Are We Watching the Internet Die?(wheresyoured.at)
wheresyoured.at
Are We Watching the Internet Die?
https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die/
249 comments
> I’ve stopped being an unpaid worker for the mega corps… I try to use OpenStreetMap consistently and provide as much data as I can
That’s a good thing and I like your framing. By contrast, the article frames this as you being tricked into it by the commercial companies to which you previously directly provided data but that’s just nonsense. You weren’t tricked, and you aren’t a victim. I’m glad OpenStreetMap is there to provide the same value with open data but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone.
That’s a good thing and I like your framing. By contrast, the article frames this as you being tricked into it by the commercial companies to which you previously directly provided data but that’s just nonsense. You weren’t tricked, and you aren’t a victim. I’m glad OpenStreetMap is there to provide the same value with open data but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone.
> but the closed systems still provided value and did not coerce or trick anyone.
I disagree. Google et al very much trick people into thinking they are helping "the community" by contributing to their databases. They even tell people how "popular" they are because their reviews were included in searches. Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"?
I disagree. Google et al very much trick people into thinking they are helping "the community" by contributing to their databases. They even tell people how "popular" they are because their reviews were included in searches. Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"?
> trick people into thinking they are helping "the community" by contributing to their databases
The only way that would be a trick is if they were helping the app owner while not making the app more valuable to the community which is obviously not the case. Clearly the voluntary contributors are adding value to the app and are therefore helping the community who uses the app.
> Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"
Their business models have been public this whole time, hence our discussion, none of this has been a secret. The mere fact that companies tend to paint everything about their operations in the best light possible instead of the opposite is not evidence of trickery or even morally culpable deception.
The only way that would be a trick is if they were helping the app owner while not making the app more valuable to the community which is obviously not the case. Clearly the voluntary contributors are adding value to the app and are therefore helping the community who uses the app.
> Do you think as many people would contribute if they were honest about it and said "help make our ads more valuable"
Their business models have been public this whole time, hence our discussion, none of this has been a secret. The mere fact that companies tend to paint everything about their operations in the best light possible instead of the opposite is not evidence of trickery or even morally culpable deception.
> The mere fact that companies tend to paint everything about their operations in the best light possible instead of the opposite is not evidence of trickery or even morally culpable deception.
We definitely differ in opinion there. I don't know why people think companies can get away with things that humans never would.
I just don't get the mindset of 'companies are evil, it's how it has to be'. Because it doesn't.
We definitely differ in opinion there. I don't know why people think companies can get away with things that humans never would.
I just don't get the mindset of 'companies are evil, it's how it has to be'. Because it doesn't.
It's possible to be popular and also profited from at the same time.
That's manipulative but not really deceptive.
They did trick us a bit in my opinion. The pervasiveness of their tracking networks was never made clear.
That part was a trick. Was... at this point, people assume even worse things but by-and-large don't seem to care.
But the above comment was about user-submitted feedback used for improving Google Maps, which doesn't seem like a trick at all.
But the above comment was about user-submitted feedback used for improving Google Maps, which doesn't seem like a trick at all.
They didn't need to trick anyone. They withheld knowledge.
Every tech company agreed they could do whatever they wanted with user created data and the user had no rights over that data.
No user was informed of the full extent of the consequences of agreeing to use new tech... or allowed to alter the 'agreement' tech companies offered the user.
The 'trick' was hiding sales tactics that were illegal in traditional businesses, behind TOS, EULAs and unregulated internet space.
We all know deep down inside that no man would agree to what big tech did, so the deal was made unintelligble to the user.
Every tech company agreed they could do whatever they wanted with user created data and the user had no rights over that data.
No user was informed of the full extent of the consequences of agreeing to use new tech... or allowed to alter the 'agreement' tech companies offered the user.
The 'trick' was hiding sales tactics that were illegal in traditional businesses, behind TOS, EULAs and unregulated internet space.
We all know deep down inside that no man would agree to what big tech did, so the deal was made unintelligble to the user.
They didn't trick you anymore than Facebook didn't trick people into being a free social media service. People elect to post data and never took away explicit permissions to use that data in other ways. FB isn't the government so 4th amendment rights would not apply.
But that's an edge case tbh. Hearing of scrapers ignoring Robots.txt and going after copyright show that they couldn't care less about ethical scraping. They more than overstepped their bounds in some places.
But that's an edge case tbh. Hearing of scrapers ignoring Robots.txt and going after copyright show that they couldn't care less about ethical scraping. They more than overstepped their bounds in some places.
This is the way. Just make sure the project is using a copyleft licence such as ODbL (as used by OSM) or GPL (as used by GNU/Linux and other software projects). Corporations will take as much as they can and give back as little as they can, as a rule.
Someone in the OSM community coined the term "crowd serfing" to describe stuff like contributing to Google Maps for free.
Someone in the OSM community coined the term "crowd serfing" to describe stuff like contributing to Google Maps for free.
Seems Microsoft got away with training Copilot on a lot of GPL'd code, though.
Lawsuits incoming then? If they aren't already happening. That France ruling from not too long ago should deter many companies from ignoring such licenses.
They're happening, but it's not as clear cut as Microsoft ignoring the license. GPL doesn't say anything about AI explicitly. Personally I think Microsoft is in the wrong anyway.
> GPL doesn't say anything about AI explicitly.
The tech industry is just a regulatory arbitrage play these days.
The tech industry is just a regulatory arbitrage play these days.
The better to contaminate your code with, my dear.
> I’ve stopped being an unpaid worker for the mega corps
I wouldnt be so sure about that... do you receive emails from gmail addresses?
I wouldnt be so sure about that... do you receive emails from gmail addresses?
Read it as a resolution.
I think you have convinced me to use OSM more for local stuff. I have added notes and updates here and there, but I've never really used it nearly as much as I have apple maps (and used to use google maps/waze). I do know the area quite well so there's not much to lose by using OSM apps instead. I'm still a little mehhhh on longer road trips though, but I'm a pretty conservative user of apps if my current apps are working well for me.
But you're contributing to HN which is owned by VCs with increasingly aggressive political postures (which we are not allowed to discuss on here) who could pull the rug on us whenever they want to.
The problem is that the n^2 stickiness of social graphs makes competition impossible when they scale into the millions. All the value is created by the users but accrues to the network owners, and then the owners are able to abuse and manipulate the networks as they see fit without repercussion. I think the ideal model for social networks is that they would be owned by benevolent nonprofits, but besides wikipedia VCs were able to capture every important social network of the Web 2.0 era.
The problem is that the n^2 stickiness of social graphs makes competition impossible when they scale into the millions. All the value is created by the users but accrues to the network owners, and then the owners are able to abuse and manipulate the networks as they see fit without repercussion. I think the ideal model for social networks is that they would be owned by benevolent nonprofits, but besides wikipedia VCs were able to capture every important social network of the Web 2.0 era.
HN isn't making any money off me, last I checked. And, as owners, the First Amendment gives them the right to publish or not on their own platform for any reason or for no reason. The alternative to this is too horrible to contemplate.
Re paragraph 2, yes. Mastodon largely fits your description of the ideal model, I think.
Re paragraph 2, yes. Mastodon largely fits your description of the ideal model, I think.
> Altman and his ilk believe they're the new Leonardo Da Vincis, but they're little more than petty kings and rent-seekers trying to steal the world's magic.
what’s sad is they don’t even compare themselves to historical patrons. Would we have Bernini without Borghese? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the genAI peddlers aren’t trying to grow artists and grow culture, they are trying only to grow content and sell it. It is a structure that is far less enriching for society than the patronage model.
what’s sad is they don’t even compare themselves to historical patrons. Would we have Bernini without Borghese? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the genAI peddlers aren’t trying to grow artists and grow culture, they are trying only to grow content and sell it. It is a structure that is far less enriching for society than the patronage model.
I love this framing of the dynamics, as a cultural concern as much as an economic one, because it cuts to the chase in a way that the AGI or open/closed themes never seem to. The extent to which anyone cares about the internet or software more broadly can only really achieve parity with past and present realities; there is no meaningful transcendence beyond the viscera of human experience because -- like trees in the forest -- we can only care about what we care about. And what has made the world a truly great place is not post-humanist striving but the connective tissue of culture that gives us access to other people, great artists and pedestrians alike, who are just like us, real. Everything else is a vice.
People keep panicking about huge internet portals but the thing is that if you compare the number of internet users 20 years ago with now there is a MASSIVE difference.
That was us back then, 20 years ago, the nerds, the sub-culture, the people who found this new internet thing fascinating.
Today it's EVERYBODY. And they're really not that fascinated with the internet but rather the content that they're consuming from the internet. In their view this content could come from anywhere, it just happens to come from the internet.
So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we'll be a miniscule minority.
That was us back then, 20 years ago, the nerds, the sub-culture, the people who found this new internet thing fascinating.
Today it's EVERYBODY. And they're really not that fascinated with the internet but rather the content that they're consuming from the internet. In their view this content could come from anywhere, it just happens to come from the internet.
So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we'll be a miniscule minority.
20 years ago, the internet was already mainstream in Western markets and we were in a repreive between the old walled gardens of AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy/etc and new agressively-walling gardens of Facebook/Twitter/etc.
That was the ideal era that many of us entrepreneurial nerds wish we could get back to. You could stand up an online business with a website, buy targeted ads for approachable prices, and bootstrap (often sucessfully if modestly) whatever weird idea you wanted to pursue. It could be local and community serving, or digital and global, and you could put all the pieces together yourself without worrying about some garden's arbitrary/anti-competitive policy change shutting you down overnight.
You're talking more about the 90's which was indeed cool for the hacker spirit and hobbyisy nerds, but not as cool (to me) as the era that bloomed just a little later.
That was the ideal era that many of us entrepreneurial nerds wish we could get back to. You could stand up an online business with a website, buy targeted ads for approachable prices, and bootstrap (often sucessfully if modestly) whatever weird idea you wanted to pursue. It could be local and community serving, or digital and global, and you could put all the pieces together yourself without worrying about some garden's arbitrary/anti-competitive policy change shutting you down overnight.
You're talking more about the 90's which was indeed cool for the hacker spirit and hobbyisy nerds, but not as cool (to me) as the era that bloomed just a little later.
The internet was TINY in 2004 compared to today.
There was about a third as many users worldwide and about 70% as many users specifically in developed countries.
Traffic has increased dramatically with broadband expansion and the streaming that soaks it up, and the number of connected devices exploder, but the number of users are actually only a modest change and the distribution of traffic has decreased tremendously as traffic consolidated onto the few "winning" brands.
