I just looked through the communities they mod. Unless you are dying to engage with illegalimigration, mixedrace, revelation, askconspiracytheorists, antiwitchcraft, fluoride, chemtrails, or newworldorder, I don't think anything of value was lost.
The basis of this article seems to be interpreting stage 1 of enshittification (“platform is good to users”) as being a “free rider”. However, that is incidental to users and not even necessarily known to them. Therefore it’s a flawed view to say users are trying to be a “free rider”. All the users know at that point is they are receiving a good deal.
I, a user on BlueSky or Threads or Facebook or Mastodon or whatever, have paid exactly zero of any currency to access it. Here, the user is almost definitionally a free-rider.
The platform may be paying to grow their business and advertise, essentially, or they may be using the customer as a source of data and audience as required to sell ads. So it’s quite wrong to look at it as if the user is acting entitled or taking advantage of someone.
If that right is restricted or they are expected to trade something for that right – even something ultimately immaterial and intangible, like seeing ads – they cry “enshittification” and push blame for this state of affairs onto the platform, then try and leave it for another platform that is willing to indulge free-riders… until their costs, too, become unsustainable.
This is all really so wrong as to be painful to read. As if Facebook doesn’t make money from people using their service?
I read this comment before clicking the link and thought, “wow, this article sounds like it’s going to be garbage.”
And it was.
To add to what you’re saying: this article is such a pile of misunderstandings and reductive thinking to to basically do anything to get the thesis “There is no better way than this! It’s so mean how these companies are unfairly criticized by the greedy, greedy, proletariat!!”
The basis of this article seems to be interpreting stage 1 of enshittification (“platform is good to users”) as being a “free rider”.
Indeed, while this can be true it doesn't have to be true. It's entirely possible to profit off of your users without being awful to them. Economics is not a zero-sum game, everyone can "win" from a transaction. Typically this happens because each party gets something from the other party that they value more than the other party does.
For example, I spent years on Reddit happily arguing with wrong people, deriving my "value" from just having fun interacting with folks about stuff. The server resources that Reddit expended supporting that were fairly trivial in dollar terms. Meanwhile Reddit earned a bunch of money by pretending to serve ads to my ad blocker and by selling information about me to AI trainers (or they would have if they'd thought of that before it was too late). None of that bothered me any, so they got something valuable to them from something nearly costless to me.
If Reddit had just stuck with that then everything would have been fine. Instead Reddit hired 2000 staff for some reason, requiring them to squeeze even more money out somehow, and the rest is history.
For example, I spent years on Reddit happily arguing with wrong people, deriving my "value" from just having fun interacting with folks about stuff. The server resources that Reddit expended supporting that were fairly trivial in dollar terms. [...] Instead Reddit hired 2000 staff for some reason
They hired 2000 staff because they were running one of the most highly-trafficked websites on the Internet, with hundreds of millions of users, something which unsurprisingly takes quite a lot of people to administer and maintain. Were Reddit to not invest in people and resources to keep the website running at that scale, you would not be able to use it in the way you enjoy and it would have nowhere near as much utility to you.
This is the entire point of the article that you missed - there are a shit-ton of costs in running a massive community that have to come from somewhere. Your approach is "well I don't think those costs are necessary". But they are.
They also spent those 2000 staff implementing image hosting, video hosting (poorly), a live chat feature nobody wanted, maintaining a mobile app that was inferior to several apps being developed by lone independent coders, and a bunch of other nonsense unrelated to the core experience of Reddit. Rather than being the best Reddit the could be they tried to poorly mimic Facebook and Instagram and other such social media sites.
The thing that killed Reddit was the unfortunately extremely common drive that corporations feel to grow, grow, grow grow all the time every quarter. Always must have more subscribers, more features, more income streams, more products, new markets.
Yeah, I keep getting told by business-savvy people that I don’t understand business and that you always have to grow into your market or even growing into someone else’s, otherwise you’re done for.
