Users are facing down the web forum’s IPO plans, but Big Tech’s attract-and-extract cycle can’t be stopped.
Why Reddit Is Destined to Turn to Crap
Well, the question is not really “why” but “when”. All big websites will eventually turn to crap, look a digg.com or even yahhoo.com or if you’re old enough altavista.com just for a few examples.
I miss altavista, but not as much as I miss webcrawler. Webcrawler was THE best once upon a time imo.
I remember trying to explain to some kids in my homeroom about how “you can just search for any song you want and download it on altavista, you just need an em pee three player” and getting made fun of because only a “loser nerd would ever listen to music on their computer”.
Now look at me, decades later, posting about it on kbin.
Funny how everybody who hated on us back in the day are all on board now.
Great read, thank you for sharing. I know it’s about Reddit, but I’m going to indulge a digression inspired by the article. One of the questions that’s been rattling around in my head ever since I wandered back onto Facebook in December after a 2.5-year hiatus: when is a social media platform “dead”?
My Facebook feed feels like it’s in its death throes, with a handful of hearty souls occasionally posting their own thoughts or pictures or jokes, and like two fun communities that are reasonably active, while the overwhelming majority of content in my feed (other than ads and promoted reels and whatever) is friends of mine simply sharing screenshots from Tumblr/Twitter/Reddit without commentary.
I understand that my feed, full of people and organizations I voluntarily friended over the last…oh god…19 years (?!) isn’t necessarily representative of Facebook as a whole. But it seems like the enshittification, the erosion of Facebook’s most basic utilities—it’s not even good at event planning or photo sharing anymore; it was way better at both of those things in 2012—disincentives using the platform for anything beyond the most anodyne resharing of other peoples’ hot takes culled from other platforms.
Is Facebook dead? It seems like it sucks for promoting/advertising small local businesses, which was one thing it seemed pretty good at ~10 years ago. It sure isn’t good for keeping tabs on your actual friends, and hasn’t worked well at that in a long time. So what does it do? What’s Facebook for in 2023?
(Bigger question for me personally is when to leave it for real, and if I’ll ever have the courage to actually deactivate when, for better or for worse, Facebook efficiently captured a huge majority of my contacts between 2010 and 2015, and I feel a certain amount of anxiety about walking away from that entirely.)
@Suedeltica I pretty much only follow family and a few friends, and some organisations I want news from. Not a huge number. But Facebook can’t even deliver me all those posts in time order, and I’m missing out lots of personal news I wanted to hear, like friends being engaged! If a ‘social network’ can’t even do that basic function, it’s useless. I keep getting prompted to follow more people, when I can’t even get the updates from the people I already follow.
