I do think they will essentially die. They will morph into completely different websites, but I think they will be around for a long time, and I think their userbase won’t shrink even a bit.
Big websites are slowly adopting the facebook model: All the content is hidden and requires you login to view it. Creating an account requires some sort of personally identifying information like a phone number, photo of ID, mailing address, etc.
The old model simply turned out to be unprofitable. It was always done under the motto of “bring the people and the money will come” and so they made it as easy as possible to build up a large user base, but it turns out that motto is false on the internet, and investors have finally realized it. There is no point in having a massive user base if they don’t actually generate a profit for you. Anonymous internet users do not do this. They are indistinguishable from bots. If they don’t use adblock, they don’t click on ads. They don’t donate money. Yet they use up the majority of the server resources.
It used to be that you at least needed anonymous users to generate content for you, but (in part thanks to facebok) non-anonymous usage of the internet has become normalized. If anything the best content will come from someone who has their real name, and profile picture attached to the content they submit. The anonymous nobody is much less likely to post anything valuable.
I think the internet as we know it is dead, and tbh I don’t even blame big corporations for this. I blame mass tech illiteracy, and people’s willingness to sacrifice their privacy for some dopamine hits.
Yup, even Digg is still around. Like you, I think reddit will be around for many more years. The content quality, which is already bad, will continue to get worse.
I didn’t migrate to Lemmy to help kill reddit. I’m here to help Lemmy grow. It’s already a better experience in some ways. Rough around the edges, and needs some features and fixes, but I feel like the user base is already much better than reddit is.
Yup, even Digg is still around. Like you, I think reddit will be around for many more years. The content quality, which is already bad, will continue to get worse.
Digg?
Hell Fark is still there. And for that matter, Craigslist discussion forums are too.
Usenet is still around.
It’s not a site but an actual system and predates (by quite a lot) the Web.
It’s was the social media equivalent back in the old days of the early 90s Internet (before AOL linked to it, before the WWW, even before Gopher).
After that came IRC (which funnilly enough is also still around, along with modern clones of it such as Discord) as well as online forums (which themselves are the descendants of the old BBSs, minus the whole modem comms part).
So far in my experience, the only tech that “dies” (well, there often is a handful of people who still do it for fun) is that which is tied to specific hardware (i.e. you don’t really have BBSs anymore because people don’t use modems to connect to a central systems via the phone line anymore) as pure software can live forever on top of emulators or just be reimplemented whilst preserving core features.
And Hi5 Anyone?
Here’s some fun history/background on Hi5-
Hi5 was bought by Tagged which was bought by The Meet Group (MeetMe).
I worked at Tagged when the acquisition happened, but was not in the team that made the technical changes necessary to migrate the product.
Tagged and Hi5 are now essentially the same site with barely-different skins - the current site is an evolution of Tagged. I believe the Hi5 codebase was scrapped, for the most part.
A few years later, The Meet Group bought Tagged (which had rebranded its company - not the products - as “if(we)” by that point).
This is tangential, but I feel compelled to share: I started my job at Tagged due to another acquisition, when Tagged bought Digsby (company: dotSyntax), a multi protocol instant messenger, social network, and email desktop app which me and some friends built from nothing. We were the first 3rd party client for Facebook messenger, and I believe MySpace IM as well :)
I doubt anyone cares about these properties anymore, but if anyone has questions I’m happy to answer what I can.
Jez… you just remembered me hi5 was my second social network after MySpace…getting old!
Wow, that’s one I haven’t thought about in years
I’m pretty sure it was my first social media
Mind blowing that craigslist exists even at all TBH.
Bro craigslist missed connections in the early 2k’s…
Shit was wildin’.
I still use Craigslist to find bands to join.
That was my go to as well. It’s still thriving ehh?
Idk about “thriving”, but it’s still alive.
Millions of people use Yahoo finance every day. Do you know what that is?
I still use Craigslist to find jobs and apartments. I sold a car on Craigslist. I still find it useful.
