Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

This is a great article. I'm gently, slowly crawling out of the cave I've been hiding in. For a few years now I've kept away from all social media. I got freaked by a revelation that all of the techno joy I had growing up for the amazing new tools of the internet, was built on shady foundations. From my cave I have witnessed these horrors. I crave the community, and the connection, though, and so am tentatively taking measured steps. Starting here, maybe mastodon.. we'll see. Hope to see some of you along the way.

Very understandable for a millennial and younger audience. I remember multiple apps and web services turn from cheap useful tools into crap. Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, every food delivery app were all great at one point until the late stage capitalism machine hits. They all destroy themselves to hit profitability targets that no company can achieve.

The thing is most would be very profitable companies if the executive wing wasn't so damn greedy trying to eek out the highest salary and bonus possible so they can have that new shiny gold watch and fancy car to impress their "friends". It's human greed, plain and simple, and it's not limited only to social media companies.

That was a great read, I'd never heard of Prodigy, but its sad how since the beginning of the internet, companies have been trying to monetize community and just end up destroying it.

That article was such a good read. It was a less a stroll down memory lane, and more being hit on the head and dragged down memory alley. But, it was so worth the read.

That was a long read but very good. It pretty much encapsulates how I feel about most things right now. Websites, game/movie/TV franchises, public spaces, even nostalgia itself. They all get squeezed dry until everyone hates them and then they are discarded.

Thank you so much for linking that, I loved it, and it seems so relevant as we start up in this new oasis!

Why do I get the impression that most of the commenters here haven't noticed that the wider fediverse, and of course kbin.social, are made as an attempt to solve this exact problem.

You're here because we're trying to fix this!

I'd put my money on spritely.institute rather than the current system, but whatever; we are trying!

This writing is a little too emotional, but I understand what it is trying to say. I think it is always someone's emotions that make something newer than it is now.

Yeah I would have loved more concrete examples, but looking at the reaction here I feel like the author is just channeling what a lot of early web users feel nowadays.

Great article. Damn, I miss the glory days of Livejournal

It really was so valuable in its heyday.

When the Russia thing happened circa 2016, I copied mine to Dreamwidth and while it’s been great it’s also pretty lonely. Basically no one in my circle updates anymore; maybe two or three friends read my stuff.

But I’m never going to stop. My whole adult life is recorded on Dreamwidth; I started my LJ the month I graduated from high school, and 22 years later I’m still blathering, just on DW now with no one to interact with. (The loneliness is mostly a result of me making a decision ~15 years ago to limit my LJ friends list to people I actually knew offline, so at this point the number of people-I-know-offline who have any interest in regularly updating DW can be rounded down to zero.) (But it still bums me out and I dream of a Dreamwidth Renaissance.)
- I stopped using LJ long before that, so I didn't know anything about the Russian stuff until fairly recently. A RL friend told me about Dreamwidth and I immediately moved all my stuff over to there... though it's private and I have no friends.
  
  So many of my years are recorded in that journal.. I would be absolutely destroyed if I lost all of it. I met my husband through LJ. I wrote about losing my mom on LJ. My entries are so so special to me. Even the cringey teenage angst! I go through them every once in a while just to remember how far I've come and how much I've changed from the person who wrote those entries.

Eh, it's not surprising that people who spend money on the upkeep of a thing will eventually also want to get revenue out of the thing. If she doesn't like it she can host her own version of reddit and pay the server fees for everyone.

While I appreciate that businesses are in existence to make money, things like Reddit aren’t strictly a business, like your local grocery store, for instance.

The grocery store has employees, products, and creates its own products (bakery, deli, etc) by paying its employees to do so. They do NOT rely on non paid, non employees to generate the ENTIRETY of the “product” that makes them exist. They pay taxes, employees, rents, vendors, etc. in other words, overhead.

Reddit relies solely on non paid, non employees to create, maintain, and expand things that, while intangible, make Reddit exist. Reddit itself doesn’t create anything people go there to see. They just provide the infrastructure.

So all that being said, yeah, sure, Reddit should be able to at least cover their limited costs, without issue. That’s not what Reddit is talking about though. Reddit it talking about destroying the things (3rd party apps) and people (mods and users) strictly for, what they see as huge profit (IPO).

This is like when there were a bunch of really great forums, and then IB started buying them all. Immediately they went to shit, and have pretty much all been left to rot, if they are even still hosted. A lot of magazines went through the same thing too, at least in the car community. Profit over everything, and then inevitable failure.
- Ok, and what would you do instead? How would you keep a forum up and running and able to sustain itself? To me, pointing out that things are bad and could be better is an extremely obvious observation. The interesting question is, how do you make it better?
If it was just about maintenance costs, that would be easy. By being public, Twitter and Reddit will need to always grow revenue, every year they are expected to bring in more money than the previous. Stable and sufficient are not good enough, it will always need to be more. And that's how these apps get shitty.
- I'm genuinely curious what the maintenance costs really are. I'm also wondering about equitable ways to share that cost.