With the benefit of hindsight, I think “free-form platforms” like reddit or youtube may be the road to mediocrity. Youtube is still the major player even thoug

With the benefit of hindsight, I think “free-form platforms” like reddit or youtube may be the road to mediocrity. Youtube is still the major player even though twitter, Facebook & netflix grew around them. It is less opinionated on how video should be consumed. Less opinionated on what should be consumed. Anyone can post. Anyone can see it. Problem is, youtube doesn’t really have a purpose that it is trying to serve. At least not an obvious one. It has a lot of content. It’s searchable (I hate that the web is no longer searchable..). It’s the obvious place to put stuff. It’s everywhere. But… The platform does not distinguish between the lazy mashup with a clickbait headline and the youtuber making original content for people who would really miss it, and could not get it anywhere else. No preference. No values. No taste. No goal. Just views. One content is as good as the next. Monetisation reinforced this, as did the partial rollback. Go to the youtube homepage now. Is the content good? Read the comments. If the conversation interesting? In the middle is Facebook. It started off highly opinionated. Use real names (big deal at the time). Connect to your real friends. Watch their videos and read their posts. Over time though, Facebook has lost opinions. Stuff is stuff. Views, likes, pokes, plays and comments. Features that get users doing more stuff, they win. This caused their political pickle. Political baiting gets lots of views, likes, pokes, plays and comments. So, as they “optimized” for more stuff, that’s the stuff they got. On the other end of the spectrum are wikipedia and stack overflow (for example). Highly opinionated. Wikipedia is for XYZ. Stackoverflow is for ABC. If you want something else, go someplace else. HN is opinionated too. It takes effort to avoid comment threads full of bullbaiting an even more to avoid a flood of one liners. So Reddit… Reddit did avoid uniformity, that’s a nice way of putting it. It has values. It has things (e.g. censorship) that it does not want to do. But, I feel it still lacks purpose. What does Reddit actually want, what’s the ideal comment or post or sub reddit? Personally, I would love more HN-like places, more wikipedia like places, places with a job to do. gdubs has an excellent comment about what Reddit is doing wrong (promoting impulse gut reactions), and I suspect it’s related. When you don’t have an opinion about what you are trying to do or be, and so you’ll tend to end up with whatever is cheap. It happened to youtube and it happened to Facebook.