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Thanks. Yeah that’s a big motivator for us as well you can only buy so much cheap Chinese Amazon shit.
That, and we like the idea of having a store to return items if need be, but it’s not as easy as Amazon, there’s no streaming services and they carry less products.
Jury’s still out, might just keep both cards.
Fark is where I was going to when reddit was enshittifying but I hadn’t heard of lemmy yet. That and hackernews.
Fark pretty much the same for 20+ years.
I agree with you for Reddit.
For Twitter, it will burn under Musk’s leadership
Are you sure about that? Spez seems like a huge fan of Musk.
The difference is in obscurity and vanity. Everyone online knows who Musk is, people outside Reddit (and even those on Reddit, some of them) don’t know who Spez is. The scale is different, and so are the severity and publicness of the negative changes. Like hell, a total site rebrand is a pretty noticeable thing.
EDIT: Case in point, everyone refers to him as Spez instead of his name, Steve Huffman.
lol
I feel like these mainstream platform have provided us with the framework of what we want the internet to be. But they’re business with the goal of profit, and that’s ok. Just not ok for us because that’s not what we want/need. I’d like to believe that the fediverse is the future. A decentralised, true social media that actually match the name. The fediverse is the media for social interaction that are of the people, by the people and for the people of the internet.
I feel like these mainstream platform have provided us with the framework of what we want the internet to be. But they’re business with the goal of profit, and that’s ok. Just not ok for us because that’s not what we want/need.
Part of that is my issue with a lot of platforms; they try to be everything at once. I don’t want every social media platform to have featured articles, stories, a messaging function, and disappearing messages.
If Snapchat stayed the way it originally was I’d probably still be using it today.
I think it’s been coined the enshitification of products as they gear towards profit.
The problem isn’t just profit, but maximizing short profit by any means necessary.
They are not content with providing a good product and making a bit of profit. They always have to press ultra hard to squeeze the last drop of profit out of the product. And they don’t care that it worsens the product and ultimately will kill it and its business end. But that’s more than two quarters away, so they don’t care.
Reddit is only the most dramatic example of this.
Louis Rossman has said this stuff for a long time, and with each passing day it seems more accurate. The enshittification has just accelerated I due to higher interest rates on loans.
At least it made me realize I’m just not their target customer. I always ask myself why people still use tiktok, twitter, reddit, facebook, youtube, etc when they continually fuck with their users. The reason is simply that they are the target audience.
There’s currently no alternative to YouTube
If anything the best content will come from someone who has their real name, and profile picture attached to the content they submit. The anonymous nobody is much less likely to post anything valuable.
I couldn’t possibly disagree more. The reverse of this is true.
I dunno, the biggest viral sensations I’ve seen in the past few years all feature very identifiable people. I think we’re starting to move past the 4chan era of anonymous memelord content.
Maybe give an example? For me, “viral” content isn’t usually something that holds my attention for more than a moment. It’s the random strangers posting really interesting content or questions that I care about
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If large companies and influential people move to Mastodon […] and no ads.
large companies and influential people are in the commercial platforms because of the ads. There is literally no reason for them to move in a place without ads.
I mostly agree with you, the internet must change, and it’s changing for the good with these non-profit decentralized networks like Lemmy.
These companies abused the internet too much and it’s hit a breaking point. People are taking the power back. I look forward to a user-owned internet again where the content I see is not entirely controlled by corporate interests.
I think these websites will genuinely die within the next decade. There’s just never been decentralized social media(of this kind) to compete with them before.
I hope this is what will happen
The companies are never going to stop fighting to take part of it back, especially if decentralization gets bigger. They will always want to take over again.
I don’t think most people actually think that these sites will literally die (well, actually Twitter/X literally dying at some point wouldn’t surprise me all that much), it’s more just hyperbole for jumping the shark.
I could also see dying referring to people rationing their time elsewhere. People might still hang on to Twitter to read about bus delays or school closures for example but they won’t engage with content there.
myspace.com is still a website you can visit, but no one does. facebook is going down that path once their userbase ages out of living. the artist formerly known as twitter is going to go bankrupt and a very salty elon musk will sell it for a fraction of what we bought it for and who tf knows what happens to it after that.
