They must have some good shovels, to digg a hole so deep for themselves.
I can’t imagine Reddit will ever recover. It’s as bot plagued as twitter and lost all semblance or its former self.
What’s with the trend of major corporations taking turns turning themselves to shit? Can’t these CEO’s see the public backlash and tell themselves “Shit, lets not do what they did”?
Every one of these companies has the exact same target, which is to make more money for their shareholders than the previous quarter at the expense of everything else.
When a company is small and not making as much it’s easier to make little changes to increase capital, but as the company gets larger and they run out of avenues to extract cash from they start getting more and more desperate and their tactics get more and more obvious.
I’ve just left a company for this exact reason, as their little cash grabbing exercises were starting to impact employees and they were making cuts all over the place in order to keep up the illusion of growth.
These CEOs don’t think about the impact that new policies make, they just see more money not being extracted.
I stop by and check the place out once in a while. You’re not missing anything. The place has become a dupsterfire filled with bots and spam. I have old comments from years ago getting new comments on them. They’re all bot comments. IDK why they are commenting on old posts, but they’re doing it a lot.
Yes. Adding a financial incentive to saying whatever everyone already wants to hear, is a brilliant idea that will definitely encourage genuine discussion.
Right, both platforms that algorithmically isolate people into echo chambers, only showing people content that offends them in ways that polarises them further, so as to keep them doom-scrolling forever.
My point is that this isn’t conducive with a social platform that unites people and builds consensus, but one that extract’s money at the cost of inflaming divisions even further.
social platform that unites people and builds consensus, but one that extract’s money (…)
I mean, thats the point and to pretend that any social media was ever anything but that is to either be a historical revisionist or delusional.
Reddit may have had a different point when Swartz was around, but anything that takes venture capitol money is eventually beholden to their moral prerogative. And that is the extraction of all possible wealth in the shortest possible timeline, even at the cost of the platform itsself. That final bit is key. and its a bummer that Reddit didn’t go public before all this fucking around, because we could be making good money off their demise.
Wanting the world to be better is not “delusional”.
Identifying something that exacerbates the problems in human society and arguing against it, is not “revisionist”.
Just because humans tend to be tribal, doesn’t mean the only way to benefit from being a facilitator of communication, is to cynically feed that trait.
If anything, that puts you in an even greater position of responsibility to design the system to do good. Give a system all that humanity creates, and you can make it make you feel whatever you want.
That we are choosing “whatever makes me money” again and again does not mean “whatever will make us grow as a species” isn’t also an option.
Pretending that social media was ever meant for anything other than profiting is “revisionist”, and you are being delusional if you think otherwise.}
There might be better ways, sure. But that was never the point. The point was always to make as much money as possible.
And to be clear “we” aren’t “choosing” anything. You aren’t reddit, or twitter, or facebook. You have no agency in this relationship other than to not participate.
Why are you acting as if meaningless defeatist comebacks are somehow successful one-ups?
I’m not pretending to believe anything, I’m fully aware of how current reality works, and has worked. You mistaking my optimism for what might be possible to mean I think that’s how the world does work, is on your antagonistic starting point.
If you think profit is the only reason people set out to run companies, then you’re the one who is delusional.
And any one of us might alone not amount to much, but even this discussion between you and me will sway at least two minds one way or the other. Scale that up a thousand times, and the direction we take as a species is determined by the ideas exchanged between people, exactly as we are doing now, averaged out among us all.
If all you have to say is nihilistic bullshit about how we should just curl up and die because we can’t really ever do enough, then you can fuck off.
If you think profit is the only reason people set out to run companies, then you’re the one who is delusional.
If you take VC money, you play by their rules. Its not nihilistic to be realistic about the context of things.
And I appreciate your optimism, even if I consider it to be delusional. But to me that kind of ‘inactive hope’ is equivalent to what you accused me of doing (‘curl up and die’).
Proceeding through this world on hopes and prayers that a system set up to do anything but exploit and destroy will do anything but that is deeply problematic and contributes significantly to the issues. Its a kind of toxic positivity that gives people the illusion that they are doing something when they aren’t. I don’t have time for that.
We’re discussing this on a federated platform for fucks sake, which part of how I’m going about living my life that you can see, suggested to you that all I do is cross my fingers and pray that the status quo changes?
Is commenting on these things for others to read mutually exclusive with actually doing something about them?
If you don’t have time for changing minds, then you’re the one giving up on the most powerful way to affect change.
Shifting popular opinion is literally prerequisite to ALL nation-scale change in modern mostly-democratic society.
How is this not going to increase the amount of bots, endless re-posts and in general FUD they get inundated with?
On the surface it sounds great and all, but to me it seems like it will accelerate the site being the shithole that it was headed to. Introducing money into anything like this typically brings out the worse in people.
