cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37870004
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
That’s been an ongoing frustration for me here. People have wanted to merge communities, even to the point of trying to organize formal community mergers, or merge duplicate posts in the client, all of which works to reproduce the culture and structure of Reddit.
But, like, c/politics on lemmy.ca and c/politics on midwest.social are going to be wildly different communities. And c/technology on programming.dev and lemmy.ml or lemmygrad.ml should probably be having very different discussions, even if they’re about the same article, and trying to force those discussions into the same space doesn’t really make sense.
But people want it, because heaven forbid they miss one of 90 boner jokes.
Totally. It’s like people miss what reddit “used to be” (I get it, I was all-in like 10 years ago) but don’t realise what we’ve got here is already an improvement over that.
Yup. And there’s so much talk about the “old internet”, while ignoring that the old internet was small.