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The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility. People expect a public utility to, perhaps, not be that innovative and maybe
by beloch 3y ago
The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility.
People expect a public utility to, perhaps, not be that innovative and maybe a little poorly run at times. What they do expect from a public utility is long-term reliability. They expect it to be there, doing what it does now, five or ten years from now. For some people (e.g. the blind), all of reddit is going dark on July 1st.
Reddit is not a public utility. It's owners have decided that short-term profits are more important than serving as a long-term non-profit public utility. I can't fault any business person for making this decision, but it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now.
Reddit is many beneficial things. Just for one example, it's a new foundation of journalism. How many professional journalists rely on reddit to find and research news stories? If you read your local city's sub and then read your local newspaper the following day, there will be a surprising amount of repeated material.
Governments in many countries run public broadcasting corporations, public news programs, and even subsidize privately owned news companies, although in many cases that's mere corporate welfare. They do this because they realize that journalism is a cornerstone of free society.
The functions that reddit now performs are too important to leave in the hands of short-sighted corporate executives who have absolutely zero interest in anything beyond their next quarterly report and the bonuses tied to it. We must not jump from reddit into the hands of yet another corporation or this will simply happen again.
Public funding has produced things like lemmy.ml, but such projects aren't ready to scale nor, arguably, interested in doing so. This is something the UN should tackle to prove they still have relevance in the modern world. Instead of simply issuing non-binding warning after warning, perhaps it's time for international organizations to build the kind of public infrastructure that provides a benefit to all of humanity.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago>> How many professional journalists rely on reddit to find and research news stories? That would be very unprofessional journalists. At least with the issues of the current war the flow of information is as follows: small telegram channels -> large telegram channels -> translation -> twitter -> reddit.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility. (...) Reddit is not a public utility. It's owners have decided that short-term profits are more important than serving as a long-term non-profit public utility. I can't fault any business person for making this decision, but it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now. Exactly this. And the same applies to Twitter and Facebook as well. And probably increasingly Discord. In the end, both sides lose because of this misunderstanding (well, except the investors on the business side win). There is demand for both, and there is space for both, and I think the society at large is going to slowly realize that the two things - utility-like social media and regular private business - are different, and learn to differentiate between them - and maybe then, finally, the utility-like social media will be created.
- Ekaros 3y agoAlso that we actually pay for public utilities and like. Water, Sewage, Electricity, District Heating, Waste management, Internet etc. All have real monthly payments. But we have gotten too used to be subsidised on online... Bills have to be paid somehow and time of free content is coming to pause.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoGood luck getting Anglo countries to pay for public infrastructure. I'm an advocate for transit in the US, and the amount of people who perceive any problem in services that they don't use and use that as justification to defund it is huge. I really doubt you'll be able to convince people to fund something with such marginal utility. Anglo cultures hate paying for other people.
- rkangel 3y ago> The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility That's a good summary of the problem, and I would extend that to say that public utilities should be in control of the public, which means federated services. My hope at this point is that Reddit massively doubles down (and that Twitter goes back to trying to eat itself) so the migration to Lemmy and Mastodon continues. Neither has quite crossed the chasm out of the early adopter/tech sector users. It looked like Mastodon got close at one point and then Twitter ran out of completely idiotic ideas.
- chongli 3y agobut it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now. There's no such thing as a free lunch! Even if we were to somehow (miraculously) get the public to pay for a free utility-scale Reddit-like site, there would still be huge problems. For one, making it public causes it to be thrust into the political spotlight. Conventional utilities (electricity, running water) are just about as boring and uncontroversial as anything you can imagine, yet there are still political fights over them. I cannot even imagine how ugly the political fights over something like Reddit would be. People would be out in the streets protesting over the kind of content that goes on there. They would demand an extreme level of moderation which would alienate all but the most anodyne users. It just wouldn't do to have the government pay for a free-speech zone like that.