With all the major social media sites committing suicide via enshittification, it seems like forums might be primed to go back to being mostly small and local a

With all the major social media sites committing suicide via enshittification, it seems like forums might be primed to go back to being mostly small and local again (discord etc). Reddit though, I’m really going to miss since they’ve avoided pissing in the pool they swim in longer than most of the others. And, because the only google results that are useful anymore are the ones where you append “Reddit” to the end of your search. I think, on some level, the people who own and run these sites don’t actually understand where the value in them comes from. Namely, the quality of the interactions between users. By replacing those interactions with paid advertisements or by making moderation more difficult they are directly attacking the very thing that makes the site useful. And they don’t understand that. More likely in this case, they don’t care. The game they are playing is to try to turn human interaction into money, and you can’t do that by making the interaction better. The point of advertising, after all, is not to reveal truth but distort it in order to manipulate the user. What we need is a Reddit type of site that’s run more on the Wikipedia model and less on the Facebook model. The original version of google seemed like magic because it provided such easy results- but you have to remember that google didn’t generate those results. The links between topics came in the form of hyperlinks between documents that were set up one at a time by human beings, and google merely mined those links to fuel its engine. Later on, people stopped creating hyperlinks, and so google’s search mostly stopped working. So it’s no wonder that Reddit’s hand curated forums are now a better source of information.