Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for th...
The link contains db0's views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it's worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:
a comparison between the current state of Reddit vs. Myspace near collapse;
the illusion that everything is fine based on "raw" numbers like engagement;
that Reddit was never a "good" site, but it had two positive points (open API and hands-off approach to communities), destroyed by the current events;
the ongoing progression of the Fediverse as alternative to Reddit;
the change in quality in both the content and the behaviour of the people still there.
EDIT: I hope that the author doesn't mind, but I'll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it'll be a bit more accessible.
For some reason Medium allowed me to read the article, so I copypasted it to a pastebin. I'll also link it in the OP, fuck those walls online.
Rather than breaking up ad-tech, banning surveillance ads, and opening up app stores, which would make tech platforms stop stealing money from media companies through ad-fraud, price-gouging and deceptive practices, governments introduce laws requiring tech companies to share (some of) their ill-gotten profits with a few news companies.
This makes the news companies partners with the tech giants, rather than adversaries holding them to account, and makes the news into cheerleaders for massive tech profits, so long as they get their share. Rather than making it easier for the news to declare independence from Big Tech, we are fusing them forever.
Holy crap, I never thought about it that way.
what if you fix it like this instead:
governments introduce laws requiring tech companies to share (some of) their ill-gotten profits with a multiplicity of news organizations, especially those which cover beats which would go otherwise ignored
(there's no strikethrough available in this version of markdown unfortunately)
Otherwise you are only going to subsidize a few already-powerful organizations regardless of how good their work is. Use the money to mix things up. We need more and more diverse journalism. Also projects like muckrock.com which facilitate journalism.
All the above said, the criteria for a company being taxable in this way should be broad and flexible to avoid making the journos feel dependent on the financials a few of the most evil. It should be mixed with money from elsewhere so that journos are actually still able to critically cover meta, google, apple etc
