Reddit was my last hope for a non-user-hostile social network.
The biggest problem with the media's complete abandoment of all principle in continuing to treat Twitter as a high integrity platform is the message it reflects to all other social media platforms : your users are captives. They can't leave. Once you have enough of a network effect going, no amount of disreputable behaviour or abuse is too much.
In my view, it's becoming imperative that Twitter (and now Reddit) actually fail to save the internet. (You could put Facebook there too but I think these days it's actually lately been more benign than the other two).
It may be impossible to have a situation where a for-profit company makes a service where the users are not the paying customers and users are treated well indefinitely. Reddit has experimented with a paid premium service, but they couldn't paywall any core functionality because having as many users as they can get is critical to their success.
It's probably a mistake to rely on things like that for socialization, communication, or creating communities. I would like to see federated technologies take off; there are at least two Reddit-alikes using ActivityPub, Kbin and Lemmy, which seem to federate with each other smoothly. They're currently much farther from critical mass than Mastodon (though they sort of federate with that too).
> Reddit has experimented with a paid premium service, but they couldn't paywall any core functionality because having as many users as they can get is critical to their success.
Businesses can certainly be "successful" with premium services, especially at Reddit's scale. What's happening there is textbook greed, where leadership chases hockey stick growth. At this point they must understand that this will be the downfall of the service, yet they're intentionally willing to make that sacrifice for short-term gains.
Good riddance. There are plenty of other services that can replace Reddit. The circle of the web.
That's why the digital markets act will be devastating when it will apply to social media apps, the first target is chat apps, next social media platforms.
Unfortunately, Mastodon is designed to look like Twitter, with people disorganizedly shouting at each other rather than being clearly organized in nestable threads.
The biggest problem with the media's complete abandoment of all principle in continuing to treat Twitter as a high integrity platform is the message it reflects to all other social media platforms : your users are captives. They can't leave. Once you have enough of a network effect going, no amount of disreputable behaviour or abuse is too much.
In my view, it's becoming imperative that Twitter (and now Reddit) actually fail to save the internet. (You could put Facebook there too but I think these days it's actually lately been more benign than the other two).