Lvxferre

I agree that Reddit will become irrelevant to internet power users. However, I disagree that it takes a massive fuckup to lose the critical mass of users.

A simple way to explain this is to imagine that everyone has an individual “I’m pissed and I leave” threshold; if a platform displeases a user more than that threshold, they leave.

For power users, this threshold is really low, so they ditch platforms like Reddit faster. However, that does not mean that the others aren’t getting displeased - they do; it might not be enough to convince them to leave, but it quickly piles up with other things displeasing them.

As such, even a large platform can lose that critical mass of users over time, even without a massive fuckup. It’s just about small things piling up.

Another thing to consider is that power users are more important to a platform than the rest of the userbase, because the power users interact with the platform more. And they’re typically the ones doing janny crap, or finding and sharing content, or that actually have anything meaningful to add instead of “lol lmao”. So once the power users leave, the platform becomes less desirable for the others too, and that’s recursive - as the power users leave, the almost-power users leave too, then the ones after them, so goes on. And there the critical mass goes down the drain.

My guess: there won’t be a specific date that you can poinpoint and say “Reddit died here”. It’ll be a slow decline, with small outbursts of re-engagement. Something like this:

Profit will follow a similar pattern, as both things are intertwined.

I have never met a person who can isolate the moment when Tucker Carlson became Alex Jones. So, where did it come from exactly? …it’s very clear to me both are demons.

Muito provavelmente, é spam. E o uso da expressão “vamos te ajudar a entender” sugere-me que o texto foi escrito por robô.

Ou seja. Melhor não interagir com este djanho.

Yeah. I got a leg scar from a domestic cat that I’ve raised from kittendom, who’d easily have ripped my face if she could reach it*. A wild, larger, and more powerful version of that seems like a bad idea.

*because I was holding a kitten that she never saw before. Yup. Fuck you Kika, I love you but you’re a bloody arsehole.

Yup, I got that you don’t mean that everyone is a bot there. I just don’t think that there aren’t so many of them as you’re saying; it’s certainly not as much as half the users, or even the activity (bots tend to be more active than actual users).

They’re still wrecking damage on the place though. Eventually they’ll reach a plateau in proportion, but their numbers will go down, alongside the actual users.

Bots are parasites: they only thrive if the host population is large enough to maintain them. Once the hosts are gone, the parasites are gone too.

In other words: botters only bot a platform when they expect human beings to see and interact with the output of their bots. As such they can never become the majority: once they do, botting there becomes pointless.

That applies even to repost bots - you could have other bots upvoting the repost, but you won’t do it unless you can sell the account to an advertiser, and the advertiser will only buy it if they can “reach” an “audience” (i.e. spam humans).

Shorthand for third language [English] speaker. I mean that I’m prone to switch a few words here and there, due to other languages interfering inside my head.

This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

Digg, right? Yeah. Perhaps spez even knew that it would repeat, but was smart (and shitty) enough to jump off the ship before it happened.

I’m not. We’re talking about different things.

Backtrack to Miles O’Brien’s comment. They’re clearly talking about individual depictions, and my comment focuses on that. To assume that people with shitty worldviews must be necessarily incompetent is wishful thinking.

The reason why the Nazi worldview is invalid has jack shit to do with efficiency or competence, it’s as simple as “that worldview oppresses the lives of innocent people into living hells”.

In the meantime you’re talking about the social impact of continuous, somewhat consistent-ish depictions of the Nazi in media, not individual depictions. What you’re saying is valid but another can of worms.

Even just repeating things like “At least Mussolini made the trains run on time” plays into it, especially when it’s a lie, just like the Wunderwaffe programs or the Nazi “miraculous economic recovery” which was just making people work longer hours and deficit spending.

Note that, if people are less eager to play along that fallacy, this sort of argument doesn’t roll any more. Suddenly if Merdolini made the trains run on time or not doesn’t matter, and can be safely called out as a distraction. Just like the Nazi economic recovery.

I’m not expecting a big exodus, but rather a slow decline in both the number of users and their engagement. With a few peaks here and there that seem to revert the downwards trend, but each peak being smaller than the one before.

They won’t be leaving for the same reason as most people here did, pissed at the IPO-related changes (such as killing 3rd party apps). It’ll be more like “…meh, why would I check Reddit? There’s better stuff elsewhere.” We can already see the decline of the content quality in Reddit now; it’ll get only worse over time.

I think that most will end in Discord. Some in Bluesky, and some will simply touch grass. Conservatives might end in Minitrue “truth social” or crap like that.

