8 ms·

It really feels like we're witnessing the end of an era. Elon is doggedly piloting Twitter into the ground and Reddit seems strangely compelled to follow his le

• HL33tibCe7 3y ago
  It’ll probably get worse if anything
  • jacquesm 3y ago
    I'm all for a complete reboot of a 100% non-commercial version of the web.
    • lamontcg 3y ago
      Really it looks like the commercial web is about to lock itself down hard into strongly walled gardens. It is definitely time to rebuild. I don't know if that'll be ActivityPub and decentralization, but it needs to be something else.
• TillE 3y ago
  Instagram doing a fediverse thing is a big deal, and makes me really optimistic about the future of ActivityPub. We don't have it all figured out just yet, but I do think we're going to see a decentralized future of social media, which is pretty exciting.
  • olah_1 3y ago
    Their use of ActivityPub is just a way to quickly bootstrap social media functionality using time tested libraries. Just like they did with XMPP.
    • threeseed 3y ago
      It's likely more a way for Instagram to avoid monopoly and associated regulatory discussions. By basing it on an open protocol they can be one of many trusted clients rather than a closed, proprietary service.
  • __jem 3y ago
    Instagram is also apparently building a Twitter-like app, which as much as I hate FB/IG, would probably convince me to switch into their ecosystem again.
    • iguana_lawyer 3y ago
      I don’t use Facebook because of all the crimes against humanity but I’ll be honest. If the cage match happens and Zuckerberg beats the snot out of Musk, I’m a Facebook user for life. I think a lot of people would feel the same. Meta has a chance to turn everything around.
  • s3p 3y ago
    I want this to release so bad. It would be the most natural step for me having used Twitter for the last 10 years off and on. There's just a comedic aspect that I haven't found yet in other social media apps. Twitter was a really special place before Elon took over.
  • dahwolf 3y ago
    The rest of the fediverse seems to disagree and is now in an obnoxious war to preblock Meta or not.
• diegocg 3y ago
  The weirdest thing of this era is that we don't see the big players (eg. Google) trying to take advantage of this situation and create an alternative.
  • granshaw 3y ago
    Google and new products… Hahahahahhhaha
  • dylan604 3y ago
    Googs has showed us in the past it is unable to make a product that people want to use, and that they have no stomach for a slow grind to get a product to beat the establishment.
    • anigbrowl 3y ago
      au contraire, they can definitely make products people like but then insist on either ruining them or shutting them down.
      • dylan604 3y ago
        fine, I'll rephrase: social products. Remember Google+? You and 10 other people do. Most people's memory of Google+ was how to avoid it after it became a mandatory thing for all gmail users, and then it was just gone. So yeah, people really liked that product
        • cavisne 3y ago
          Imo Google (basically by accident) owns the best place social network for the next decade - YouTube. Human generated content will become rare and more valuable, which is why the remaining non walled gardens (Reddit and Twitter) are quickly raising the drawbridge. Video will be the last medium to fall to AI generated content pretending to be human generated, and by cloning tiktok across to YouTube shorts they remove the barriers to entry for humans. Social media nowdays is not about friends, it’s about algorithms & creator monetization. YouTube is #1 on monetization by a huge margin. Any text based social media network will be absolutely overrun with LLMs.
• partiallypro 3y ago
  If Meta were smart, they'd immediately shift away from their Metaverse nonsense and use this as a massive opportunity to do things they are pretty good at (hate them or love them.) I know they are working on a Twitter competitor, but they need to find a way to help get the followers they once had back, if they were to switch. They could even ultimately challenge Reddit. I know that would not be an ideal outcome, but as a business with that core competency, I'd be putting a huge effort to take advantage of all of this.
  • seydor 3y ago
    I d say the opposite. Their headsets are great and affordable, but their obsession with making everything social is ... annoying at this point? They keep adding social stuff to the oculus, but why the hell would i want to be stalked while i m deep into another world wearing glasses. They need to quit their old habits and focus on the future not the past
    • partiallypro 3y ago
      The future in question is not profitable (yet, if at all anytime soon). Social media is and will be for a long time in competent hands. You can think that their VR stuff is cool but also know their core competency is good social experiences. You can hate Facebook and Instagram all you want but they are both very popular and profitable.
  • worrycue 3y ago
    > They could even ultimately challenge Reddit. Frankly I feel Google would be more motivated to challenge Reddit. Since so many of Google’s search results go to Reddit, they might as well try to take over that part of the web rather than leaving it in the hands of mercurial leadership of Reddit. The only problem is possible retaliation from Reddit and potential antitrust problems if other similar sites feel threatened.