When you use "tiny" in all-caps, I imagine you to mean an order of magnitude difference in users or well-visited services. It's nothing like that.
Traffic has increased dramatically with broadband expansion and the streaming that soaks it up, and the number of connected devices exploder, but the number of users are actually only a modest change and the distribution of traffic has decreased tremendously as traffic consolidated onto the few "winning" brands.
When you use "tiny" in all-caps, I imagine you to mean an order of magnitude difference in users or well-visited services. It's nothing like that.
Many “orders of magnitude” qualitatively.
Today is the 11150ᵗʰ of September 1993.
20 years ago was 2004 my guy not 1994
woof
Maybe this goes like usenet - spam technology improves to the point where the old open platform is unusable...
I'm more of a proponent for small community hosted nodes that require manual approval to join, and federate in a larger network.
That way each node in the larger community can vet new members, but they can still communicate across nodes. Sort of like ActivityPub, or something like it. Not trying to prefer one design over another, we'll see what comes.
That way each node in the larger community can vet new members, but they can still communicate across nodes. Sort of like ActivityPub, or something like it. Not trying to prefer one design over another, we'll see what comes.
I think that's the most succinct explanation of the problem that I've ever seen.
>So all of us old nerds, and new nerds, will continue using the internet, but we'll be a miniscule minority.
Ive long accepted low quality users focused on easy consumption. I'm not as welcoming of the realization of the Dead Internet theory. If I'm going to take time to engage with someone, they should at least have the good graces to be sentient.
Ive long accepted low quality users focused on easy consumption. I'm not as welcoming of the realization of the Dead Internet theory. If I'm going to take time to engage with someone, they should at least have the good graces to be sentient.
People talk about a "decentralized Internet" and immediately start talking about pie-in-the-sky solutions: Web3, Gopher, private Discords, etc.
We already had a successful era of decentralization with vBulletin and PHPbb boards in the 2000s. Reddit and Facebook Pages took over that niche, and started pulling up the ladder behind them by de-emphasizing posts that linked out to a third party site. The message was clear: got something to post? Post it on the site directly, don't link. Their advertising business relies on people spending as much time as possible on [myPlatform], as opposed to [yourSite].
Heck, even that famous article about "dead Internet" has its source in a forum topic, not a viral tweet. Because it's a forum post, it's not arbitrarily limited to 280 characters, there's actually room for nuance, both in the OP and the replies to it.
https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
We already had a successful era of decentralization with vBulletin and PHPbb boards in the 2000s. Reddit and Facebook Pages took over that niche, and started pulling up the ladder behind them by de-emphasizing posts that linked out to a third party site. The message was clear: got something to post? Post it on the site directly, don't link. Their advertising business relies on people spending as much time as possible on [myPlatform], as opposed to [yourSite].
Heck, even that famous article about "dead Internet" has its source in a forum topic, not a viral tweet. Because it's a forum post, it's not arbitrarily limited to 280 characters, there's actually room for nuance, both in the OP and the replies to it.
https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-...
And there was also IRC chat, which is a protocol, not a software/platform.
On the forums end, there's also things like ProBoards, which works like Discord in sense that they are hosted by a company (and thus pursuant to their terms), in which they act as the community "hub".
On the forums end, there's also things like ProBoards, which works like Discord in sense that they are hosted by a company (and thus pursuant to their terms), in which they act as the community "hub".
I miss those days when most websites implemented this.
For the old 2000s boards, there is Tapatalk, which was a lifesaver back in 2011-13 when many boards did not have mobile-friendly layouts. Unfortunately, Tapatalk enshittified rapidly by adding insane amounts of ads and other dark patterns to their app, forcing me to uninstall it.
Also they took over InvisionFree/Zetaboards, which also destroyed their customization.
> losing $90.8 million on $804 million of revenue in 2023 and never having turned a profit
how in the world could it possibly cost $900 million a year to run Reddit?
how in the world could it possibly cost $900 million a year to run Reddit?
Seems they spent $438,346,000 on research and development.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...
Meanwhile every actually interesting thing Reddit the company has done in my memory seems to link back to Josh Wardle, who came up with the "The Button" event and also the "Place" event, then left and created Wordle, then sold it to the New York Times for millions. They should just redirect 5% of their R&D funds to getting that guy back and letting him do whatever he wants.
Or maybe keep trying to get in on the NFT craze and working to carefully ensure third party apps can't work with Reddit. That's also a choice.
Or maybe keep trying to get in on the NFT craze and working to carefully ensure third party apps can't work with Reddit. That's also a choice.
Dang, didn't know he did all that pre-Wordle. I'd ask why game studios aren't eating him up, but he's probably set for life by now. Wonder what's on the horizons for him.
Apparently he joined "MSCHF." They describe themselves as "AN ART COLLECTIVE THAT ENGAGES ART, FASHION, TECH, AND CAPITALISM." Their products run from tech startup failure collectibles (get your mini Juicero and a mini Theranos Minilab today!), to oil paintings of ML feet, to a celebrity's iPhone full of the phone numbers of other celebrities (locked, password not included).
Sounds like an interesting place to work.
Sounds like an interesting place to work.
Oh no, $438 million dollars spent on research & development... for an internet forum. That is so tragic.
And after all that R&D, the only thing keeping many long-time users around is that old.reddit.com still lets you opt-out of the last 6+ years worth of R&D they have done on the interface.
Speaking to some mods, old. doesn’t cut it for moderation, so there’s that other side to consider.
And I guess that matters more as 3rd party tools have been locked out.
And I guess that matters more as 3rd party tools have been locked out.
[deleted]
Let’s start the rumour mill on what HN spends on R&D.
How many people is dang really?
How many people is dang really?
Aren't developer salaries, servers, etc., included in that? That's what I seem to recall from recent tax changes that were discussed here a few weeks ago.
Developer salaries are probably under Research & Development, further, given their employee count and likely mix of tech (it/dev/infra) to biz, that's the only line item likely large enough to house their engineering team.
> Cost of Revenue
> Cost of revenue consists primarily of payments to third parties for the cost of hosting and supporting our mobile applications and website. In addition, cost of revenue includes expenses directly associated with the delivery of our advertising and other services, including advertising measurement services and credit card and other transaction processing fees. Cost of revenue also consists of personnel-related costs, including salaries, benefits, and stock-based compensation.
That was only $111,011,000.
Edit:
This is incorrect, R&D does include R&D salaries.
> Cost of revenue consists primarily of payments to third parties for the cost of hosting and supporting our mobile applications and website. In addition, cost of revenue includes expenses directly associated with the delivery of our advertising and other services, including advertising measurement services and credit card and other transaction processing fees. Cost of revenue also consists of personnel-related costs, including salaries, benefits, and stock-based compensation.
That was only $111,011,000.
Edit:
This is incorrect, R&D does include R&D salaries.
I wonder how many of that is just handouts to friends' businesses under the name of "R&D". In Ireland we always joked about the business "overhead" mainly being spent on admiring the sun overhead from a tropical beach :)
Researching on how to make the UI even worse is no easy task.
Sounds like Twitter pre-Elon where 80% are woke commissars and 20% actually make the site go. That's a big pattern these days where a small group of people make everything work and generate enormous wealth then you have this huge overhang of people who find some sort of way to hang on to them by inventing and enforcing ideological purity contests.
Yuval Harari wonders what we'll do with people made useless by AI. They will be activists directed by AI generated propaganda campaigns to force all the people the AI doesn't control to comply.
Yup, that's the future with AI. You have a few AI researchers that program the robots and everyone else is crusading for justice and working in compliance. There jobs consist of inventing new things to be offended about and enforcing new rules to prevent their feelings from being hurt though everything they believe comes from AI generated propaganda campaigns.
Same thing happens at colleges were you got like $20 million spent on salaries for senior DEI person in charge of putting tampons in men's bathrooms and such whose job mainly consists of going to meetings and finding things to be offended about[1].
[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/virginia-taxpayers-a...
Yuval Harari wonders what we'll do with people made useless by AI. They will be activists directed by AI generated propaganda campaigns to force all the people the AI doesn't control to comply.
Yup, that's the future with AI. You have a few AI researchers that program the robots and everyone else is crusading for justice and working in compliance. There jobs consist of inventing new things to be offended about and enforcing new rules to prevent their feelings from being hurt though everything they believe comes from AI generated propaganda campaigns.
Same thing happens at colleges were you got like $20 million spent on salaries for senior DEI person in charge of putting tampons in men's bathrooms and such whose job mainly consists of going to meetings and finding things to be offended about[1].
[1]https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/virginia-taxpayers-a...
I highly doubt those 80% were working on ideological stuff. It's common in big tech companies to have too many cooks in the kitchen, and because the design process and tech stack tends to mimic an org chart, stuff gets semi-permanently more complicated as a result. There are also some teams doing projects/research that wouldn't normally make a lot of sense, but the interest rates were so low at times that companies had to stretch to do more random things.
Sometimes after a change of ownership, they cut whatever they consider fat. This is Broadcom's strategy for example, acquire and cut.
Sometimes after a change of ownership, they cut whatever they consider fat. This is Broadcom's strategy for example, acquire and cut.
Well, looking at the value of Twitter pre- and post acquisition, those 80% did do things that provided some positive value for the company.
You're forgetting the one thing that sets Reddit apart. They get crazy people to perform moderation tasks for free. It turns out that a lot of people don't ask for a paycheck as long as you let them push their ideology on an entire subreddit.
> Sounds like Twitter pre-Elon where 80% are woke commissars and 20% actually make the site go.
You seriously think 80% of Twitter was “woke commissars”?
You seriously think 80% of Twitter was “woke commissars”?
It's a fun speculative fiction premise but assumes that everyone else's feelings and grievances are the result of AI manipulation while your own feelings and grievances are authentic[1].
[1]https://xkcd.com/610/
[1]https://xkcd.com/610/
The way to counteract AI influence is to view the world as Bayesian and incorporate many different opposing views. I read both Russian and Western views of the Ukraine war on Telegram channels for example that regularly contradict each other. When I start reading something and I experience cringe, I view that as a positive signal that I'm getting information from a different perspective that I should evaluate and update my priors.
as opposed to the Elon-era where 95% is the Dear Leader Commissar and 5% actually make the site go
And the rest apparently goes to the CEO.
All they came up with is bog standard enshittification stuff. I could have consulted that to them for well under a hundredth of what they paid.
Maybe they're using Netlify? :P
Reddit's CEO and COO made $193M and $93M in 2023...
Why is a company paying one person a quarter of the revenue earnings? And mind you, a number that arguably no single being truly deserves?
