One of the hurdles to change for users switching from reddit to a federated platform is less content. The logic goes: “smaller community, less content, I can see i’m missing out on stuff over there so I’m not going to switch away”....
The content porting really only means something when it’s not overwhelming and the person doing the content porting is actively planning to participate in the submissions.
The easiest way to get someone to not comment on something is a wall of submissions with a fair number of upvotes and few to no comments. At this point, it’s just a glorious RSS feed rather than an actual community.
Driving user growth actually requires putting in the leg work to make meaningful submissions, following-up on them, commenting on submissions, and upvoting content. All of this takes actual effort though. A bot content porting content from Reddit to Lemmy doesn’t do much and for a number of people, looks much more like artificial engagement rather than any meaningfully sincere attempt at growing a community.
Some of the (World/US) News and Politics related communities are so barren of comments despite the deluge of content porting submissions, while other communities have blown up into their own distinct thing because people are making sincere, organic (enough) submissions.
Some users wonder if the dev will be charged for having it still up, others argue Reddit can't charge him without having signed a contract. Everyone is confused as to why the API change hasn't made it inoperable....
It’s honestly really sad what’s been happening recently. Reddit with the API pricing on 3rd party apps, Discord with the new username change, Twitter with the rate limits, and Twitch with their new advertising rules (although that has been reverted because of backlash). Why does it seem like every company is collectively on...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
What's your opinion on cross-posting?
One of the hurdles to change for users switching from reddit to a federated platform is less content. The logic goes: “smaller community, less content, I can see i’m missing out on stuff over there so I’m not going to switch away”....
3rd party app for Reddit, Boost, is still functioning well after July 1st ( www.reddit.com )
Some users wonder if the dev will be charged for having it still up, others argue Reddit can't charge him without having signed a contract. Everyone is confused as to why the API change hasn't made it inoperable....
What’s with social media companies trying to destroy themselves recently? ( kbin.social )
It’s honestly really sad what’s been happening recently. Reddit with the API pricing on 3rd party apps, Discord with the new username change, Twitter with the rate limits, and Twitch with their new advertising rules (although that has been reverted because of backlash). Why does it seem like every company is collectively on...