4 ms·

One (in this case, 2) company's incentive for profit should not take priority over the usability/well being of the internet as a whole, ever, and is exactly why

One (in this case, 2) company's incentive for profit should not take priority over the usability/well being of the internet as a whole, ever, and is exactly why we are where we are now. This is an absolutely terrible precedent.

jedberg 2y ago
I agree with you in theory, but in practice someone has to pay for all this magic.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  This is a false dichotomy. You can have services, and not have them devolve into complete unusability in the name of profit. This isn’t sustainable either. The myopic pursuit of short term gains at the expense of the product will collapse at some point in the future, no matter how much you believe in this weird frog-boil internet we’ve inherited now.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    > The myopic pursuit of short term gains at the expense of the product will collapse at some point in the future, The myopic pursuit of short-term gains is the only playbook that works. Long-term business strategy is a gamble, and today's businesses have all learned that they'd rather make hay when the sun is shining than be remembered as a good business. Twitter tried a long-term playbook to reverse their unprofitable sinkhole of a website. That ended up with them being undervalued and sold to the highest bidder.
    - latexr 2y ago
      > Twitter tried a long-term playbook to reverse their unprofitable sinkhole of a website. From what I recall reading at the time, Twitter was finally becoming profitable before the sale (last two years? It’s hard to find a source now since every story since is about some shit show or other post sale). > That ended up with them being undervalued and sold to the highest bidder. You make it seem they were in dire straits and had to be sold for scraps, but that’s far from the case. They sold for more than their valuation to the only bidder because they understood what a good deal it was for them. They forced the buyer to not back out, after all.
  - twelve40 2y ago
    Complete unusability is when ai tools clone the content and people stop visiting the original service and participating. I'll leave it up to them to defend blocking duck duck go for example, but blocking "AI" bots for an online community is a matter of survival at this point.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      Alternatively, it's because the base platform has also devolved into unusability. Both Reddit and Twitter are in a position where their info is easily scraped, and their community is barely worth the advertising/paid-premium experience they demand from you. As both platforms continue to decline in quality, you might not even need to replace the original service. Both businesses appear intent on getting replaced.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  We did. As in we, the Internet, existed for a long time without anyone making money and we paid for the privilege. Websites were built and hosted at owner's expense, for years, with no expectation that they be financially rewarded. Sure some would run donation drives, or work with sponsors relevant to the community in question, but a whole ton, mine included, just cost me a lot of money over many years. Those websites were definitely technically inferior, as the march of progress is unavoidable, but web hosting is cheaper than it's ever been. A VPS that utterly blows away what mine was capable of in 2007 for nearly a hundred a month can now be had for about $10 per month. Yet everyone wants these monolith platforms, but even that wouldn't be the worst thing ever, except that every one of these platforms has a backend to support that we in the Old Internet never did: a C-suite's worth of executives and millions of shareholders, who for some reason have decided that reddit can't exist unless reddit makes them reams and reams of money. I'd be very, very interested to see how much of, even what's probably the most massive one of all, Facebook, is non-essential busywork that could easily be shut down tomorrow with no adverse effects to the platform. Firstly the entire executive class, just, they don't do shit to make Facebook the product. In fact I'd argue their decisions almost universally have made it worse as a product very consistently for it's entire lifetime. Then, all the marketing people. There's just no goddamn reason to advertise Facebook (or reddit for that matter) the brand is so ubiquitous, if you actually found someone who'd never heard of it, I'd give you a large chunk of money. Add to that, if Facebook was doing a good job of being what it ostensibly is, then people immediately become the best advertising, because people want to hang with people in these digital spaces. Then get rid of the people working to make Facebook addictive with dark patterns. Then get rid of the entire targeted ad division, because it's gross and inhumane. Pare the company down to engineers who build the product, and if anything, expand the moderation team so they can actually ensure the safety of the platform, and of course the IT staff to back them. Now what does Facebook cost to operate? As far as I'm concerned, this pearl-clutching about "well websites have to make money" is grossly, grossly overstated. Websites don't cost that much to run. A ton of money is being siphoned off by the MBA parasites playing games in Excel all day. A ton more is being wasted developing features that advertisers want and users hate. A ton more is being funneled into making products artificially addictive to vulnerable people, to exploit them, so let's just not do that. And of course, leadership, rewarding themselves with generous compensation packages they aren't even remotely able to justify. Now what does your website cost to maintain? Surely not nothing, and for websites of substantial size, it will still be high, but I'm willing to bet it's a hell, hell, hell of a lot less than it was before.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  how can we keep paying the ever-growing profits of multi-trillion dollar companies? This is insane.
  - jsnell 2y ago
    Reddit is 100x from being a trillion-dollar company, and is not profitable.
    - meiraleal 2y ago
      Reddit offers no magic is just a forum. Google used to do some magic decades ago and still profit from it.
- account42 2y ago
  People were paying for forums before Reddit came along.
BeetleB 2y ago
I know people will hate to hear this, but Reddit it's not important to the A well being of the Internet.
- TeaBrain 2y ago
  I think it's the other way around, in that people don't like to hear how Reddit has become important due to the death of independent forums and the degree to which information has become concentrated on the site.
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    The death of independent forums has been greatly exaggerated. Of all the forums I used to be active in, many are still active. The ones that died did so because the community died (i.e. they did not shift to Reddit and the like). Reddit is great simply because it allowed anyone to create a community. No need to get a LAMP stack and deal with security vulnerabilities in your forum SW. These days you have Lemmy and its ilk. Much higher barrier than the old LAMP stack, but also much superior to it. I do hope it takes off.
  - latexr 2y ago
    Independent forums, like RSS, are not dead. I use both every day.
- account42 2y ago
  GP was not claiming that it is.

jedberg 2y ago

I agree with you in theory, but in practice someone has to pay for all this magic.

