So, I was kinda idly thinking about how we’re seeing more and more companies such as Reddit give into peer pressure in favor of profit. As their endless stream of investment dollars with the hope of being profitable eventually seems to be running out. How do you see the web moving forward?
Do you think the best way forward, is to go back? I was thinking about it and back in the old days people would have websites that they would host that would make little to no money, they’d just run them for fun, for the passion of it. Do you see these days returning? Lemmy is kind of an example of that, and other federated self-hosted software. It kind of feels like the way things might be headed. People host their own, smaller scale sites, not in pursuit of profits specifically, but for the passion of it.
I honestly think this way of communicating with eachother is more genuine, more real and honestly more optimal. Communications with others shouldn’t entirely hinge upon the will of one soul entity. And while federation definitely has its issues, I personally think it’s vastly better than being ruled by 1 single entity who’s entire goal is to farm as much mindless doomscrolling as possible in pursuit of profits.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against making money off of your work, I think if you spent time working on something you should absolutely make money off of it. However, I don’t think it’s the way our communication should work. For original content such as art, books, movies, shows, games or other similar mediums, I definitely think that the creator is entitled to make money off of that work.
But having our communication fueled by that sort of business model doesn’t make sense to me. It incentives more harsh restrictions on speech and discussion, restricting user speech/expression to what’s “advertiser friendly” and of course, for harvesting and collecting our personal data like we’re some sort of crop or cattle.
Might’ve gone on a bit of a tangent there, but I hope my general point still got across.
Lately I’ve found myself going back to narrower-focus forum sites more. From my perspective, the problem with these big sites is that they’re owned by people who treat them like an investment. Odds are they’ve never laid eyes on a piece of code or read user feedback. But they’re the one’s calling the shots, with the intention of making money. So you have these sites running tests and making changes to maximize profits in the short-term. But when the other shoe drops, it’s the workers getting the axe to protect 0.01% of some investor’s fortune. The way these internet companies grow is basically like how Standard Oil formed a monopoly, then turned around screwed everyone over.
Anyway, rant over. That’s an oversimplification and I’m not an economics person. As for the for-profit internet, I like the idea of user-owned or employee-owned businesses. They have a vested interest in making the site actually good long term. I don’t mind giving my money to people who actually work. None of this VC or equity firm bs.
Federated stuff is cool. I hope it catches on. I’m not holding my breath.
Your post hit me right in the feels.
The internet is becoming a dystopian place. That why I love smaller communities like this. I’ve been a Reddit user but honestly I though almost all the big subreddits were crap. They were either censored to the point you couldn’t say anything that remotely hurts a snowflake or be banned/downvoted to hell or just filled with ads pretending to be articles. It was purely the small subreddits that interested me, and sadly even with those becoming more popular I started losing interest.
Lemmy might never become as big as Reddit but to me that is fine. I’ve always been a fan of seperate forums with small but passionate communities. For example I was on a tech forum where there was this one guy that was always super direct and pretty rude. But guess what, everyone respected him and his opinion because he knew a lot of stuff and actually made very insightful posts. Now try that on Reddit and prepare to be downvoted into oblivion. Reddit has been turning into trash long before the API changes and honestly a big part of it was the community, it’s becoming more vile and toxic every day and if your opinion is just slightly different than the masses you just get labeled as troll or unwanted poster. I really hope Reddit goes under but realistically I don’t think that will happen. Honestly the CEO and top layer might be bad but so are a big part of reddits user’s, most of them don’t give a shit about free speech and just want to see their popular opinion parroted. If you come to Reddit for a good discussion just stop looking because you won’t find any, it’s just “Person A is right and gets upvotes”, Person B is wrong and gets downvoted " no matter how respectful either person is.
I just hope that Lemmy gets big enough to support a decent sized active community. It doesn’t need to be “Reddit big” for me.
Totally agree. I went to Reddit thinking I could have deep conversations, and realized that actually it was just as shallow as Twitter. I suppose it’s nice if a person wants to throw out controversial opinions and receive validation (in upvotes) from the echo chamber. I’ve had that happen by accident, and it felt nice, for a minute, until I realized it was totally hollow, and the replies to my comment that were being downvoted were probably the ones I should have been paying attention to, because they could broaden my narrow thinking.
Also, I learned early on that I had to be careful that I didn’t offend people that weren’t even present, but who could have been considered part of the group. I once asked a mail carrier sub for help because my carrier kept delivering my mail when I was on vacation, despite placing a mail hold. However, this was a mistake, because they didn’t take it as a request for help, but as a veiled criticism that somehow implied that some of their number were not perfect at their jobs. They were extremely offended, and even claimed it was my fault. It wasn’t, but explaining what I did just brought more downvotes, because now I was the enemy. Whether I tried to defend myself or diffuse the situation, it just provided more comments for them to downvote, more fuel to the fire. And the downvotes and angry comments kept coming in, some even months later. They were so focused on hating me that they never once tried to actually help. After that, I realized if I made an unpopular comment or post I needed to delete it, otherwise it would just continue to drain karma or invite angry comments. Of course that means I basically helped reinforce their echo chamber.
Traditional linear forums might still be the best way to have a focused conversation about something.
The idea of user/employee owned internet businesses is a cool one and I could definitely see advantages to that! Never really thought of that model, but it’s definitely not a bad idea in concept, Idk how it’d work in practice. Not saying it wouldn’t work, simply that I’m not smart enough to know off the top of my head.
I definitely hope more people start hosting federated social media, I’m not sure I want it to catch on to becoming mainstream. I could see some disadvantages with that that might potentially put us back to square one. Though, that’s just a worry on my part, not really based on anything concrete.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question, very much appreciated.
You should read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, as the idea of employee-owned businesses where you have to invest in order to work there is a thing that exists in the third book (and foreshadowed by the coops in the second).
I’m not much of a reader, but I might check it out, see if maybe there’s an audio book or something. It definitely sounds like an interesting concept!
lol an audiobook version would probably last a month per book. They are thick even with small print.
Lol, definitely doesn’t sound like my sort of thing then, I can’t get invested in books very easily at all.
I’ve been looking for a decent sci-fi series. If I like Red Mars will I like the rest?
Yeah, you should.