Users are facing down the web forum’s IPO plans, but Big Tech’s attract-and-extract cycle can’t be stopped.
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.)
The only reason I keep FB around at this point is that’s honestly the only way I have to contact a certain sub-section of people. The messenger app is the only real reason, that and FB is the new Classmates.com lol
ETA: I believe FB is dead in terms of what it once was. My GenZ teenagers seem to think so, and honestly so does almost everyone else I regularly actually interact with. What really killed it in my eyes is when they began targeting what showed up in your feed, instead of the old default “all, newest first”. And over time it became harder and harder to find how to do “all, newest first”. Once that happened, it was inevitable it would become the violently divided echo chamber it is today.
The only reason I keep FB around at this point is that’s honestly the only way I have to contact a certain sub-section of people
Exactly. I should use this moment to reflect on how many Facebook “friends” are “must have” folks I should put effort into keeping in touch with outside of FB, and then I should…do that.
But one thing I admit would be tough would be giving up on the possibility (more of a fantasy at this point) of popping into FB for a feeling…for of a general sense of what folks I know are up to. Where they are, what they’re enjoying, what they’re struggling with, etc. Do I need to know how my middle school acquaintance’s cancer treatment is going? Do I need to see pictures of a former coworkers’ dogs frolicking at doggie daycare? Well, no; I maintain my circle of close friends and family without Facebook and can continue to do so. But there was a time FB seemed to provide a sense of being at least casually plugged into a wider community of acquaintances and more distant relatives that I liked and enjoyed. I don’t think we’re ever really going to get that back.
Maybe losing that peculiar late-00s-early-teens sense of a network of real people you kinda care about even if you’re not close is a good thing. Maybe Facebook only ever provided a false sense of community that made us over-invested in near-strangers’ dramas; maybe it pulled us away from face-to-face community building with our actual neighbors. I dunno! Regardless, I’m reluctant to discard it entirely if only because I’m pretty sure we’ll never again see a mass “(almost) everyone is going to gather on this one platform, under their real names, and be at least somewhat reachable through it.”
@Suedeltica So, I’ve been around for what is turning out to be a long time now, and I can tell you that pre-web-based internet, I used to BBS a lot. And the fun thing there was we were online with people within our long-distance calling range basically. So we had that early sense of online community, but with people we eventually ended up meeting up with in real life once we got old enough to drive and be unsupervised and stuff. And the BBS’s are long, LONG gone now, but these are some of the people I’m actually RL closest with to this day. So I guess I’m saying, yeah, the networks they come and go, and the people come and go too, but we do end up keeping the ones who really matter. FB isn’t the first to disappear, and it won’t be the last. The world changes so much, and there will be something new eventually. There always is.
The first people to jump ship are going to be the ones who already desire something “better” than the current environment. Those who haven’t yet jumped ship are the ones who are not (yet?) dissatisfied enough with the current environment to make a change.
If enough of the “early leavers” manage to coalesce around the same new space, then that new space is instantly noticeably “better.” On the other hand, because those early leavers are a very small proportion of the place they are leaving, the old place doesn’t change much. Even if the rate of that change does increase, that rate change may not even be very noticeable (although I have already heard of an uptick in pro-company rhetoric at reddit).
As I recall, this is precisely what happened when Digg began its collapse, and many people abandoned Digg for Reddit. Reddit was instantly a much better forum than Digg had become. Now the same thing is happening again, well, not exactly.
Digg declined because it was a silo, and because corporate interests needed to monetize it. Corporate interests made decisions that they felt went in the direction of monetization, with disregard to the overall user experience. Reddit is also a silo, also operated by corporate interests, who are also making decisions they feel are in the direction of monetization, with disregard to the overall user experience. The difference today seems to be that the place people are jumping ship to is not a silo, and is not operated by corporate interests.
It’ll be interesting to see where the fediverse goes, and how this landscape develops. With beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.it, it’s clear that it would be possible for corporate interests to operate their own instances, and only federate with “approved” instances - a fracturing of the fediverse, and a “re-siloing.”
In the past, it took a long time and was quite difficult for users to abandon declining siloes. The fediverse makes it so much easier for people to jump ship when that becomes necessary. Corporate interests take note.
I think you’re right. It’s been my impression that a lot of the people over at Reddit who don’t care, are the ones who are reading, not writing. I’ve sadly gone back, to at least provide an alternative with a magazine I started, and it feels very uncomfortable now.
The death of a website isn’t a single event, it’s a process that plays over potentially years. It plays out like your favorite restaurant dying: first the food gets expensive, then the food quality becomes garbage, and then you notice how few patrons come at peak hours. The day that restaurant died isn’t the day the “We’ve shut down” notice appears on the door. It’s started long before then.
Had a Burger King near me die. It seemed sudden, because one day I went there and got lunch, and the next day it was closed forever. But in retrospect, yeah, you run for like 9 months with only 2-3 workers on, you’re not giving a very good impression, and it’s inevitable.
I don’t blame the workers in any of that, they were doing their best. If BK wasn’t going to pay a livable wage, that’s their own fault, nobody wants to work a job that isn’t going to pay their bills.
@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.
@anathema_device: Well said! I guess I haven’t quit it entirely because walking away feels like abandoning even the possibility of keeping up with a ton of people, when maybe that was never really possible in the first place.
@anathema_device - Love the username, Gaiman and Pratchett are my top two favorite authors.
@Lells thank you :)
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.
“Enshitification” is my favorite new word of the year so far. I first encountered it just a few weeks ago from this 3-part interview with Cory on ON THE MEDIA. Little did I know that Reddit would be the very next popular platform to enshitify…
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/enshitification