But that strategy hasn’t really been working, has it? Why not just be a sustainable business? Focus on ramping up competition only when someone dips into your user base. Don’t hire a couple thousand people only to boot them a year later. They were temp workers all along, just didn’t know it.
That’s an issue I see with this analysis and the underlying problem also.
The so-called “free ride” stage for many companies has been fueled by easy VC money, accelerated by low interest rates. The belt-tightening enshittifying “time to make money!” trend has been spurred by higher interest, as it’s time to cash in on older investments.
The thing is that users never demanded anything for free. We wanted the service that Uber or whoever provided at a fair rate. That’s it. Companies like that chose as a strategy to pursue growth while sacrificing profits in order to corner the market - drive taxi companies under, promote their service vs public transportation, build market share and brand recognition, and ingrain habits into customers. That was an investment for their benefit, not a donation to us freeloaders. Same as Facebook or reddit or whatever providing decent free services that killed off independent forums, blogs, so on while taking control of publisher’s customer lists. Not exactly a charity.
Then when it’s time to raise prices and screw over customers and employees, it’s basically a bait and switch. They paid to make us dependent on them, then once we were, oh, prices doubled and payments halved. FB owns access to businesses’ mailing lists and stopped displaying page posts to your own subscribers unless you pay for ads. So did we get something for free? No, they invested in controlling us.
This is true, but twitter also has an opaque algorithm to choose what appears in your feed. By default Mastodon only allows you to view your feed in chronological order, so there is an argument to make that kbin allows a more twitter like experience...
I do also get there is a steeper learning curve with kbin, and it's basically still only an alpha release (it's clearly not going to be right for everyone).
In general, I consider myself fairly open-minded, I have no issues with the LGBTQ+ community and find it infuriating that the Trans community especially is being targeted by Republicans. It’s obvious they’re being made into scapegoats to get Republican voters to the polls. They’re exploiting people’s misunderstandings and fear for political gain.
HOWEVER, I think the Trans community is its own worst enemy at times, due to their excessively heavy-handed tactics online and this constant drumbeat of accusing anything under the sun as being transphobic, no matter the actual intent. There’s no attempt to educate or help people understand, it’s just bringing the ban hammer, reporting transphobia, accusing people of bigotry, for relatively mild and innocuous comments or actions.
This situation could’ve been resolved by somebody just saying, “Hey that term ‘tranny’ is offensive, you shouldn’t say that,” to which the poster would’ve responded with their background and everyone would realize it was just a joke from someone who was obviously not a bigot. The country is still coming to terms with the Trans community “entering the mainstream”, it’s all new and not everyone knows what’s acceptable (poster probably should’ve known, but probably thought people would know him better). I get that they’re under attack, but the Trans community could afford to chill out online and not go on the attack at the slightest perceived provocation, else they’re gonna start turning people against them.
According to Wikipedia it is. 🤷🏻♂️ I’ve also heard that the “It’s Pat” segments from SNL are considered offensive as well, which to me is odd bc Pat is not the joke of those segments, the joke is people’s utter inability to cope with Pat as a person if they can’t put them into a gender-box. No one laughed at Pat, it was the people struggling to figure out how to behave towards this seemingly non-binary character. In my mind, Pat should be the poster child of the movement and used as a teaching tool, but I don’t really have any skin in the game, so it’s not my place to say what other people should and shouldn’t be offended by.
Referring to oneself as a slur is usually not viewed the same way as referring to someone else with a slur. Doubly so if one doesn't belong to the group the slur targets.
It’s like with most people really. The majority just wants to live their lives in peace, but there’s that small group of militant assholes that make life difficult for everybody.
In this case, they also happen to belong to a disadvantaged group, so in addition to being assholes, they can also accuse other random people of just about anything, and you can’t really say anything against them.
The only possible end result of this is that it will blow up, nobody will be happy and the wave of sympathy can even turn around. Like Amber Heard killed the whole MeToo movement, but it was on its last legs already due to similar shitty people.