Why do they care if it does? Creators get paid on a per-gold basis, which means people are paying reddit in the first place for gold. Whether bought gold is spent on bots or human users is probably entirely immaterial to the Admins. Reddit sees engagement and (ideally) spending go up.
Reddit could crack down on bots if they want to. It’s almost entirely a separate issue. Adding money likely isn’t going to change much since obviously bot farms already have a profit motive to spam reddit and the payouts aren’t huge.
Fuck reddit but a broken clock is right twice a day. Advertisers pay reddit because there are eyeballs on their site. Eyeballs are on their site because of the things people post. Shouldn’t the people making those posts be getting a chunk of that advertising money? Maybe some payment to mods for all their hard work? Do all the negative commenters prefer that reddit just… keep all the money for themselves and their shareholders?
wHaT abOut thE BotS? Yes, the bots are a problem, they are a problem because reddit actively decides to let them run rampant. There are many tried and true solutions to this problem and with an incentive system they actually become easier to control. It’s easier to control people with economic incentives. You can’t stop every bot but you can stop most bots and you can make botting harder and more expensive to the point that it’s not worth it for most would-be bot users.
It sounds good in theory but look at how people behave just for the fake internet points. Every top comment in any reasonably large subreddit reads like a bot trying to input all the right words to make the hive mind reward them. It’s why subreddit simulator is so creepy.
I guess you could say that’s pretty much how all communication works but at such a large scale, it starts to get very homogenized and the site starts feeling like one person interacting with themselves. There’s no room for actual discussion because anyone deviating from the hive mind gets buried and attacked. I’m not even talking about politics, go to a guitar subreddit and imply that wood makes a difference in guitar tone. You will get downvoted and all the responses will be over the top indignant which shuts down all discussion.
If you can turn your pandering in to cash, this only gets worse.
Like others said, it sounds good in theory to let users profit as well as the site itself, though ultimately, I think the whole idea of profit in this context is antithetical to online discussion.
In my opinion, an ideal forum or discussion board isn’t about farming karma, awards, or real currency. It’s about speaking your mind about subjects or topics you are passionate about or have something you want to chime in on. Adding an additional monetary incentive only corrupts those involved, which includes Reddit as we’ve seen. But I also think this extends to the users as well. If people are compelled monetarily to post opinions that will gain awards or upvotes, discussion will become even more inorganic, for lack of a better term. In my opinion, the site will have lost sight of generating meaningful discussion, even more than it already has.
It’s why I like how Lemmy doesn’t have universal karma or awards. The incentive of using the site rests solely on the content of the discussions you have, save for the exception of moderators who want to coalesce power. I think monetization is just bloat and only serves to make social media more addictive than it already is.
While I’m not saying Reddit should go the donation-only approach, as I think it is too late for that, I do think keeping monetization to a minimum is in the best interest of any forum.
All of the last 20 years of social media engagement on the internet has been companies falling for the Pepsi Challenge.
The Pepsi Challenge was an ad campaign by Pepsi to get people to blind taste Coca Cola and Pepsi side by side and decide which one they liked better. Pepsi won a majority of the time, which led to a disastrous reformulation of New Coke (before customer complaints caused a reversal back to Coca Cola “Classic”). Now the consensus is that the Pepsi challenge was given in the wrong quantity to measure: people preferred a sip of Pepsi over a sip of Coke, but the preferences shifted back the other way when asked to drink an entire can.
Modern internet feedback loops reward users for very short term bursts of preference, leading to an engagement loop where each step seems like the best step for happiness and engagement, but where the overall loop leaves people feeling shallow and disengaged. Clickbait works at getting clicks but people don’t actually like or respect the sites that do it. Same with influencer accounts working the recommendation algorithm rather than user satisfaction.
Providing a monetary reward will speed up that disconnect, and I think places where influence is rewarded with actual money will bring out a downward spiral.
glad I got kicked out of that platform. Admins (not mods) are getting way too trigger happy when it comes to bans, to the point where I was stating the obvious in a normal way and got hit with a ban for “hate”. Other than that, I was getting bot messages promoting only fans accounts once every ~2 days
indeed, I quit for good after getting banned for telling off a shitty mod. "lol fuck off" is banworthy now. it's a high bar to make another account on a site I was barely clinging on to in the first place. content is still a little scarce here but I still vastly prefer it. even when I do end up on reddit researching ebikes or something it's without an account reading old posts. we're the future and the IPO will be really interesting to watch, since there isn't much worth buying
What kind of idiots are in the boardroom or senior leadership meetings saying, “This is a great idea!” Must be some hella salesmen in there to convince people this won’t run the site further in the ground.
I wonder how much money laundering will occur because of this. I can also see any community discussing anything even remotely illegal that one could buy getting banned because of people using this feature to commit crimes and the shit admins overreacting because of it
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