefully this means more users from the NCD community will move to federated communities like the one I'm familiar with on sh.itjust.works.
I’m not sure how jerboa works, but if you go to the actual sh.itjust.works website, you can do it. Go to the communities search bar and paste kbin.social/m/NonCredibleDefense. The magazine should show up there.
On Kbin I find that sorting by top, and then limiting top to the last 3 hours does a better job of showing stuff I'm subbed to. It's not perfect, but better.
The interesting thing about Twitter is how it shows how a significant part of our society works. It is kind of about amplifying fame and suggesting that we should all cares about meaningless 240 character posts or what these guys think.
That news media types love Twitter is kind of an indictment of how news works.
That's not really true. When it first came out, before the ads, before the algorithm, when they embraced 3rd party apps with an open api, it was really great. It was full of techy personalities and interesting folks. Hashtags were fun to follow, live events were amazing in real time, so much more. That was before it got inundated with politics and celebrities though. I think that honeymoon phase only lasted a tiny while, then it all went downhill into the outrage machine pretty quickly. But for a quick minute there, it was glorious.
Twitter was also an important tool for journalists and researchers worldwide. Military targets have come from Twitter posts. It is a reflection of a huge chunk of society. You may as well call all of internet technology "just a porn box" for how wildly over generalized that statement is. The reality is your generalization comes from arrogance. "I never engaged in such frivolous behavior". You're here now. Yes you have and yes you do.
Even your comment is the first cousin of outrage, it's pure disdain. Nothing more or less, and exactly as valuable as outrage.
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