Morals aside, 193m is almost double Tim Cook's compensation and a bout 90% of Sundar Pichai's. Public companies that made 1000x the revenue in a quarter, compared to this yearly revenue report. How is Spez justifying such compensation?
Morals aside, 193m is almost double Tim Cook's compensation and a bout 90% of Sundar Pichai's. Public companies that made 1000x the revenue in a quarter, compared to this yearly revenue report. How is Spez justifying such compensation?
He could have made it a profitable year just by cutting his salary.
193 million for CEO of a web forum? We truely live in interesting times...
Buy Reddit, fire the CEO and COO, and boom, you have nicely profitable company.
they must have pretty good control of the board or they probably would have been fired by the board
A few AWS services will bring you far in that bill
apparently "cost of revenue" which includes AWS/etc expenses was only ~$100M
easy. pay the CEO like he is a genius even if he makes insane decisions.
There's a lot of complaints here, the advice is decent but not magical. "Don't spend time and money on crap". Maybe the implication is "Do spend time and money on good services".
Reddit never owed me anything, never spent any money and was paid back for the time invested. Might spend 5 minutes per week on it now. Plenty of people are trying to make a better Reddit, nobody has targeted them with unfair competition.
Reddit never owed me anything, never spent any money and was paid back for the time invested. Might spend 5 minutes per week on it now. Plenty of people are trying to make a better Reddit, nobody has targeted them with unfair competition.
As much a piece of work that the founder was, Something Awful may have had a point. One time low (IMO) cost for access to a forum. Doesn't even have to he 10bux. Even $1 as a cost of entry fixes so many problems plauging the modern internet. Almost eliminates spam (bots or otherwise), deters trolling unless someone wants to spend dozens of dollars on alts, filters out a lot of younger folk who at least need access to a credit card to participate (so less liability for adult content should you choose to host it), and it lessens or removes the need to appeal to engagement and ads and whatnot.
Of course, the huge downside is networking effects and you now in the 2020s have to compete against "free" services. It shouldn't be such a hump to overcome if you appeal to the right crowd, but you also need to somehow appeal to the power users who will ultimately get your site off the ground. And those are never easy to find.
Of course, the huge downside is networking effects and you now in the 2020s have to compete against "free" services. It shouldn't be such a hump to overcome if you appeal to the right crowd, but you also need to somehow appeal to the power users who will ultimately get your site off the ground. And those are never easy to find.
Right - Reddit exists, and I can make up my own mind on whether I want to use it, how much I want to use it, and whether I want to volunteer as an unpaid mod.
I do not understand people who volunteer unpaid labor and then complain bitterly about it.
I do not understand people who volunteer unpaid labor and then complain bitterly about it.
>I do not understand people who volunteer unpaid labor and then complain bitterly about it.
Well, let's say you helped someone on Reddit.
What you were intending to do is to share your life experience with someone, making their, and maybe probably someone else's life meaningfully easier/save them some time. And, hopefully, someone will treat you the same way in return.
What you also have done is contributed said part of your life experience towards making some meaninglessly rich guy even richer, and who will enshittify the platform you presumably enjoy using in return, so that he can make pennies on top of the follar he already earns.
Well, let's say you helped someone on Reddit.
What you were intending to do is to share your life experience with someone, making their, and maybe probably someone else's life meaningfully easier/save them some time. And, hopefully, someone will treat you the same way in return.
What you also have done is contributed said part of your life experience towards making some meaninglessly rich guy even richer, and who will enshittify the platform you presumably enjoy using in return, so that he can make pennies on top of the follar he already earns.
Why did you "help" (in other words make a post/comment) that person on Reddit? Because you enjoy it, you enjoyed reading posts and comments by strangers, replying to them, and seeing your comments accumulate upvotes and other comments. Reddit gave you that experience for free.
Reddit also occupies the space that otherwise might permit a more useful, benevolent internet platform. From a certain perspective, Reddit is standing in the way of an internet that better facilitates the enjoyment you describe.
You could say that about nearly any good thing in life. Your current job/relationship may be holding you back from an even better one. Those leftovers you grabbed out of the fridge are occupying the space that could be taken by an even better meal. Every minute you spend watching a TV show you've already seen or a videogame you've already played is taking away time from your finite lifespan you could be spending on new, novel experiences.
If there's a better platform for giving you what you want, I'm sure you'd leave Reddit and never look back. If this platform you're imaging doesn't exist, how do you know it even could ever exist?
If there's a better platform for giving you what you want, I'm sure you'd leave Reddit and never look back. If this platform you're imaging doesn't exist, how do you know it even could ever exist?
These two things are not mutually exclusive. You can help someone via Reddit and Reddit also profits. But you aren't gonna get paid for it.
It doesn’t pay well, unless you’re crooked.
I’d be more worried about those that don’t complain.
I’d be more worried about those that don’t complain.
A "better Reddit" is a moderated Discourse messageboard (FOSS forum tool). Those exist: many software forums are on Discourse rather than pointing people to Stack Overflow or Discord.
> but a return to the dark ages of the internet where most traffic ran through a series of heavily-curated portals operated by a few select companies
This statement confuses me. I see how the fact that most people tend to cluster around a small number of platforms effectively at least trends this toward being more and more true, but what are the older "dark ages" referred to here? AOL? In the 90's you could take the easy route and sign up with AOL, but there were numerous dial-up ISPs you could choose from. Even then, you didn't have to use the AOL portal (though I'm sure non-tech savvy people who only used AOL for email never bothered to understand).
This statement confuses me. I see how the fact that most people tend to cluster around a small number of platforms effectively at least trends this toward being more and more true, but what are the older "dark ages" referred to here? AOL? In the 90's you could take the easy route and sign up with AOL, but there were numerous dial-up ISPs you could choose from. Even then, you didn't have to use the AOL portal (though I'm sure non-tech savvy people who only used AOL for email never bothered to understand).
AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc had isolated content and communities.
The internet at large (web, gopher, http, ftp, email, etc) existed and was available at universities and through regional ISP's and a smattering of local BBS's but for a very long time there was very little shared traffic between this common "internet" of services and those proprietary services.
The propriety services were delivering convenience, curation, cohesion, and features that the internet-at-large hadn't matured enough to deliver. Consumers liked that.
That's the "dark" time the author, and myself, generally see us trending back towards.
The internet at large (web, gopher, http, ftp, email, etc) existed and was available at universities and through regional ISP's and a smattering of local BBS's but for a very long time there was very little shared traffic between this common "internet" of services and those proprietary services.
The propriety services were delivering convenience, curation, cohesion, and features that the internet-at-large hadn't matured enough to deliver. Consumers liked that.
That's the "dark" time the author, and myself, generally see us trending back towards.
AOL only started allowing access to the Internet at large in 1993 (thus leading to the "Eternal September" that greybeards complain about to this day). Before then, AOL users were limited to what AOL provided. And there were other such services such as CompuServe and GENIE that were similar.
AOL didn't provide Usenet access until 1994. Eternal September started when dialup ISPs started providing access in 1993.
Right. Because AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, Excite, Yahoo, MyNetscape, etc held more sway per capita than Google alone holds ? We moved from a world with many “portals” to a world with effectively one.
Even Reddit, stackoverflow, and other “portals” originate most traffic from Google. Facebook is probably one of the rare “internet” estates that isn’t navigated to via Google, but I’ll betcha the browsers they start opens Google first.
The whole “the internet is dying” is a continuous and trite refrain. It’s not dying but continuously changing. There’s always subcultures in various places. But the mass market internet has always been corporate curated crap for profit. That won’t change. And the whole AI is ruining the universe is malarkey. SEO garbage has taken over most search results and it’s of such incredibly low quality that AI generated SEO is actually a significant step up. At least LLM AIs are trained on stuff that has the content looked for whereas the SEO crap is written by people with know knowledge of the subject. While the AIs may hallucinate a bunch of weirdness into a page, that’s no different than some SEO content monkey typing in nonsense to capture clicks. Probabilistically the AI is more likely to write something cogent.
Even Reddit, stackoverflow, and other “portals” originate most traffic from Google. Facebook is probably one of the rare “internet” estates that isn’t navigated to via Google, but I’ll betcha the browsers they start opens Google first.
The whole “the internet is dying” is a continuous and trite refrain. It’s not dying but continuously changing. There’s always subcultures in various places. But the mass market internet has always been corporate curated crap for profit. That won’t change. And the whole AI is ruining the universe is malarkey. SEO garbage has taken over most search results and it’s of such incredibly low quality that AI generated SEO is actually a significant step up. At least LLM AIs are trained on stuff that has the content looked for whereas the SEO crap is written by people with know knowledge of the subject. While the AIs may hallucinate a bunch of weirdness into a page, that’s no different than some SEO content monkey typing in nonsense to capture clicks. Probabilistically the AI is more likely to write something cogent.
>And the whole AI is ruining the universe is malarkey
Quantity is a quality of its own. In moderated forums there has been a distinct rise in moderation load because of AI generated "not quite" crap and bots that still do not contribute to the quality of discussions. This is what the death of the internet is about. It's turned into an ocean of piss and pollution that is and will continue to drive people away.
Quantity is a quality of its own. In moderated forums there has been a distinct rise in moderation load because of AI generated "not quite" crap and bots that still do not contribute to the quality of discussions. This is what the death of the internet is about. It's turned into an ocean of piss and pollution that is and will continue to drive people away.
AOL wasn't a "portal." It was the whole site. Companies advertised "AOL keywords" instead of domain names, and the content on AOL was specific to AOL. AOL didn't become what you'd think of as an ISP until later. You could think of it more like a really big BBS that charged hourly.
I think they mean the actual dark ages, as big tech has effectively created feudalism where users are trapped on their platforms/software/hardware generating profits for these companies. Much like serfs stuck farming for their lord/vassal/king.
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No one is trapped on any social media platform. Zuck and Musk aren't sending armed goons to kill anyone who dares to leave, in fact people have been leaving Twitter in droves.
Nowadays, for the average Internet user, content is on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube...
And back then, the "Internet" was AOL for a while - look at old ads, they often had their "aol keyword" in large type than their URL.
But shortly afterwards there was an explosion of web content and forums that over time has been digested back into giant conglomerates - but for a short, beautiful time, if you wanted something you had to go find it yourself, on site-owner's terms.
But shortly afterwards there was an explosion of web content and forums that over time has been digested back into giant conglomerates - but for a short, beautiful time, if you wanted something you had to go find it yourself, on site-owner's terms.
