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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • Definitely Reddit’s buildup was smart. The transition to profitability not so much. Although we’ll see.

    Man, remember all those who kept arguing against it? I would say “Reddit is dying”, and these new accounts that had never visited my sub before we decided it should go dark suddenly appeared and started talking crap about anyone who criticized Reddit. That should have been a smoking gun alone for people to realize what was going on. But instead, people just said “yup, that’s Reddit for you”. Which extremely unfortunately… they were right, bc that is what it had become by that time.

    i.e., spez didn’t kill Reddit by denying the usage of third-party apps - that was merely the final nail in the coffin for many of us, topping off a process that had begun several years earlier.


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

    People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I’m not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.

    Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long “video essays”, rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?

    All the rest: yup.


  • Over time yes, but then again those most likely to leave have already done so. At this point I don’t expect anymore large exoduses from it, but even if there were I’m not so sure that they would come here.

    Conservatives would not feel welcomed in the slightest (nor should they, hey-oh!:-), normies would not feel comfortable due to the heavy need to block every damn thing here just to survive it, and especially the people who think they are leftists (as I once naively thought, with zero evidence I should add!:-P who wants to bother actually looking up definitions of terms? especially if everyone around you is a conservative and thus it makes no functional difference) will find themselves most likely to become dogpiled onto by the people most ah… “eager” to look down upon their fellow human (and some as we so recently and unfortunately discussed go so far as to tell others to kill themselves - highly inappropriate language, especially coming from an instance admin).

    So even if some were to leave, where would they go? Twitter is dead, having been eaten from the inside by X and cancelled, then necro-birthed into its current undead existence. And Facebook… just… no. Threads then? Maybe in a few years but either way it’s not comfortable and familiar like Reddit is. So even if people left Reddit, I would expect them to go crawling right back into it, maybe just change their subs or some such. Especially when they roll out subscription model to avoid (some of) the ads, though it’s too soon still as they get people used to them slowly but surely… just like a frog in a pot being cooked slowly (except that’s a false story, bc irl the frog actually does have enough sense to jump out!).

    Or maybe they’ll simply touch grass, until they can’t stand that anymore?:-) Playing games rather than talking with people can be a real distraction from the grittiness of life - and then there’s Discord servers that so long as you only want a singular specific game, actually do offer a convenient method to discuss such a focused topic.

    So “less profitable”, I guess we’ll see. Probably somewhat less, but substantially so? That I dunno.















  • No…t entirely.

    There is a lot of extremist propaganda here - e.g. advocating for literal murder (just search for the word “guillotine” to quickly get an idea of what I mean). Also, if you criticize Russia or China on lemmy.ml, or try to claim that e.g. genocidal practices happen (even share your second-hand accounting of Uyghur family members) you will get banned from communities that you’ve never even heard of across the entire instance, with no prior warning.

    The “funny” part there is that both Russia and China are capitalist nations, not communist. It helps to think about children talking about what they think (or rather wish) communism is, rather than the real world. So they’ll tell you to read certain books, while studiously ignoring e.g. that the Tiananmen Square massacre actually did take place, i.e. they cherry pick and only talk as if they care about it, rather than actually doing so. Think Truth Social, but claiming to be leftist rather than right.

    But e.g. there’s also Star Trek memes, and… well I am sure there are other things too, somewhere!?:-D More seriously, each instance has its own focus, none of which (anymore) is “conservative”, all of which is left leaning, but the vast majority of which is not extremist. Mander.xyz for instance has some fantastic scientific content.

    Check out !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca - I refer back to it often, e.g. to remember how to do things like use links to communities from different Fediverse instances. I wish it, or something like it at least, would be shared with everyone, but Lemmy is extremely primitive when it comes to such things (case in point, if you go to lemmy.ml, visit their sidebar, and click “What is lemmy.ml”, it takes you to a post that does not exist).

    I have been advocating for labeling such communities and instances - that way, like porn, people can enjoy it all they like while also being friendly enough to let others know what’s present therein, and that way we can get along better. However extremists famously resist labeling themselves as such, treating their own views as the sole correct one and rather it is everyone else - yes literally the entire rest of the fucking world - that is “different”. So instead, each person has to find out mostly on their own what these subjects are all about. Kudos for sticking around long enough to do so.