JohnMakin 2y ago
This is a false dichotomy. You can have services, and not have them devolve into complete unusability in the name of profit. This isn’t sustainable either. The myopic pursuit of short term gains at the expense of the product will collapse at some point in the future, no matter how much you believe in this weird frog-boil internet we’ve inherited now.
- talldayo 2y ago
  > The myopic pursuit of short term gains at the expense of the product will collapse at some point in the future, The myopic pursuit of short-term gains is the only playbook that works. Long-term business strategy is a gamble, and today's businesses have all learned that they'd rather make hay when the sun is shining than be remembered as a good business. Twitter tried a long-term playbook to reverse their unprofitable sinkhole of a website. That ended up with them being undervalued and sold to the highest bidder.
  - latexr 2y ago
    > Twitter tried a long-term playbook to reverse their unprofitable sinkhole of a website. From what I recall reading at the time, Twitter was finally becoming profitable before the sale (last two years? It’s hard to find a source now since every story since is about some shit show or other post sale). > That ended up with them being undervalued and sold to the highest bidder. You make it seem they were in dire straits and had to be sold for scraps, but that’s far from the case. They sold for more than their valuation to the only bidder because they understood what a good deal it was for them. They forced the buyer to not back out, after all.
- twelve40 2y ago
  Complete unusability is when ai tools clone the content and people stop visiting the original service and participating. I'll leave it up to them to defend blocking duck duck go for example, but blocking "AI" bots for an online community is a matter of survival at this point.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Alternatively, it's because the base platform has also devolved into unusability. Both Reddit and Twitter are in a position where their info is easily scraped, and their community is barely worth the advertising/paid-premium experience they demand from you. As both platforms continue to decline in quality, you might not even need to replace the original service. Both businesses appear intent on getting replaced.
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
We did. As in we, the Internet, existed for a long time without anyone making money and we paid for the privilege. Websites were built and hosted at owner's expense, for years, with no expectation that they be financially rewarded. Sure some would run donation drives, or work with sponsors relevant to the community in question, but a whole ton, mine included, just cost me a lot of money over many years. Those websites were definitely technically inferior, as the march of progress is unavoidable, but web hosting is cheaper than it's ever been. A VPS that utterly blows away what mine was capable of in 2007 for nearly a hundred a month can now be had for about $10 per month. Yet everyone wants these monolith platforms, but even that wouldn't be the worst thing ever, except that every one of these platforms has a backend to support that we in the Old Internet never did: a C-suite's worth of executives and millions of shareholders, who for some reason have decided that reddit can't exist unless reddit makes them reams and reams of money. I'd be very, very interested to see how much of, even what's probably the most massive one of all, Facebook, is non-essential busywork that could easily be shut down tomorrow with no adverse effects to the platform. Firstly the entire executive class, just, they don't do shit to make Facebook the product. In fact I'd argue their decisions almost universally have made it worse as a product very consistently for it's entire lifetime. Then, all the marketing people. There's just no goddamn reason to advertise Facebook (or reddit for that matter) the brand is so ubiquitous, if you actually found someone who'd never heard of it, I'd give you a large chunk of money. Add to that, if Facebook was doing a good job of being what it ostensibly is, then people immediately become the best advertising, because people want to hang with people in these digital spaces. Then get rid of the people working to make Facebook addictive with dark patterns. Then get rid of the entire targeted ad division, because it's gross and inhumane. Pare the company down to engineers who build the product, and if anything, expand the moderation team so they can actually ensure the safety of the platform, and of course the IT staff to back them. Now what does Facebook cost to operate? As far as I'm concerned, this pearl-clutching about "well websites have to make money" is grossly, grossly overstated. Websites don't cost that much to run. A ton of money is being siphoned off by the MBA parasites playing games in Excel all day. A ton more is being wasted developing features that advertisers want and users hate. A ton more is being funneled into making products artificially addictive to vulnerable people, to exploit them, so let's just not do that. And of course, leadership, rewarding themselves with generous compensation packages they aren't even remotely able to justify. Now what does your website cost to maintain? Surely not nothing, and for websites of substantial size, it will still be high, but I'm willing to bet it's a hell, hell, hell of a lot less than it was before.
meiraleal 2y ago
how can we keep paying the ever-growing profits of multi-trillion dollar companies? This is insane.
- jsnell 2y ago
  Reddit is 100x from being a trillion-dollar company, and is not profitable.
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    Reddit offers no magic is just a forum. Google used to do some magic decades ago and still profit from it.
account42 2y ago
People were paying for forums before Reddit came along.

BeetleB 2y ago

I know people will hate to hear this, but Reddit it's not important to the A well being of the Internet.

TeaBrain 2y ago
I think it's the other way around, in that people don't like to hear how Reddit has become important due to the death of independent forums and the degree to which information has become concentrated on the site.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  The death of independent forums has been greatly exaggerated. Of all the forums I used to be active in, many are still active. The ones that died did so because the community died (i.e. they did not shift to Reddit and the like). Reddit is great simply because it allowed anyone to create a community. No need to get a LAMP stack and deal with security vulnerabilities in your forum SW. These days you have Lemmy and its ilk. Much higher barrier than the old LAMP stack, but also much superior to it. I do hope it takes off.
- latexr 2y ago
  Independent forums, like RSS, are not dead. I use both every day.
account42 2y ago
GP was not claiming that it is.