> "aol keyword"
i haven't had a retro memory pull that strong in a while
i haven't had a retro memory pull that strong in a while
It's really weird for me, because it was such a huge thing at the time, and I was there and never used it - even though my friend's connection to the Internet was through his mom's AOL account; it was just something you did and then minimized.
The comparison with low-background steel is especially interesting, because since we ('we' the human species) effectively stopped doing atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1960s, background levels have returned to within a few microsieverts per year of pre-war normal, and there barely still exists any specific need for materials manufactured prior to 1945.
I think that we are. The web mostly died a good while ago, killed by commercialization. I think that trend has continued and will continue until the blood-draining is complete.
But it depends on what you want the web to be, I suppose.
But it depends on what you want the web to be, I suppose.
The death knell was when blogs with personality and a single-topic focus started posting those "Here's our favourite vaccuum cleaner for Thanksgiving" type garbage.
That is but one cut in the thousand cuts that killed the internet.
The fact your useful site could be DDOSed by any kiddy so you had to put it behind cloudflare is but another. The fact that security became a huge burden on most self hosted software was another. Moderation and spam if you allowed posting is just another. Getting all of your content copied and Google boosting the copier above you yet another.
The fact your useful site could be DDOSed by any kiddy so you had to put it behind cloudflare is but another. The fact that security became a huge burden on most self hosted software was another. Moderation and spam if you allowed posting is just another. Getting all of your content copied and Google boosting the copier above you yet another.
There is a direct parallel from companies using open source code to build monetization platforms while paying open source developers nothing; to companies using user generated content to build LLMs. At least with LLMs it is a self-poisoning well. The internet is dead, long live the internet.
The lead in to this post says
> None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits, or performing the vital-but-thankless role of moderation, will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing
.. and then mentions Sam Altman's investment. His announcement in fall of 2014 specifically said:
> First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time.
https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit
So _are_ there people who were highly involved reddit community members in 2014 who will get a payday? Or did they already have a chance to cash out some time ago, and only some fraction held on until now? Or did that 10% contribution to "people in the reddit community" not happen at all?
> None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits, or performing the vital-but-thankless role of moderation, will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing
.. and then mentions Sam Altman's investment. His announcement in fall of 2014 specifically said:
> First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time.
https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit
So _are_ there people who were highly involved reddit community members in 2014 who will get a payday? Or did they already have a chance to cash out some time ago, and only some fraction held on until now? Or did that 10% contribution to "people in the reddit community" not happen at all?
And in fairness, I can see why it might have been hard to give shares to the reddit community:
- aren't there regulatory/legal problems with having a very large number of people owning equity in a company that's not public?
- associating active reddit users with real people with addresses, accounts, etc would be real lift, and potentially alienating to users who have been operating under pseudonyms
- establishing that you eventually get paid for activity seems like it creates a natural incentive for low-quality/high-volume (spam?) engagement, karma rings, etc. Rewarding only the people who _actually_ add value is messy
- aren't there regulatory/legal problems with having a very large number of people owning equity in a company that's not public?
- associating active reddit users with real people with addresses, accounts, etc would be real lift, and potentially alienating to users who have been operating under pseudonyms
- establishing that you eventually get paid for activity seems like it creates a natural incentive for low-quality/high-volume (spam?) engagement, karma rings, etc. Rewarding only the people who _actually_ add value is messy
The moderators and users of Reddit aren’t the people paying for the hosting and development of the service - a service which has never turned a profit.
I think this idea that “moderators should be paid” or that users of Reddit deserve shares of the company just because the website wouldn’t be very useful without the users is such a stretch.
That would be like saying that people who post classified ads in the newspaper should own the newspaper. After all, the newspaper would have far less revenue and value without classifieds.
I think this idea that “moderators should be paid” or that users of Reddit deserve shares of the company just because the website wouldn’t be very useful without the users is such a stretch.
That would be like saying that people who post classified ads in the newspaper should own the newspaper. After all, the newspaper would have far less revenue and value without classifieds.
> The moderators and users of Reddit aren’t the people paying for the hosting and development of the service - a service which has never turned a profit.
Seems like Reddit not turning a profit is strictly Reddit's problem — not users or even really basic business model, but spending.
Seems like Reddit not turning a profit is strictly Reddit's problem — not users or even really basic business model, but spending.
I agree with you, but the point stands that if Reddit can’t turn a profit their users aren’t really generating any lasting value.
If I juice 20 oranges per hour and sell that orange juice for $5, you might say that I created $5 in value, but if minimum wage is $20 all I accomplished was losing $15.
Similarly, Reddit moderators only generate business value if you assume the website costs less to maintain than it does in real life.
If Reddit users and moderators would like to start a non-profit alternative they can go ahead and try that.
It’s not like Reddit has been an especially spendy tech company, either, they’ve had well under 1000 employees until very recently. They’re the 15th most popular website in the world and their headcount is not particularly extreme.
If I juice 20 oranges per hour and sell that orange juice for $5, you might say that I created $5 in value, but if minimum wage is $20 all I accomplished was losing $15.
Similarly, Reddit moderators only generate business value if you assume the website costs less to maintain than it does in real life.
If Reddit users and moderators would like to start a non-profit alternative they can go ahead and try that.
It’s not like Reddit has been an especially spendy tech company, either, they’ve had well under 1000 employees until very recently. They’re the 15th most popular website in the world and their headcount is not particularly extreme.
Tangentially, this is a decent example for why minimum wage is actually a bad thing. There can be useful work available that is eliminated by the artificial price fixing.
Aren’t you describing crime in general?
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say, but I don't think so.
If I'd like to, say, fold custom envelopes for less than minimum wage while I'm watching TV, no crime is being committed, and society is not being harmed.
There are certain social restrictions that are set to prevent social harm, and then there are those that are set because some people thought it would prevent social harm but in fact does the opposite; minimum wage falls into the latter.
If I'd like to, say, fold custom envelopes for less than minimum wage while I'm watching TV, no crime is being committed, and society is not being harmed.
There are certain social restrictions that are set to prevent social harm, and then there are those that are set because some people thought it would prevent social harm but in fact does the opposite; minimum wage falls into the latter.
> That would be like saying that people who post classified ads in the newspaper should own the newspaper.
I don’t think this is fair. When you publish an ad in the paper you’re not also responsible for the moderation, ensuring the newspaper content is appealing, interesting, well organized, or building your own tools to make it so.
But on Reddit, prolific users and mods did all that only to get a gigantic finger that led to the blackout and the killing of all third party apps only to leave the dumpster fire of a client that the official one is.
I don’t think this is fair. When you publish an ad in the paper you’re not also responsible for the moderation, ensuring the newspaper content is appealing, interesting, well organized, or building your own tools to make it so.
But on Reddit, prolific users and mods did all that only to get a gigantic finger that led to the blackout and the killing of all third party apps only to leave the dumpster fire of a client that the official one is.
I'm not a heavy reddit user so please correct me if I got this wrong.
- I think the "giving 10% shares" thing morphed into reddit creating its own crypto coin which was supposed to be backed by shares? https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-scoops-up-50m-serie...
- But a coin/gold system was retired last year, but I can find no mention of these being in any way related to shares by this point https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/13/23794403/reddit-gold-awar...
So I kinda think that the 10% shares thing was a nice idea which more or less got abandoned in favor of a "reward system" which got watered down and killed.
Perhaps someone else has more background here. Naturally when I search I mostly get unrelated posts about other stock and crypto on subreddits, and reddit community people starting their own coin.
- I think the "giving 10% shares" thing morphed into reddit creating its own crypto coin which was supposed to be backed by shares? https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/30/reddit-scoops-up-50m-serie...
- But a coin/gold system was retired last year, but I can find no mention of these being in any way related to shares by this point https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/13/23794403/reddit-gold-awar...
So I kinda think that the 10% shares thing was a nice idea which more or less got abandoned in favor of a "reward system" which got watered down and killed.
Perhaps someone else has more background here. Naturally when I search I mostly get unrelated posts about other stock and crypto on subreddits, and reddit community people starting their own coin.
The word "giving" is the thing that changed. Reddit plans to allow its power users to get in on the IPO, as in they'll have the opportunity to purchase an amount of shares at the IPO price. That may or may not be a good thing, depending on whether you think Reddit is worth $6.5 billion.
They're not giving it to us, they're letting us buy it.
They want us to be the bag holders.
Yes, if you are a mod or an early user, you've received the option to buy early stock. I've received an e-mail from them, BUT I am not a US citizen so it was for nil.
Here's their email
"tl;dr – you’re invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock at the same price as institutional investors when we IPO. Details about eligibility and next steps follow. This (long, dense) email has all the info we can provide due to legal restrictions.
As you may have heard, Reddit has taken steps toward becoming a publicly traded company with the initial public filing of our registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on February 22, 2024. Yes, it’s happening.
And because you have helped make Reddit what it is today, you now have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors.
We’re offering a Directed Share Program (“DSP”) that invites eligible users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to participate in our initial public offering (“IPO”). (Including you!)
Program Requirements While being selected to pre-register is the first step, there are certain legal and regulatory requirements to participate in the DSP that are outside of Reddit’s control. Bear with us here…
To be eligible for the DSP, you must: Be a current U.S. resident; You will be asked to provide the DSP Administrator a valid social security or permanent resident number, along with other personal information. Reddit will not have access to this data. Please note that U.S. residents using a VPN may face application limitations if the VPN locates them in certain non-U.S. jurisdictions. Be at least 18 years old; Provide your full legal name and an email address; Not be a current or former Reddit employee (FTE). When the DSP launches (a few weeks after pre-registration ends), individuals who have been confirmed for the program will be contacted by our external DSP Administrator. You will then be asked to provide additional information securely to the DSP Administrator to confirm your eligibility.
Here's their email
"tl;dr – you’re invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock at the same price as institutional investors when we IPO. Details about eligibility and next steps follow. This (long, dense) email has all the info we can provide due to legal restrictions.
As you may have heard, Reddit has taken steps toward becoming a publicly traded company with the initial public filing of our registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on February 22, 2024. Yes, it’s happening.
And because you have helped make Reddit what it is today, you now have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors.
We’re offering a Directed Share Program (“DSP”) that invites eligible users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to participate in our initial public offering (“IPO”). (Including you!)