This is a tale as old as time. Oppressed groups are naturally conditioned to be hyper-defensive per the oppression they face, which results in lashing out against neutral parties, which comes back to haunt the oppressed group as oppressors can now point as their "inherent evil" and sometimes even the neutral parties will say "hmm maybe they ARE all crazy" and become oppressors themselves. In this case it's not even a neutral party, but someone who is part of the oppressed group theirself, being ostracized by their own community.
I'm reminded of the time that Contrapoints (Natalie Wynn, a veritable transgender icon) got cannibalized by the very community she seeks to advocate for because she confessed that the pronoun dance that happens in inclusive spaces can feel like a step backward for a newly passing trans person who wants nothing more than to be supportive of others, but simultaneously wants nothing more than to naturally and intuitively be referred to by their preferred pronoun without needing the dance. If even the champions of the community are going to be eviscerated for not treading lightly enough, what hope is there of recruiting allies from normie-space?
imo, I can totally understand parts of the trans community not wanting to have to teach people to respect them (people not respecting you as a person by default fucking sucks, and it’s understandable that you’d find it not worth your energy and fucking ridiculous that you have to teach people that you’re a person)
so, I can see why OP got immediately banned, especially since they legit said a slur in a shit joke that, with said slur, could have come off as weirdly fetishizing; many people in marginalized communities don’t really like having to go through someone’s post that comes off bigoted to “figure out if they meant to say something bigoted on purpose or in a bad way” for obvious reasons
hopefully OP realized why they blacklisted them so quickly
Another trap one can easily fall to even for just being friendly
don’t really like having to go through someone’s post
If you’re gonna accuse someone of something, then yes you better make some effort to be reasonably sure. This is the other side of vigilantism people don’t like hearing about - accusing everyone of being evil and making everyone just walk on tiptoes around you isn’t really the outcome you want, it will eventually come around and bite you in the ass.
Reporting everything and leaving the police/mods sort it out only works if those police/mods aren’t overly trigger-happy to shoot you on sight.
Random author who has no say on if a platform does or does not succeed
Its impossible for mastodon to “not survive” because it’s decentralized
Its not a hot new thing it’s been around a long time.
I’ve already read a million articles like this that always boil down to “I don’t like this therefore it will fail” or “it’s not exactly like Twitter therefore it will fail” or the one I sympathize but hate hearing is “it’s to hard”
Just because your system is automated doesn't mean it's free of bias. LLMs are trained on human-generated content. Human-generated content has biases. The model will reflect those biases. There's also the proclivity of GPT to be confidently incorrect, like when it made up completely bogus court cases and a credulous lawyer used them in an actual case. I wouldn't want to get my news from a source that may be lying to my face.
But that’s exactly the thing. I don’t get my news from comanies that outright lie. With the LLMs you don’t really know, so it’s not exactly trustworthy either.
@realcaseyrollins I feel as if people are only sticking with the platform because of a few reasons.
They want to go where the majority of people are
The Brands & people they like to interact with haven't jumped ship either
They are unaware of alternatives such as Kbin or Mastodon (as well as any other that I can't think of atm)
They are Elon fans and hate to think otherwise.
They are super right wing and don't want to join a 'Woke' platform
They don't think a Decentralised system would work
There's probably more other reasons and would love to know your thoughts about what I feel is some of the reasons people don't want to leave X or Twitter, What ever you want to call it.
Mastodon also doesn't feed you content from my understanding, you have to curate your feed yourself, and a lot of people don't mind the algorithm of places like TwitterX and Facebook feeding them random stuff.
@JelloBrains Yes you are right, mastodon doesn't have the 'normal' feed they are used to. I like the explanation that it's like a Garden, you have to pick the weeds but the things you grow are much sweeter in the end.
For me the majority isn't even relevant, I'm on Twitter specifically to follow certain people or organisations which are related to my interests. I barely use Twitter these days but most of the accounts I follow are still on Twitter and bascially nobody is active on Mastodon (or any other alternative I can access for that matter).