Facebook might perhaps absorb some of the former Reddit users. It feels disgusting for the privacy conscious, but for them it’ll be a simple matter of not finding interesting stuff in Reddit.

The same applies to Reddit’s liquid profit - for now, that value extraction still creates a small peak on raw profit, to the point that the bottom line became positive; later on the peak will barely reach the surface; later on, value extraction will be necessary to avoid making the bottom line too negative.

I think that most users there are still human beings, but botting has become a big enough problem that the platform can’t be seen as a place for genuine content any more.

Yup, it is 100% relevant! Selling user data is extremely profitable, specially with a large userbase. However, it lowers the value of the platform - it makes users less eager to genuinely contribute with it (due to privacy concerns, seeing it as a “they’re exploiting me!” matter, etc.). As such the data being generated there becomes less useful, less relevant, and less profitable over time, paradoxically enough.

I fucked it up and switched the terms, sorry. Look for “value extraction” instead; you’ll find multiple references to the concept such as this or Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything”.

To keep it short: you create value when you produce desirable goods/services for the customers; however, when you extract it, you’re picking the value that was already created (by society, your customers, or even your own business) and turning it into profit. The later is faster but unsustainable, as that value doesn’t pop up from nowhere, so when a business shifts from value creation to value extraction it’ll get some quick cash and then go kaboom.

In Reddit’s case, this value is mostly users willing to generate, curate, and share content with the platform, and other users knowing this:

• someone recommends you a product/brand. The person might be wrong, but you were reasonably sure that they aren’t a corporation astroturfing their own product. Someone else might criticise it instead.
• you hop into your favourite subreddit and, while the content there isn’t the best, it’s still good enough - because the mods gave some fucks about growing their subreddits;
• you discuss some controversial topic. You might get dogpiled, but at least you know that the dogs piling you are human beings, that sometimes might listen to reason; a bot will never;
• et cetera.

All that value was being slowly extracted through the last years, but the changes in 2023/2024 did it the hardest.

As I often mention in other communities, this smells like value exploitation extraction* from a distance. Value exploitation extraction typically generates a peak of profit in the short term, but it makes losses even harsher in the long run.

As such I don’t think that Reddit is getting “bigger”. That profit is like someone who lives in a wooden house, dismantling their own home to sell it as lumber; of course they’ll get some quick cash, but it’s still a bad idea.

In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature.

Let’s pretend for a moment that we can totally trust Huffman’s claim here. Even human translations often get some issues, as nuances and whatnots are not translated, and this generates petty fights, specially in a younger userbase like Reddit’s; with AI tendency to hallucinate, that gets way worse. And even if that was not an issue, a lot of content is simply irrelevant for people outside a certain regional demographic.

*EDIT REASON: I switched the terms, sorry. (C’mon, I’m L3.)

I’ve had one idiot tell me ANY media that paints them as competent or successful is glorifying them. And setting anything in a world where they succeeded and progressed technologically instead of collapsing is basically saying Hitler’s world view is valid.

And people still wonder why I pick so much on the wishful thinking fallacy… I mean, that’s basically it, right? “Nazi are morally bad, I hate them, thus they must be incompetent”. And if you correctly highlight that this is fucking stupid, you’ll get some kid saying stuff like “I dun understand, why are you defending Nazi?”.

Kind of. @storksforlegs@beehaw.org is right that journalistic standards prevent too much meddling. Plus commercial news defending interests have a better resource for manipulation - instead of lying, they pick which true pieces of info to release as relevant, and paint them one or another way.

For example. Let’s say that Alice insults Bob, and Bob slaps Alice in return. Someone defending Alice would say that she was the victim of aggression, while someone defending Bob would say that he reacted to Alice’s verbal abuse. Neither is false, but they don’t get the full picture. While LLM/A"I" style bullshit be saying instead “Alice picked a puppy and beat it to death with Bob’s face”.

Any outlet accepting the deal should be immediately put into a list of sites spreading disinformation and potentially harmful content.

That’s fair - and it’s clear that your moral premises are, like, diametrically opposed to mine (I completely disregard intent - for me responsibility takes the job).

I was aware that you weren’t contradicting me but this sort of discussion is fun, sorry!

A person is good or bad depending on their impact on the people around them; as such I don’t consider “misguided” a valid defence.

And while someone can be overall a good person while writing socially harmful and user-hostile software, because they have other qualities that compensate it, writing said software still makes them a worse person.

It’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it

So it’s hard to be good when your salary depends on you being bad.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m analysing this through my moral views, but I don’t think that they’re the only valid ones. Your mileage may vary.

My other comment was mostly on how idiotic the whole defence is, not about morality (as this one).