Program Requirements While being selected to pre-register is the first step, there are certain legal and regulatory requirements to participate in the DSP that are outside of Reddit’s control. Bear with us here…
To be eligible for the DSP, you must: Be a current U.S. resident; You will be asked to provide the DSP Administrator a valid social security or permanent resident number, along with other personal information. Reddit will not have access to this data. Please note that U.S. residents using a VPN may face application limitations if the VPN locates them in certain non-U.S. jurisdictions. Be at least 18 years old; Provide your full legal name and an email address; Not be a current or former Reddit employee (FTE). When the DSP launches (a few weeks after pre-registration ends), individuals who have been confirmed for the program will be contacted by our external DSP Administrator. You will then be asked to provide additional information securely to the DSP Administrator to confirm your eligibility.
Wait, these are not the same.
"you now (2024) have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors" is very different from in 2014 saying "the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community".
Is there anyone who was a very active community participant prior to fall 2014, who as part of the series B got (was _given_) shares?
"you now (2024) have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors" is very different from in 2014 saying "the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community".
Is there anyone who was a very active community participant prior to fall 2014, who as part of the series B got (was _given_) shares?
Ah ok. I dont know.
Obviously I can't see the future, if I had to guess, the most valuable thing to do with this option to buy (is it a contract?) is to sell it before the IPO. If that is legal, then it could be lucrative for these early contributors.
Does it say how people "qualify" for that email?
I think there are thresholds in the S-1
Yes. From the S-1:
Users and moderators who created an account on or before January 1, 2024 are potentially eligible for the directed share program. Eligible participants must reside in the United States and be at least 18 years of age. Further, eligible users and moderators must be in good standing on our platform and cannot be a current or former Reddit employee.
We will invite users and moderators to participate in the directed share program in six phased priority tiers. We will assign each eligible participant to a tier based on that participant’s contributions to Reddit. User contributions will be measured in karma (a user’s reputation score that reflects their community contributions). Moderator contributions will be measured by membership and moderator actions on our platform. Tier 1 will include certain users and moderators identified by us who have meaningfully contributed to Reddit community programs. Tier 2 will include users who hold at least 200,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 5,000 moderator actions. Tier 3 will include users who hold at least 100,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 2,500 moderator actions. Tier 4 will include users who hold at least 50,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 1,000 moderator actions. Tier 5 will include users who hold at least 25,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 500 moderator actions. Tier 6 will include all other eligible users and moderators.
Users and moderators who created an account on or before January 1, 2024 are potentially eligible for the directed share program. Eligible participants must reside in the United States and be at least 18 years of age. Further, eligible users and moderators must be in good standing on our platform and cannot be a current or former Reddit employee.
We will invite users and moderators to participate in the directed share program in six phased priority tiers. We will assign each eligible participant to a tier based on that participant’s contributions to Reddit. User contributions will be measured in karma (a user’s reputation score that reflects their community contributions). Moderator contributions will be measured by membership and moderator actions on our platform. Tier 1 will include certain users and moderators identified by us who have meaningfully contributed to Reddit community programs. Tier 2 will include users who hold at least 200,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 5,000 moderator actions. Tier 3 will include users who hold at least 100,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 2,500 moderator actions. Tier 4 will include users who hold at least 50,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 1,000 moderator actions. Tier 5 will include users who hold at least 25,000 karma and moderators who have performed at least 500 moderator actions. Tier 6 will include all other eligible users and moderators.
I'm going with it was a nice sentiment that was never going to actually happen.
Maybe AI is facilitating a new "Commons" in that people will feel more of a right to take and reuse and consume things created by these sites with a better understanding that they collectively contributed to their creation.
... except the "exorbitant" pricing on API access means that it's _not_ a commons that others can take from in a scalable way.
What an awful time for a tech company to IPO, I bet they are kicking themselves for waiting so long. A decade ago the idea was to maximize for user engagement and you can always monetize later. As companies began to monetize we adopted to term "
enshittification" to describe how that feels on the user perspective. Today, after several products have gone down this path, we see that the revenue of a fully monetized community is less than investors originally thought, and there are moat concerns.
Reddit is way to late to IPO. They cannot sell the idea of future growth. They have already gone deep down the enshittification path and are still not profitable. On top of that, they missed the top of the market for what they are selling by several years.
Are we watching the internet die? We are certainly watching a lot of it become worse, and the Reddit IPO is a good time to point that out.
Reddit is way to late to IPO. They cannot sell the idea of future growth. They have already gone deep down the enshittification path and are still not profitable. On top of that, they missed the top of the market for what they are selling by several years.
Are we watching the internet die? We are certainly watching a lot of it become worse, and the Reddit IPO is a good time to point that out.
Mostly Web 3.0 is dying because it is a scam.
Regardless of whether you consider it a scam, it's not worthy of the "web 3.0" title. Like, why did npm allow Ethereum to have the "web3" name instead of simply "ethereum"? It's so annoying.
npm is a member of Microsft's Cabal o' Privacy Haters;
Microsft & Scum need the Web3.0 gimmick to hype up their shareholders &/or fanbois.
Microsft & Scum need the Web3.0 gimmick to hype up their shareholders &/or fanbois.
Oh, they own npm, I forgot. Just when I thought I'd gotten rid of MSFT.
A want a P2P social networking construct where I can pick my friends and input sources, design or choose my own filtering and boosting algorithms, and leave the rest of the web/platforms to rot.
We should have gone P2P in 200X, but Facebook and Google took us down a different path. Bittorrent was good. Semantic Web kind of understood the task, but it was academic and not leveraged. Now we understand the assignment and have all the experience necessary to build the thing.
Mastodon and ActivityPub are not the solution. Bittorrent was.
We should have gone P2P in 200X, but Facebook and Google took us down a different path. Bittorrent was good. Semantic Web kind of understood the task, but it was academic and not leveraged. Now we understand the assignment and have all the experience necessary to build the thing.
Mastodon and ActivityPub are not the solution. Bittorrent was.
Bittorrent is a great way to download big files. Heck, if Docker used Bittorrent to download files it might even work on my DSL connection but I guess reliability is an "enterprise" feature.
Bittorrent is not a good way to download small bits of data like status updates. What do you think is so bad about ActivityPub? Should we fall back on RSS and just settle for stale data sometimes and excessive polling other times?
Bittorrent is not a good way to download small bits of data like status updates. What do you think is so bad about ActivityPub? Should we fall back on RSS and just settle for stale data sometimes and excessive polling other times?
While BitTorrent itself isn't great for small messages, P2P as a model is fine. The issue of P2P vs something like RSS is you have to be "platformed" to host RSS or even ActivityPub. You need some sort of publicly available server, a TLS cert that doesn't trigger scary warnings, and some ability to deal with inevitable abuse from assholes (DDoS etc). These are doable things for me but impractical for many.
A fully P2P status update network would really only need Internet connectivity to participate.
A fully P2P status update network would really only need Internet connectivity to participate.
To host RSS you just need a domain name and a server. It's pretty hard to stop somebody from getting those.
Or does the new USA constitution of 2024 state that "free" speech is not as in speech as we used to understand it but more in the sense of free beer? Maybe we can trade the possibility for people to put a lot of effort into having meaningful to say for the "free" ability for people to express their membership in a tribe.
Or does the new USA constitution of 2024 state that "free" speech is not as in speech as we used to understand it but more in the sense of free beer? Maybe we can trade the possibility for people to put a lot of effort into having meaningful to say for the "free" ability for people to express their membership in a tribe.
> To host RSS you just need a domain name and a server. It's pretty hard to stop somebody from getting those.
The word "just" is doing some heavy lifting here. Even cheapo web hosting (that automatically handles TLS) and a domain name still costs more than the "free" of Facebook/Twitter/etc. That's besides the non-zero technical competence to set it up and then actually update the RSS.
Then you're at the mercy of the host's AUP/EULA. You can have your account terminated for a number of reasons, like getting DDoSed because someone doesn't like what you said or your account is hacked and is used to host malware.
Most people, even the technically inclined, don't necessarily want to be their own system administrator. It's an order of magnitude more effort than signing up for a centralized platform and pressing a button. RSS might be fined for a certain demographic but it's completely untenable for the majority.
That is besides the ergonomics of RSS. Because RSS readers want to display item titles because they treat all items like more formal news articles they de facto require posts to have titles. Common blogging platforms also want titles on posts.
Short form content is attractive to many people because it doesn't require formalities like titles or subjects. Short form platforms even understand inline tags (hashtags etc) so posts have even less friction then the typical blog software.
RSS, because of common patterns of readers and generators, sucks for carrying short form content. To make it work you'd need not just generators to make items without titles but also add a "short form" mode to feed readers that don't try to make every feed item look like a long form blog post. Both sides of the equation would also need to capture things like references to posts to display posts as replies to others.
It's all doable but requires agreement on what changes need to be made to the format/schema then implement those in feed readers and generating software. The Atom format tried some of this but too few bits of software really leveraged the format.
I say all this as someone that loves the idea of RSS. The lack of affordance to short form message-like content is a major limitation of the format and a design oversight. I think social media would be very different today if RSS (as an ecosystem) handled informal short form content better.
The word "just" is doing some heavy lifting here. Even cheapo web hosting (that automatically handles TLS) and a domain name still costs more than the "free" of Facebook/Twitter/etc. That's besides the non-zero technical competence to set it up and then actually update the RSS.
Then you're at the mercy of the host's AUP/EULA. You can have your account terminated for a number of reasons, like getting DDoSed because someone doesn't like what you said or your account is hacked and is used to host malware.
Most people, even the technically inclined, don't necessarily want to be their own system administrator. It's an order of magnitude more effort than signing up for a centralized platform and pressing a button. RSS might be fined for a certain demographic but it's completely untenable for the majority.
That is besides the ergonomics of RSS. Because RSS readers want to display item titles because they treat all items like more formal news articles they de facto require posts to have titles. Common blogging platforms also want titles on posts.
Short form content is attractive to many people because it doesn't require formalities like titles or subjects. Short form platforms even understand inline tags (hashtags etc) so posts have even less friction then the typical blog software.
RSS, because of common patterns of readers and generators, sucks for carrying short form content. To make it work you'd need not just generators to make items without titles but also add a "short form" mode to feed readers that don't try to make every feed item look like a long form blog post. Both sides of the equation would also need to capture things like references to posts to display posts as replies to others.
It's all doable but requires agreement on what changes need to be made to the format/schema then implement those in feed readers and generating software. The Atom format tried some of this but too few bits of software really leveraged the format.
I say all this as someone that loves the idea of RSS. The lack of affordance to short form message-like content is a major limitation of the format and a design oversight. I think social media would be very different today if RSS (as an ecosystem) handled informal short form content better.
I think the implication here is that ActivityPub is still server to server. Is better distributed than one closed-monolith to another, but BitTorrent was really good client to client. Protocol wise it’s probably not perfect for small updates, but imagine if you just had a magnet link to your friends’ “website” which, instead of being hosted somewhere is available when they update it and gets distributed around peers.