I love the idea of Mastodon, but it's worthless to me if my timeline is empty. Lemmy and Kbin are different because they're organised around topics instead of people.
@astrionic I did actually make this point in point number 2. The Brands & people they like to interact with haven't jumped ship either.
This is where Threads is a good example of why it needs to federalize as it actually does have a lot of Brands & people on there and if it did, it would be able to interact with Mastodon as well as the rest of the Fediverse. As well as in my point number 1. They want to go where the majority of people are.
Some people are like sheep and go with the flock, if a big company or influencer moved over to Mastodon or any part of the Fediverse they might actually move across themselves, even if they crosspost it's a good start allowing people to move away from TwitterX if they wish to. But yes the Fediverse has fewer people & brands of the moment but in due time people will mostly get fed-up with being toyed around by these centralized platforms.
The same people who are mad at Meta for scraping already public information, are now mad at Microsoft for not forcing themselves into the fedi to scan all private and public content? Consistent view points are hard!
Putting the blame on Microsoft or IWF is meaningfully missing the point.
People were responsible for moderating what showed up on their forums or servers for years prior to these tools' existence, people have been doing the same since those tools existed. Neither the tool nor it's absence are responsible for child porn getting posted to Fediverse instances. If those shards won't take action against CSAM materials now - what good will the tool do? We can't run it here and have the tool go delete content from someone elses' box.
While those tools would make some enforcement significantly easier, the fact that enforcement isn't meaningfully occurring on all instances isn't something we can point at Microsoft and claim is their fault somehow.
PeerTube is great, it just needs more content. The only instance with good content is tilvids.com and there isn’t much there other than Linux content. The problem with PeerTube is that there’s no creator funding model, so creators don’t have any incentive to use PeerTube instead of YouTube where they can get paid.
Around June 10, a massive influx of reddit refuges hit the fediverse in a giant migration that nocked out massive parts of the fediverse. Kbin activated cloudflare, beehaw went to application mode, several lemmy instances went down, mastodon had a huge influx.
Yeah. This is probably it. Kbin, lemmy.ml, etc. all went down at some point in June. Idk about Mastodon, though, but the graphs line up with what I remember happened in June.
Instances with a few hundred to a few thousands users where getting hit with several thousand people per day. Kbin.social went from 400 to a couple thousand to 50k in ~7 days. @ernest was scrambling and did a great job for a one person show. Super happy he has help now. Need to buy that guy a beer.
Beehaw was a few people, one or two with minor dev experience, and they were hammered. Kbin.social defederated and several lemmy instances were hit with bot attacks. It was chaos.
Okay so this is the first time I'm actually interested in following a Mastadon account via kbin. Um....this is what microblog is for right? Is there a place I can see posts from just my followers?
That's the catch, isn't it? Like subscribed magazines it's not easy nor obvious to find the people you've followed. I think the only thing following does is adds them to your "following" list, which you can only find in your profile.
The mastodon-type posts/microblogs are less well developed at this point. It's a recent feature added to the software before the reddit blow up, if I remember right
Things are moving fast for kbin and lemmy, but right now it feels like nothing is moving fast enough. It's tough being patient.
My understanding is that whenever someone you follow on mastodon makes a post, in kbin it shows up under Microblogs in the “random” magazine… I think… which is here:
but maybe you can narrow that down by using the “subscribed” filter? Maybe? (edit: yes, appears that’s how to do it, select the subscribed filter and then the microblogs tag for kbin.social/sub/microblog to see just who you’re following.)
I think things only show up in other magazine microblogs if someone on kbin specifically posts one to that magazine.
Still working things out myself. But it’s probably better to have a separate mastodon account and appropriate app to keep up with those posts and ignore the Microblogs tab because for some reason all comments are always expanded. Again, I think.
edit: correction already, it looks like everyone posting on Mastodon shows up in the random microblog, whether you follow them or not.
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