    • raverbashing 3y ago
      Except Google seems completely incompetent at creating new products (though maybe YT shorts is the exception that proves the point) and very bad at handling community
• PheonixPharts 3y ago
  I'm always a bit surprised how few people realized how many "nice things" from the last decade plus have been heavily subsidized by VC money (which itself was created from low interest rates). Every cool startup that people loved started by burning cash. This made Uber cheap, DoorDash cheap, Youtube helpful and creative, Facebook about connecting with classmates, Twitter a free public forum, Reddit a playground for forums of all possible varieties, Imgur an ad-free alternative to ad-laden image hosting sites, 0% loan available for purchasing anything, etc, etc. But all of this was possible because all of these companies spent more than they made. In fact, most of these listed still do spend more than they make but they're going through contortions trying to change that and many might not survive it. For those that do their products will unquestionably be inferior to what we had in the 2010s. There's this belief that technology can only go forward, only get better, but what I think we'll see as we move into the 2020s is a growing realization that things were substantially better in the 2010s... but only because we were putting everything on a credit card and not worrying about the bill that eventually had to be paid.
  • AlexandrB 3y ago
    What's frustrating about all this is the resources wasted on growing businesses that were fundamentally unsustainable. I think a tougher economic climate would have been better for innovation long-term.
    • bardak 3y ago
      Honestly outside of the Youtube/Imgur I don't think these companies are unsustainable. The problem is the VCs are aiming for huge returns. Instead of focusing on their niche and running a lean but profitable business they are forced to chase trends and exponential growth. Who on Reddit wanted chat or live streams. Why is Facebook spending so much money on videos. does Uber really make any money off hellocopters rides. These aren't what people came to these platforms for and are just costing them a huge amount of money.
      • Nathan2055 3y ago
        Most of these companies seemingly were in a good place, and then started doing stupid pivots to try and make even more money than they already were. Reddit was doing fine as a text-only forum supported by advertising and Reddit Gold. Then they went a billion dollars in debt building the redesign which is widely disliked by power users (who are responsible for most of Reddit’s actual activity thanks to volunteer moderation combined with the Pareto principle), and at the same time decided to add native image and video hosting and take on all the costs associated with that. Everything since then has really been chasing whatever’s popular. After Twitch got big, they added livestreams, which didn’t go anywhere. After Discord got big, they added chat, which didn’t go anywhere. During the NFT boom, they invested big in those, which wasted a lot of money and didn’t go anywhere. Now AI is the new hotness, and they’re following Elon’s lead by treating the site as a static text repository which more value being sold to people training AIs than any value that could be gained from just...running the site. This boom will end, either by way of hitting the peak of what’s currently possible, updates to copyright law or other regulations, or just by the AI companies remembering they can just download the Common Crawl database for free and get the exact same content without paying Twitter or Reddit (or even specific dumps of Twitter or Reddit content if that’s what they really want; those are widely available in places like the Internet Archive). Imgur was never going to be sustainable on its own, since it’s basically impossible to monetize an image hotlinking service by definition. However, they brilliantly decided to pivot the site to being its own image sharing community (with all of the monetization opportunities that allows), while still supporting the original use case as a sort of “unintended” feature (while actually being the whole reason the site was originally made in the first place). Then they suddenly forgot that was the plan, probably after several managerial/executive swaps, and started shutting down everything that wasn’t part of the “community” system, even though the “community” was really created just to subsidize everything else. Facebook’s adventures with video are probably the single most damaging thing to ever happen to the Internet. Basically, they saw that video ads were wildly more profitable than anything else they were doing, proceeded to inflate their video stats by counting anyone scrolling past an autoplaying video as a “view”, told the entire web that text was dead and video was the future (causing hundreds of major sites to shut down their writing departments in favor of mainly producing videos), used all of these manufactured stats to get massive investment in video ads, and then just kind of shrugged when everything eventually collapsed. YouTube has been in a good place consistently since the mid-2010s, and just really likes pretending that they aren’t. Like I said with Facebook, video ads are really profitable when done right, and YouTube operates at a big enough scale that the bandwidth and storage costs of hosting all of humanity’s video content is offset by the number of people watching Mr. Beast eight seconds after he posts a new video. The problem is that they’re always trying to optimize for more revenue, leading to massive pushes for family-friendliness to keep advertisers happy, pushing whatever the latest “format” is (at the moment, Shorts) because that’s what advertisers are most interested in since it gets the most views, and just generally trying to hyper-optimize every aspect of the website to further improve their margins. All of these sites could have simply continued with their original business models and maintained small but lean businesses, and they’d probably be able to even keep getting moderate growth thanks to network effects. But they wanted all the money and they wanted it right now, leading to extreme overextension into whatever else is currently popular, and it only ever leads to the core business collapsing because the people who were maintaining it are off selling NFTs or trying to build a video player.
• TigeriusKirk 3y ago
  The shift is that the content itself now has tangible value. So far it's been the attention of the users that has been monetized, primarily via advertising. But now the content generated by the users has value as input into AI training sets. And AI companies are scrambling to gather as much as they can as rapidly as they can. The data itself, not the attention of the users, is what is now being harvested. The companies hosting the data are right to intervene, there's no reason to allow incredibly well-funded AI organizations hoover it all up for free. Where it's going wrong is how the social companies are intervening. Their goal is correct, their methods are not.