Sounds like Bitcoin to me. Bitcoin took so long to get invented because if you went to a computer science conference and said you'd give a talk about how you built a node network 20,000 computers in it that does as much work as 1 computer did people would just laugh at you.
Now if you had a system with 20,000 computers where there are 20 copies of your content in the system that might be interesting, but peer-to-peer networks can easily be a way to make Amazon Web Services look cheap the same way that Bitcoin makes Visa and Mastercard look fast and inexpensive.
Now if you had a system with 20,000 computers where there are 20 copies of your content in the system that might be interesting, but peer-to-peer networks can easily be a way to make Amazon Web Services look cheap the same way that Bitcoin makes Visa and Mastercard look fast and inexpensive.
You don't need durability or even reliability. It can be completely ephemeral. It's social commentary, and that doesn't need to live more than a day. There isn't even a need for an SLA.
A simple in-memory object store with basic signing for authorship would work. This isn't even a hard problem. It's a UI/UX problem. Let individual clients / implementers worry about customer specific asks, like video, media, voting, and persistence. The core protocol should just be about exchanging messages in a swarm and clients keeping track of the nodes that they like.
The big win here is that everyone gets to decide upon their own algorithm and curation. You could compose your own Hacker News and suppress stories about Bitcoin. The next big win is that it's censorship resistant (you can opt into whatever personal censorship or automatic curation you want). There are no misaligned incentives between the platform and the consumer, so you can do whatever you want with the product. Finally, since the data and protocol are first class, you can meld it into whatever you'd like.
A simple in-memory object store with basic signing for authorship would work. This isn't even a hard problem. It's a UI/UX problem. Let individual clients / implementers worry about customer specific asks, like video, media, voting, and persistence. The core protocol should just be about exchanging messages in a swarm and clients keeping track of the nodes that they like.
The big win here is that everyone gets to decide upon their own algorithm and curation. You could compose your own Hacker News and suppress stories about Bitcoin. The next big win is that it's censorship resistant (you can opt into whatever personal censorship or automatic curation you want). There are no misaligned incentives between the platform and the consumer, so you can do whatever you want with the product. Finally, since the data and protocol are first class, you can meld it into whatever you'd like.
As someone who builds recommendation, filtering and moderation systems I think most of the discussion on the topic is naive.
About a billion pieces of content are posted to social media a day, maybe you can look at 100 of those, so no matter how you look at it content is being winnowed down by a ratio of 1-to-10,000,000. Maybe I can afford to show you one comment that was inspired by Fox News's ceaseless agenda spamming on certain issues. Trouble is, some people like to keep repeating things that other people repeat and they're going to cry censorship if I am not showing you 99/100 pieces of content. Trouble is all that spam displaces real content that somebody put blood, sweat and tears into plus it also poisons the well and drives consumers away. (You never hear complaints about "censorship" in the West when it is a book or an investigative journalism project that takes person-years, it is always in the context of low-effort imitation, spam, etc.)
This 1971 book is head and shoulders better than anything I've seen written recently
https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med...
about the problem of personalized news media. I find it quite interesting that the book predicted we were going to have something like the WWW almost 15 years before we actually did. (Technologically we did, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel. The trouble was the lack of a business model to make it a sustainable business outside France. Technology had to progress so far that it was so cheap that we didn't have to think about it as a business when we were deploying to people...)
Most notably Bagdikian points out the severity of the filtering problem, that the editor of a small town paper looking at the AP feed in 1971 could spend at most 6 seconds deciding what article to run.
In recent years we've had an epidemic of aquired situational narcissism where someone whose life was just work, sleep, eat, repeat suddenly discovers that the government did something really bad with respect to COVID-19 and now they wake up and their computer is now a command center and they are trying to organize everybody. I will hear what they have to say but I am not going to stand for them repeating and this person has another 999 just like them and, sorry, I listened to the first person once and just don't have time for the other 999.
That's how I see it.
About a billion pieces of content are posted to social media a day, maybe you can look at 100 of those, so no matter how you look at it content is being winnowed down by a ratio of 1-to-10,000,000. Maybe I can afford to show you one comment that was inspired by Fox News's ceaseless agenda spamming on certain issues. Trouble is, some people like to keep repeating things that other people repeat and they're going to cry censorship if I am not showing you 99/100 pieces of content. Trouble is all that spam displaces real content that somebody put blood, sweat and tears into plus it also poisons the well and drives consumers away. (You never hear complaints about "censorship" in the West when it is a book or an investigative journalism project that takes person-years, it is always in the context of low-effort imitation, spam, etc.)
This 1971 book is head and shoulders better than anything I've seen written recently
https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med...
about the problem of personalized news media. I find it quite interesting that the book predicted we were going to have something like the WWW almost 15 years before we actually did. (Technologically we did, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel. The trouble was the lack of a business model to make it a sustainable business outside France. Technology had to progress so far that it was so cheap that we didn't have to think about it as a business when we were deploying to people...)
Most notably Bagdikian points out the severity of the filtering problem, that the editor of a small town paper looking at the AP feed in 1971 could spend at most 6 seconds deciding what article to run.
In recent years we've had an epidemic of aquired situational narcissism where someone whose life was just work, sleep, eat, repeat suddenly discovers that the government did something really bad with respect to COVID-19 and now they wake up and their computer is now a command center and they are trying to organize everybody. I will hear what they have to say but I am not going to stand for them repeating and this person has another 999 just like them and, sorry, I listened to the first person once and just don't have time for the other 999.
That's how I see it.
Thank you for posting this. Until you've been on the infrastructure side of the problem you'll never truly grasp how big the internet is and how much of it is crap. I had managed a lot of email and SMTP filtering in the past and had a few users that really complained when things got past the spam filter. One user was complaining they were getting around 20 or so spams per day out out of about 100 received messages, and I agreed it seemed high compared to most users. Then I looked at the number of messages we blocked for that one user alone. Around 3 to 4 thousand messages every single day.
Without moderation and without limits spammers would just use up all the bandwidth and compute they could find blasting you off the face of the map.
Without moderation and without limits spammers would just use up all the bandwidth and compute they could find blasting you off the face of the map.
> Now if you had a system with 20,000 computers where there are 20 copies of your content in the system that might be interesting
ZeroNet is about a decade old, though it looks like development has stalled.
ZeroNet is about a decade old, though it looks like development has stalled.
The interesting part of cryptocurrency is that it's a trustless database. Not easy and comes with big costs.
Make a website where each user has an RSS feed and posts/reposts stuff to that, mainly links to things they've found interesting. "Following" someone means subscribing to their RSS feed. That'd be federated out of the box.
That was the secret of Google reader. Being able to subscribe to friends feeds. Social networking based on RSS.
Wow. Didn't know it could do that.
I showed up to the internet party around 2011, a little late for my age, so I was still getting my legs and kind of missed "being there" for a few events, like Megaupload going down and Google Reader getting killed.
I'm honestly starting to get a little stunned at the number of number of times I see people say "yeah, Google Reader could do [this-or-that]".
I showed up to the internet party around 2011, a little late for my age, so I was still getting my legs and kind of missed "being there" for a few events, like Megaupload going down and Google Reader getting killed.
I'm honestly starting to get a little stunned at the number of number of times I see people say "yeah, Google Reader could do [this-or-that]".
I was around then. Never knew anyone who used Google Reader, though. Megaupload going down, now that was a big event.
I was thinking, someone must've tried this before. Didn't know Google Reader was that someone.
> A want a P2P social networking construct where I can pick my friends and input sources, design or choose my own filtering and boosting algorithms, and leave the rest of the web/platforms to rot.
With the obvious caveat that it's not done, ATProto is pushing towards this. Pick your personal server (your PDS), pick an aggregator (or multiple) to get a firehose from, delegate moderation and feed creation to other systems, view it through a mostly-standardized appview.
With the obvious caveat that it's not done, ATProto is pushing towards this. Pick your personal server (your PDS), pick an aggregator (or multiple) to get a firehose from, delegate moderation and feed creation to other systems, view it through a mostly-standardized appview.
> where I can pick my friends and input sources, design or choose my own filtering and boosting algorithms
It's not P2P, but that seems to be what Bluesky is aiming for. Whereas Reddit fights end up with /r/MyTopic, /r/MyTopic2, /r/BetterMyTopic, etc., you could have competing curators for #MyTopic and choose to view any one or any union or intersection of them.
It's not P2P, but that seems to be what Bluesky is aiming for. Whereas Reddit fights end up with /r/MyTopic, /r/MyTopic2, /r/BetterMyTopic, etc., you could have competing curators for #MyTopic and choose to view any one or any union or intersection of them.
Secure Scuttlebutt is probably close to what you want but it seems dead (all the main implementations seem abandoned).
You may enjoy Scuttlebutt and other gossip-based protocols.
We're either watching it die, or we're watching its immune response to some nasty tumors as people fuck off back to niche forums, the fediverse, etc.
The internet isn't going to die. The web may die, but the internet carries a lot more than html traffic.
Internet is being divided into big conglomerates ruled by the most wealthy corporations. Knowledge is being held back and closed behind login-walls and pay-walls. There is a global censorship introduced in which people are being convicted automatically, and only then they can only prove innocence, but sometimes they don't because no one answers or there is no way of discussing the matter with a human being
Corporations are owned by people. Corporations aren’t wealthy, they are wealth.
Don't worry about the Internet, it will survive this just fine. It was designed to reroute around damage like the "Reddit IPO".
The era of "The Net" as a magical place away from the world and its troubles is well and truly gone. I think that's what oldsters like us mourn the most - the world has invaded full force and brought its troubles with it. It's just that now we're starting to notice, as those easy-peasy centralized platforms inevitably turn the screws even as the spammers vandalize anything that's open.
When the internet was young the predators were small, but now that it's grown the predators are nation state sized. You can be DDOSed off forever if some monied actor chooses that for you. And that is tiny, as you say, to the raw torrent of spam looking to infected your site with their message. It's enough to kill any host.
>once again offering users nothing in return for their hard work.
What does this guy want users to get? Is the platform not enough?
What does this guy want users to get? Is the platform not enough?
I took two points from this part of the article. First, that the expected exchange for years was "users create content, the companies provide the platforms and show ads to pay for it". But over time, the companies have not just adopted new ways of profiting off of the users (which may feel more exploitative than simple advertising) but also reduced the functionality of the platforms.
And second, that if there are vast amounts of money to be made off of all this activity, it's fundamentally not just for all of that money to go to the people who run the infrastructure, rather than some of it also going to the people who create and moderate the communities that make the infrastructure worth money at all.