It will be interesting to see, whether Meta manages to stay afloat even without Facebook.
Buying Instagram was one of their best business moves and kept them connected with the younglings for a while. They couldn’t replicate that with TikTok or the likes.
Over time, Facebook will become irrelevant, but Meta might actually manage to buy apps left and right hoping to hit the new unicorn.
I think the internet as we know it is dead, and tbh I don’t even blame big corporations for this. I blame mass tech illiteracy, and people’s willingness to sacrifice their privacy for some dopamine hits.
So, you’re blaming the victims? Not the billion dollar corporations, leveraging their immense power and wealth to drain as much value out everything they touch just to discard what remains the second it’s not creating enough money for them? Instead you blame the tech illiterate, that never had a chance? The poor and exploited, caught in the hamster wheel of capitalism barely able to plan until the next pay check?
I agree with some of your conclusions, but not others, and also not the overall concept. Yes, Reddit is not going to die or disappear. Twitter, I’m not sure how it will be thriving in the future, but it will likely still exist.
Essentially your main point is that the style of Facebook, mainly, a walled garden with profiling and targeted advertising, has beat more open commercial models. In terms of profitability, that is true. Companies based on that model, Google and Facebook, have been making a lot more money for years than companies less focused on user identity and advertising, like Reddit and Twitter. As far as whether there is profit in anonymity, I definitely don’t agree that non-profiled users are “indistinguishable from bots”, but yes, companies can make a lot more by abusing user privacy. Some people are growing tired of this, but not enough or for long enough. I also don’t agree that anonymous people are ‘nobodies’ who don’t post anything useful. Some of the most popular members of reddit either have no public identity, or it’s superfluous. Did I ever need to see a photo of gallowboob? No. Do I know who PoppinKREME is? No, and I don’t need to, other than their content. Anonymous content does make money for social media sites because even if those people had their ‘real names’ and profile pics, it would make no difference at all. Consumers? Sure, but only because ad profiling and selling data of real identities is more profitable. This is not even close to new as Facebook has been doing that to the tune of billions for over a decade.
Facebook as a product is not really thriving, and the only way Zuckerberg has found to grow his company is to buy and imitate other companies - bought IG, Whatsapp, copied Snapchat, now copied Twitter. I’d call that the Microsoft Model. Microsoft still exists and does quite well, but not to the same extent they did 20 years ago. Time will run out for Zucka when someone makes a new hit product that he can’t purchase or copy. We don’t know yet what that will be. Another interesting issue is Reddit, Twitter and Facebook have tried to move to charging money monthly vs only advertising.
The internet as we know it is not dead because my internet was not Twitter. I mean, you’re posting this on Lemmy. The internet does not have to be about making investors and CEOs billions of dollars.
Agreed. I’ll add though, I’m weary of the “internet is dead” rhetoric.
There’s a lot more spammy content on the Web now, but all the actual people are still around and still producing content. The only thing that’s really changed is where the actual people can be found.
Reddit hasn’t made many significant changes yet, but Twitter is working hard to fail.
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I think the fact that more information is becoming readily available on federated platforms due to more people moving over to Mastodon and Lemmy for example is definitely making the platform grow as well. With Twitt- sorry, “X” locking down threads to an account, the information on there, as well as other sites eventually, I guarantee, will become less accessible over time. The fediverse hardly has that issue of it’s information becoming less available, and if anything, the structure of hosted instances makes that near impossible for the time being to be phased out. If Threads, for example, went through with adding fediverse support, it probably would not be as widespread as others like Mastodon as such, because the sites that power ActivityPub were designed with users in mind instead of profit.
the problem is we don’t have the critical mass of users to make it not a ghost town, and that problem’s starting to get solved. the only moat the twitbooks of the world ever had was their large userbases and once enough people migrate the rest can do so easily
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They’re already dead to me, that’s all I care about personally