  • blowski 3y ago
    And yet, by shrinking the reach of posts, there must be far less content being generated. Isn't that the tightrope social networks have always been walking?
  • imartin2k 3y ago
    This seems to become this year’s biggest unanticipated second order effect of LLMs: UGC and organic human-generated content in general is suddenly valuable in a different way than before. This should totally accelerate the move of “quality content” behind paywalls or signup walls. Only commodity content, low quality content, and AI-generated content will remain on the open web.
• olalonde 3y ago
  It doesn't feel like that to me. Elon reported that Twitter hit a new all time high of "user seconds" last week. Reddit usage doesn't seem to have gone down much. In my opinion, what you are really experiencing is wishful thinking.
  • aquova 3y ago
    It's going to be hard to continue hitting record highs if you're limiting how much of your content people are able to see.
    • olalonde 3y ago
      That's probably why the limits are temporary.
      • user_named 3y ago
        They're not temporary they're indefinite
  • lljk_kennedy 3y ago
    How is user seconds defined?
    • c-cube 3y ago
      Users coming for seconds, because they've been rate limited and deprived of their dopamine hits.
    • olalonde 3y ago
      According to Elon, it's screen time as reported by Android & iOS.
  • faefox 3y ago
    Elon says a lot of things, like last fall when he was crowing about how Twitter had the bot problem licked. Fast forward to today and bot spam is worse than ever before. You can believe what you want. I choose to believe what I see with my eyes.
• esskay 3y ago
  > What technologies will take their place? Someones going to say Lemmy and Mastedon - they're wrong.
• jklinger410 3y ago
  There will be no observable long term impact from Reddit banning third party apps. Only a few power users cared about it and no one cared about them.
  • usednet 3y ago
    I would estimate 90% of worthwhile content on Reddit is posted by power users. Most subreddits are only alive because a few power users take the time to compile and post content. Nobody cares about them, but people will care once their content is gone. Power mods suck, but power users are the backbone of the site. I predict information quality and density will continue to decrease rapidly on Reddit until it becomes no different from Instagram. (I’m not personally a power user, I’ve just been on Reddit for a while)
    • trafficante 3y ago
      Sample size of one, but I suppose maybe I’m in that category of power users - given that I’d post 3-10 “effort posts” per day. Apollo finally went dark yesterday, I deleted it, and haven’t felt a single compulsion to check the mobile Reddit site. About the only Reddit related thing on my mind is whether I’m petulant enough to mass overwrite my posts - I’m only too familiar with the struggle of searching for something and finding dead blogs and forums a few years back. I don’t think Reddit the company owes me anything, but I wonder how many other “high value” users (in terms of both content and value to marketers) simply drifted away once the iOS apps went dark.
  • Maxion 3y ago
    I think this is a pretty naïve viewpoint - just look at what the mods of e.g. /r/iama announced today. On social network websites, the vast majority of people are only lurkers, a relatively few people commenting, even fewer people posting, and fewer people still who want to put in the effort to build up a community. Reddit's soul sits in those handcrafted small communities, the big ones sure will stay around and be popular, but there's lots of other places where one can get 5 second cat videos, and memes. This event eroded a lot of the remaining trust between moderators and the admins, and while that can feel like it's not relevant to normal users, over time this will cause fewer people to be interested in starting a community on Reddit.
• daniel-cussen 3y ago
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• deleted 3y ago
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• ajot 3y ago
  I would love for an RSS reader/HN/Reddit thing to exist. You could get you personal news on one side, and subs/communities whith two columns, one for news from sources curated by the admins/mods of the sub, and other column for news, links and text posts submittes by the users. You could only join by invitation, so as to make F2F social networks in self-hosted instances, or in a Discord-esque "server". I think the value here would be in exchanging opinions, information and new interests with an expanded social network (you woukd probably like and find interesting your friends' friends). Although I admit this model would be a closed community, if it's only one instance then it's not a problem because there are not a lot of people, and if it proves to be successful, it could span a renaissance of blogs or independent content-generation, i.e. these communities would be closed but reinforcing an open Web, instead of mega-silos with captive audience. I think that a limit in size for each community would be essential, the first member/admin can invite, let's say, 80, people, each of those can invite 40 people, and the third "generation" just another 20 people. This way you get at most 64k people to interact with. There was a post here on HN a couple months [0] ago with a back of the envelope calulation of subreddits being hostile when reaching a 300k userbase. [0] https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/scaling-problems-in-social-control https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/scaling-problems-in-soc...
  • kjkjadksj 3y ago
    You can already follow hn and reddit and youtube channels and tweets on rss
• kgwxd 3y ago
  Lemmy has been great. I went SDF as a host. Never going back to Reddit. I left Twitter almost a decade ago so I can’t compare to mastodon but that’s been really nice too.