If most of the money flowing in to a company like Reddit went directly toward improving the user experience, then maybe the original deal that "the platform itself is your reward" would still be fine. But as soon as there are executives and investors getting big cash payouts, that means that a whole lot of user-created value is being siphoned off: the deal doesn't feel nearly as fair anymore.
And second, that if there are vast amounts of money to be made off of all this activity, it's fundamentally not just for all of that money to go to the people who run the infrastructure, rather than some of it also going to the people who create and moderate the communities that make the infrastructure worth money at all.
If most of the money flowing in to a company like Reddit went directly toward improving the user experience, then maybe the original deal that "the platform itself is your reward" would still be fine. But as soon as there are executives and investors getting big cash payouts, that means that a whole lot of user-created value is being siphoned off: the deal doesn't feel nearly as fair anymore.
He's a former journalist:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/about/
He resents how social media destroyed traditional media via free labor from users, that statement a perfect reflection of that sentiment.
He resents how social media destroyed traditional media via free labor from users, that statement a perfect reflection of that sentiment.
I mean, traditional media was never big on paying the people it interviewed or the people that were photographed (or owners of the objects photographed) unless you were some “celebrity” with an agent.
I just want them to stop ruining every good platform out there. The enshitfication process of Twitter and Reddit has been remarkable in this sense.
I think this is the idea behind the post, users shouldn't "get" anything, they just need to stop destroying every good online experience left.
I think this is the idea behind the post, users shouldn't "get" anything, they just need to stop destroying every good online experience left.
Kagi shows the way forward: monthly subscription to not get an enshittified product. And once one service gets enshittified, the user will move their subscription to another service.
We probably are watching the Internet die. If we want something better then we are going to have to build it.
The internet or the web? Because putting a trillion in infrastructure for your own internet doesn't seem likely.
Now if you're talking about running on IP, we'll whatever system you're going to build is going to inherent all the problems of the internet instantly when someone here on HN makes a IP to magic wonderland gateway a day later.
Now if you're talking about running on IP, we'll whatever system you're going to build is going to inherent all the problems of the internet instantly when someone here on HN makes a IP to magic wonderland gateway a day later.
You can't, it's very expensive and controlled now: https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/696629352701493248/why-go-n...
>"You'll need to be on Tumblr to see this particular blog "
I see what you did there!
EDIT:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221102132003/https://www.tumbl...
I see what you did there!
EDIT:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221102132003/https://www.tumbl...
I think the internet is going to recede in value, on account of lack of trust. It already is mainly just a bunch of corporate shop fronts. AI is not going to improve the user experience - it's only going to become more personal and more irritating.
[deleted]
Ive been using lemmy since the API shenanigans from Reddit and, apart from the not so smooth onboarding (a problem with all Fediverse applications) the experience is pretty similar to Reddit, only lacking the volume.
Since Reddit is following the enshittification path to try to pump up its valuation (ex: forced push to app use) I imagine that Lemmy will continue its slow organic growth until it hits critical mass. Hopefully all reddit investors would have exited until then...
Since Reddit is following the enshittification path to try to pump up its valuation (ex: forced push to app use) I imagine that Lemmy will continue its slow organic growth until it hits critical mass. Hopefully all reddit investors would have exited until then...
I hope so too, but how is Lemmy hosted when it is at the volume of Reddit? Supporting lemmy.world on Patreon?
Or if niche communities are found on niche instances, how do I participate without either keeping up with inter-instance politics or just creating local accounts?
It feels possible to scale Lemmy organizationally, but it also not something to take for granted.
Or if niche communities are found on niche instances, how do I participate without either keeping up with inter-instance politics or just creating local accounts?
It feels possible to scale Lemmy organizationally, but it also not something to take for granted.
Fair question. If maybe they could somehow distribute the DB load over a network of users...
"These people have names - Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (which has its own model called LLaMA), Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Satya Nadella of Microsoft - and they are responsible for trying to standardize the internet and turn it into a series of toll roads that all lead to the same place."
Treacherous cretins.
Treacherous cretins.
Saying that posters and mods are not getting value from the content they generate because they are not getting paid implies that reddit as a platform has no value. If you moderate the astronomy sub because you love astronomy and get joy from the community, then you are profiting from your involvement with or without getting paid.
This blog post is the death of the internet. As you scroll down, it suddenly forces a pop up to subscribe to the blog via email. There is no respect to the reader at all and makes the internet a worse place to use. Perhaps the message would be more effective if it wasn’t doing what it laments.
I Agree, this is just typical boomer behaviour.
Seems to me that there's probably a market for websites that do more curating and filtering for real people.
Seems to me that there IS a market for web sites that offer something more than social commentary, product pitches and ads. That are genuinely useful. That help accomplish needed, wanted, useful and necessary things.
Yes, such places exist but are in the very minority.
Yes, such places exist but are in the very minority.
So we're moving back to what Yahoo! was originally?
5 times this website popped "subscribe to my newsletter". 2 times as full screen annoying pop up and 3 times in between paragraphs. If this crap is not direct evidence of "internet dying" idk what is
I even acquiesced (using a fake address expressing my displeasure with their aggression) to the first popup yet the bombardment continued.
Reddit was done long before the IPO, even before the moderator revolt. I don't really find value in any of the niche subreddits, the only use i found is discussing, er sorry, shitposting about politics again and again as a pastime. Sure there are times when you can get an answer if you shout loud enough in some subreddit but it 's rare anymore. I don't even know why they are IPOing so long after their product peaked. Are any investors seriously expecting future returns?
People keep finding ways to discuss , all around the internet. No, the internet is not dying as a communication medium, it's dying as a content medium. IMO, twitter has made a comeback as a more relaxed, (and yes, more free) discussion place. The format is not conductive to information density but maybe they 'll figure something better
People keep finding ways to discuss , all around the internet. No, the internet is not dying as a communication medium, it's dying as a content medium. IMO, twitter has made a comeback as a more relaxed, (and yes, more free) discussion place. The format is not conductive to information density but maybe they 'll figure something better
For me people are a mirror of internet. People turned into soulless super consumers. Unfortunately like many people here I am part of it. But if i had the opportunity i would step out of that world.
> Are We Watching the Internet Die?
Short answer, no. I was in college when the internet went public. It's very much alive and well and exceeding all expectations.
Short answer, no. I was in college when the internet went public. It's very much alive and well and exceeding all expectations.
We've been saying this for decade[s] now haven't we?
The question is no longer is it dying, its how do we change it or even replace it.
The question is no longer is it dying, its how do we change it or even replace it.
Oh, honey, it was dead two decades ago.
Reddit revenue idea: sue the heck out of developers of various LLMs and other models trained upon relatively high-value Reddit content, and switch to licensing the Reddit corpus at fees high enough to put Reddit in the black.
Also, reconcile with contributors, and reverse some recent changes.
Also, reconcile with contributors, and reverse some recent changes.
They just licensed the data to Google for $65m, so it’s very possible to reconcile the remaining 90M they’re in the hole for.
But it’s not clear if a license will be needed.
Oh and the CEO made much more than that 90M last year, so you could cut his salary and immediately be profitable, no AI sellout required.
But it’s not clear if a license will be needed.
Oh and the CEO made much more than that 90M last year, so you could cut his salary and immediately be profitable, no AI sellout required.
We don’t know who else they were already licensing it out to.
I think a contract with Google is too big to keep it under the radar (or Google wants their involvement to be known).
I think a contract with Google is too big to keep it under the radar (or Google wants their involvement to be known).
The internet obviously isn't dying. It may be returning to the sphere of the nerds though, where there is an corporate, milquetoast internet for the plebes and a more open, decentralized network for us nerds. Unless the government starts filtering all traffic and activity the internet network will live on.
Yes.
Honestly, this article feels a bit like a jumble of separate ideas. Dare I say, word salad.
It has too many separate barely-related ideas about some barely-related websites with a sprinkle of AI.
Take the example of Reddit. Yes, third party apps were effectively banned except for those who want to deal with paying a monthly fee.
As someone who used to use one of those third party apps, one of its main benefits was to avoid advertisements. Reddit is a company that has never turned a profit. I’m not sure what person expects them to keep allowing people to access their API directly and cut out advertisements.
When we bust out the word “enshittification” I feel like all logic gets thrown out the window and it turns into sensationalism. A Reddit that isn’t profitable is a Reddit that will die anyway, regardless of how enshittified it is.
The Internet isn’t only made up of a handful of bad websites bad corporate leadership which are on the decline, it’s still an incredibly diverse place where new ideas come to fruition.
It has too many separate barely-related ideas about some barely-related websites with a sprinkle of AI.
Take the example of Reddit. Yes, third party apps were effectively banned except for those who want to deal with paying a monthly fee.
As someone who used to use one of those third party apps, one of its main benefits was to avoid advertisements. Reddit is a company that has never turned a profit. I’m not sure what person expects them to keep allowing people to access their API directly and cut out advertisements.
When we bust out the word “enshittification” I feel like all logic gets thrown out the window and it turns into sensationalism. A Reddit that isn’t profitable is a Reddit that will die anyway, regardless of how enshittified it is.
The Internet isn’t only made up of a handful of bad websites bad corporate leadership which are on the decline, it’s still an incredibly diverse place where new ideas come to fruition.
Its not just advertisements its getting a useable site at all. The new style reddit is terrible. It takes forever to load. When you read comments they start to crop so narrow that it not only puts in dozens of line breaks it will put the break in the characters of words. Old.reddit.com in comparison loads pages in a tenth the time and shows all the comments as you’d expect. Luckily that still works or I’d fully abandon the site.
> Its not just advertisements its getting a useable site at all.
Yeah, it is particularly unusable for the community/commenting aspect of the site, because of how often you need to "click to load more", which sometimes means content popping into the middle and sometimes means navigating away so that you lose your place (and sometimes previously mid-loaded stuff) when you return.
IMO it's heading into some of the same pitfalls that killed Digg, which over-focused on the headline-links and promoting specific material, at the expense of the person-to-person communication.
Yeah, it is particularly unusable for the community/commenting aspect of the site, because of how often you need to "click to load more", which sometimes means content popping into the middle and sometimes means navigating away so that you lose your place (and sometimes previously mid-loaded stuff) when you return.
IMO it's heading into some of the same pitfalls that killed Digg, which over-focused on the headline-links and promoting specific material, at the expense of the person-to-person communication.
Enshittification will exist for as long as the profit-seeking motive exists.
As long as MAU is the prime target, enshittification will continue.
As long as MAU is the prime target, enshittification will continue.
"None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits, or performing the vital-but-thankless role of moderation, will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing"
So? It's not a paid job, nobody said it was. You don't even own your Reddit posts. If you want something in return for your time spent, don't agree to terms you disagree with. Plenty of moderators are just doing it for the sake of it.
So? It's not a paid job, nobody said it was. You don't even own your Reddit posts. If you want something in return for your time spent, don't agree to terms you disagree with. Plenty of moderators are just doing it for the sake of it.
As linked in another thread on this story, Sam Altman said this almost 10 years ago when investing in reddit [0]:
> First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. We have some creative thoughts about the mechanics of this, but it’ll take us awhile to sort through all the issues. If it works as we hope, it’s going to be really cool and hopefully a new way to think about community ownership.
How is that "new way to think about community ownership" going for the reddit contributors?
[0] https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit
> First, it’s always bothered me that users create so much of the value of sites like reddit but don’t own any of it. So, the Series B Investors are giving 10% of our shares in this round to the people in the reddit community, and I hope we increase community ownership over time. We have some creative thoughts about the mechanics of this, but it’ll take us awhile to sort through all the issues. If it works as we hope, it’s going to be really cool and hopefully a new way to think about community ownership.
How is that "new way to think about community ownership" going for the reddit contributors?
[0] https://blog.samaltman.com/reddit
To answer your question, no it hasn't panned out. Reddit users aren't generally paid for their posts, nor was there any promise that they would be, even from Altman. Is the implication that some people got their hopes up from one investor's opinion on this?
>it's become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly
it has become apparent? oh, this is someone having their "light bulb" moment. wait till they read about actual slavery in 2024!
it has become apparent? oh, this is someone having their "light bulb" moment. wait till they read about actual slavery in 2024!
I'm just thrilled he said "toe" and not "tow."
Seriously: in a few years they'll be the Pets.com of our era.
Seriously: in a few years they'll be the Pets.com of our era.
>in a few years they'll be the Pets.com of our era
Pets.com only lasted for 2 years (November 1998 - November 2000)
Reddit is active since 2005, 18 years
Pets.com only lasted for 2 years (November 1998 - November 2000)
Reddit is active since 2005, 18 years
Yeah, pets.com misplaces it pretty badly. For better and worse, Reddit is the usenet of the second/social/2.0 wave of the web, perhaps better at some points because of the wider reach of the web, and often worse for the same reason (as well as the picket fence of ownership).
18 years, but privately held, and never profitable.
[deleted]
BuckRogers(2)
No.
Reddit is doing an IPO, so the internet is dying? That's, um, not the greatest evidence. Neither the Reddit IPO, nor Reddit itself, show that the internet is dying.
The AI angle is more reasonable. That at least has the chance of doing real damage. Sites may have to find a way to restrict the damage, and search engines may have to prioritize results from sites that do. It's not an easy problem, but the traffic will go to the sites that best solve it. Nobody wants to read an infinite amount of AI spew.
Reddit is doing an IPO, so the internet is dying? That's, um, not the greatest evidence. Neither the Reddit IPO, nor Reddit itself, show that the internet is dying.
The AI angle is more reasonable. That at least has the chance of doing real damage. Sites may have to find a way to restrict the damage, and search engines may have to prioritize results from sites that do. It's not an easy problem, but the traffic will go to the sites that best solve it. Nobody wants to read an infinite amount of AI spew.
>Sites may have to find a way to restrict the damage
The best you can do is create AI that detects AI but that's hardly effective. Twitter can't even get rid of "PUSSY IN BIO".
>search engines may have to prioritize results from sites that do
You mean the same search engines that prioritize Quora, Pininterest and Medium which have all also become progressively worse?
> but the traffic will go to the sites that best solve it. Nobody wants to read an infinite amount of AI spew.
We have already witnessed the sites with the most aggressive recommendation algorithms and quick dopamine generators like TikTok win, not sites with high quality content.
The best you can do is create AI that detects AI but that's hardly effective. Twitter can't even get rid of "PUSSY IN BIO".
>search engines may have to prioritize results from sites that do
You mean the same search engines that prioritize Quora, Pininterest and Medium which have all also become progressively worse?
> but the traffic will go to the sites that best solve it. Nobody wants to read an infinite amount of AI spew.
We have already witnessed the sites with the most aggressive recommendation algorithms and quick dopamine generators like TikTok win, not sites with high quality content.
Reddits attempt at community moderation killed it.
Even hyper specific subs, like city subs, are victim to the ideological whims of their moderators. My local subreddit has basically become useless because mods have banned so many people, or attempted to ban questions which are generally related to the city. They want typical city related questions or discussions to go into weekly roundup threads, and the main sub is just for current events (read: politics).
It’s extremely frustrating. I know it’s kind of boring to complain about mods, but seriously Reddits moderators are what poisoned it.
Even hyper specific subs, like city subs, are victim to the ideological whims of their moderators. My local subreddit has basically become useless because mods have banned so many people, or attempted to ban questions which are generally related to the city. They want typical city related questions or discussions to go into weekly roundup threads, and the main sub is just for current events (read: politics).
It’s extremely frustrating. I know it’s kind of boring to complain about mods, but seriously Reddits moderators are what poisoned it.
I agree that city subs have basically been ruined by overbearing moderation, but ultimately it's a small part of Reddit. Go somewhere else for that. Plenty of other subs are doing fine or are thriving.
Wasn't it this way from the start, though?
Moderation really used to be just removing spam or abuse. At some point it became enforcing topics.
While yes a subreddit about trains should stay in topic space about trains, mods have overstepped that. Take for instance the Star Trek subreddit. Criticism of Star Trek discovery is banned, despite being clearly on topic.
While yes a subreddit about trains should stay in topic space about trains, mods have overstepped that. Take for instance the Star Trek subreddit. Criticism of Star Trek discovery is banned, despite being clearly on topic.
Yeah, I think topics should be separated from communities in future Reddit-like websites. I mean it's an indisputable fact that some article is about trains, and what's arguable is whether it needs to be discussed in that particular community.
In my mind it looks something like this:
1) user posts a link (and upvotes some initial topics)
2) other users vote on those topics, also can propose some additional ones
3) topic mods can superdownvote/remove some topics (in case of trolling etc.)
4) community mods select posts for their communities from available posts, possibly automatically (based on upvoted topics)
In my mind it looks something like this:
1) user posts a link (and upvotes some initial topics)
2) other users vote on those topics, also can propose some additional ones
3) topic mods can superdownvote/remove some topics (in case of trolling etc.)
4) community mods select posts for their communities from available posts, possibly automatically (based on upvoted topics)
The community thing seems fine. If you don't like how a community is run, you can go to a different one.
This is how it works now, and I'm thinking about alternative ways. Communities do also exist in my model, and you can do the same thing. But you don't need to be a hardcore reddit user which has esoteric knowledge like "these articles are allowed in /r/trains1, and these are better to be posted to /r/trains5".
I'm watching Bluesky with interest, because I think it claims to offer that; you would in principle create a ‘feed’ matching (tagged-#Trains AND (approved-by-Trains1 OR approved-by-Trains5) AND NOT rejected-by-CrapFilter23).
The interface is horribly twitter-like but does at least have threading (and unlike !&*#&$ Mastodon, respects `:preferred-color-scheme`), and it's not clear that it couldn't have an alternative old.reddit-like interface.
The interface is horribly twitter-like but does at least have threading (and unlike !&*#&$ Mastodon, respects `:preferred-color-scheme`), and it's not clear that it couldn't have an alternative old.reddit-like interface.
I think the way HN does it would be good; give me the “showdead” option.
> None of the people that spent hours of their lives lovingly contributing to Subreddits ... will make a profit off of Reddit's public listing
They'll not make money because they're stupid. I have never participated in this kind of scam (this is what I call getting free labor to prop up a private company). But several people seem to love donating free work for private companies.
They'll not make money because they're stupid. I have never participated in this kind of scam (this is what I call getting free labor to prop up a private company). But several people seem to love donating free work for private companies.
I am genuinely curious what is different about us posting here?
dang gets paid, basically
That's what it comes down to - this site has a particular purpose, and it is open about it being basically a freebie given out to help Ycombinator; worth whatever hosting + dang costs these days.
That's what it comes down to - this site has a particular purpose, and it is open about it being basically a freebie given out to help Ycombinator; worth whatever hosting + dang costs these days.
does he?
Nothing. I don't expect something in return for my HN posts, and I don't care what someone does with them. It's not a job.
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People in tech and the valley like judging things through the eyes of tech capitalism, and basically think that if “you’re good at something, never do it for free”.
The truth is that many people don’t view the world through these lens. They just enjoy a hobby and a community. Participating in a forum is a fun experience for many, and I’d guess the average Redditor would be less happy if they bought into the mindset that they must be paid for the writings.
The truth is that many people don’t view the world through these lens. They just enjoy a hobby and a community. Participating in a forum is a fun experience for many, and I’d guess the average Redditor would be less happy if they bought into the mindset that they must be paid for the writings.
True, but it is slightly galling when someone else is making handsome profits off your free labour. Like, I might happily give up a few hours to coach my child's football team at the weekend. But if someone is charging everyone to come watch the games and keeping the profits for themselves, that would be annoying.
Of course, Reddit has always been a for-profit business so arguably people should have known. But the fact that the mechanics of monetisation are deliberately obscured, together with the fact that (as I understand it) Reddit has actually been loss-making for most of its history makes it easy to overlook.
Of course, Reddit has always been a for-profit business so arguably people should have known. But the fact that the mechanics of monetisation are deliberately obscured, together with the fact that (as I understand it) Reddit has actually been loss-making for most of its history makes it easy to overlook.
"Reddit has always been a for-profit business so arguably people should have known" is what I would say. Some people don't mind if their time is being profited from. I understand if some people do mind, but then they shouldn't be spending so much time on Reddit.
> If someone profits off me it must mean I am being exploited.
This is a fallacy.
This is a fallacy.
You may not realize it, but it is true. You're trying to think about exploitation as a personal perception issue, but it is an entirely economic thing.
No nothing about personal perception. It is completely normal and common that someone profits off me while I myself am also happy with the situation. It is called a trade. Every interaction that's not a zero-sum game is two people profiting of each other and being (usually) fine with it.
Yes, but also Reddit is giving away free access to a site where anyone in the world can exchange ideas with each other.
I know that companies use this data as the basis for commercial offerings and I am completely fine with that, but I know that the data will always be available for free as well. As a side note, in general I’ve found the local OSM community to be much nicer than the local Waze admins.