I'm always a bit surprised how few people realized how many "nice things" from the last decade plus have been heavily subsidized by VC money (which itself was created from low interest rates).

Every cool startup that people loved started by burning cash. This made Uber cheap, DoorDash cheap, Youtube helpful and creative, Facebook about connecting with classmates, Twitter a free public forum, Reddit a playground for forums of all possible varieties, Imgur an ad-free alternative to ad-laden image hosting sites, 0% loan available for purchasing anything, etc, etc.

But all of this was possible because all of these companies spent more than they made. In fact, most of these listed still do spend more than they make but they're going through contortions trying to change that and many might not survive it. For those that do their products will unquestionably be inferior to what we had in the 2010s.

There's this belief that technology can only go forward, only get better, but what I think we'll see as we move into the 2020s is a growing realization that things were substantially better in the 2010s... but only because we were putting everything on a credit card and not worrying about the bill that eventually had to be paid.

What's frustrating about all this is the resources wasted on growing businesses that were fundamentally unsustainable. I think a tougher economic climate would have been better for innovation long-term.

Honestly outside of the Youtube/Imgur I don't think these companies are unsustainable. The problem is the VCs are aiming for huge returns. Instead of focusing on their niche and running a lean but profitable business they are forced to chase trends and exponential growth.

Who on Reddit wanted chat or live streams. Why is Facebook spending so much money on videos. does Uber really make any money off hellocopters rides. These aren't what people came to these platforms for and are just costing them a huge amount of money.

Most of these companies seemingly were in a good place, and then started doing stupid pivots to try and make even more money than they already were.

Reddit was doing fine as a text-only forum supported by advertising and Reddit Gold. Then they went a billion dollars in debt building the redesign which is widely disliked by power users (who are responsible for most of Reddit’s actual activity thanks to volunteer moderation combined with the Pareto principle), and at the same time decided to add native image and video hosting and take on all the costs associated with that. Everything since then has really been chasing whatever’s popular. After Twitch got big, they added livestreams, which didn’t go anywhere. After Discord got big, they added chat, which didn’t go anywhere. During the NFT boom, they invested big in those, which wasted a lot of money and didn’t go anywhere. Now AI is the new hotness, and they’re following Elon’s lead by treating the site as a static text repository which more value being sold to people training AIs than any value that could be gained from just...running the site. This boom will end, either by way of hitting the peak of what’s currently possible, updates to copyright law or other regulations, or just by the AI companies remembering they can just download the Common Crawl database for free and get the exact same content without paying Twitter or Reddit (or even specific dumps of Twitter or Reddit content if that’s what they really want; those are widely available in places like the Internet Archive).

Imgur was never going to be sustainable on its own, since it’s basically impossible to monetize an image hotlinking service by definition. However, they brilliantly decided to pivot the site to being its own image sharing community (with all of the monetization opportunities that allows), while still supporting the original use case as a sort of “unintended” feature (while actually being the whole reason the site was originally made in the first place). Then they suddenly forgot that was the plan, probably after several managerial/executive swaps, and started shutting down everything that wasn’t part of the “community” system, even though the “community” was really created just to subsidize everything else.

Facebook’s adventures with video are probably the single most damaging thing to ever happen to the Internet. Basically, they saw that video ads were wildly more profitable than anything else they were doing, proceeded to inflate their video stats by counting anyone scrolling past an autoplaying video as a “view”, told the entire web that text was dead and video was the future (causing hundreds of major sites to shut down their writing departments in favor of mainly producing videos), used all of these manufactured stats to get massive investment in video ads, and then just kind of shrugged when everything eventually collapsed.

YouTube has been in a good place consistently since the mid-2010s, and just really likes pretending that they aren’t. Like I said with Facebook, video ads are really profitable when done right, and YouTube operates at a big enough scale that the bandwidth and storage costs of hosting all of humanity’s video content is offset by the number of people watching Mr. Beast eight seconds after he posts a new video. The problem is that they’re always trying to optimize for more revenue, leading to massive pushes for family-friendliness to keep advertisers happy, pushing whatever the latest “format” is (at the moment, Shorts) because that’s what advertisers are most interested in since it gets the most views, and just generally trying to hyper-optimize every aspect of the website to further improve their margins.

All of these sites could have simply continued with their original business models and maintained small but lean businesses, and they’d probably be able to even keep getting moderate growth thanks to network effects. But they wanted all the money and they wanted it right now, leading to extreme overextension into whatever else is currently popular, and it only ever leads to the core business collapsing because the people who were maintaining it are off selling NFTs or trying to build a video player.

> After Twitch got big, they added livestreams, which didn’t go anywhere. After Discord got big, they added chat

I never heard of twitch as a non-streaming site and discord as a non-chat website.

Yes. Overly cheap money has negative externalities, that’s been the lesson of the post-9/11 financial order, and one of those is that overly cheap money causes fart.app to crowd out economically productive activity. A lot of things were done that shouldn’t have been done at all and fundamentally sucked up money that could have been used for actual productive stuff.

Another is that it incentivized companies to try for the Uber strategy of burning investor cash to become a monopolist player rather than targeting a sustainable growth plan. Low-key this has led to long term consolidation to a greater level than otherwise would have occurred.

> I think a tougher economic climate would have been better for innovation long-term.

I am convinced that the overuse of cloud computing has largely been a byproduct of the money firehose of excessive funding. If money was tighter, massively overpaying for compute and bandwidth should be less attractive.

As someone who is deeply interested about performance, efficiency and scalability, I'm hoping there is a partial industry reversal to caring about these things again.

Yep somewhere along the way we forgot that you can't become profitable on volume when marginal revenue is negative. This is first-year business undergrad stuff.

I don't think they forgot that, the general plan has been successive rounds of funding so you can say "valued at" at increasingly high values, then an IPO or a sneaky exit through secondary market share sales. Then some dummies who aren't you are left holding the bag.

Yep. That’s the worst part — all these startups and people’s time and effort are just a ploy by rich people to get richer.

It's possible to make money on them. But not if you have tens of thousands of employees.

They fail because they need to become billion dollar behemoths to support the VC funding they've gotten. But plenty (not all though) of them could be profitable if they were ran as a "lifestyle" business.

If you actually looked at the balance sheet of twitter before Elon took it over it was quite possible to make it profitable. It would have needed to cut cost and probably try and to boost its ad platform a bit more but well within the realm of possibilities.

With the debt that Elon has saddled them with I doubt they will ever be profitable again without declaring bankruptcy.

> it was quite possible to make it profitable

Without the $760M settlement, they'd have made about $270M in 2021[1].

[1] "2021 operating loss of $493 million, or an operating margin of -10%, includes a one-time litigation-related net charge of $766 million" - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...

At the absolute pinnacle of ZIRP era, there were just barely able to get into the black (ex their legal settlement). That’s not an extremely healthy business. They were going to crash in 22/23 regardless of ownership.

Crash as in what? Get delisted from the Nasdaq and go bankrupt or just have a bad bearish couple years or something? Their cashflow had pretty consistently improved since their IPO, they would've maybe had a couple bearish years, would've laid off employees like most other tech companies and most likely would have roughly followed the overall Nasdaq trajectory in the market. But that's a normal business cycle, the stock market is full of companies in much worse shape (look at Amazon for its first decade) that can survive any storm as long as their DSCR ratio isn't crazy...like Twitter's is now.

Twitter never had a health P/E (Price/earning) ratio. 270M is great on a 2B company but terrible on a +40B company.

In general yes, but Twitter was borderline profitable before Musk took over and saddled them with insurmountable debt payments and decisions alienating advertisers and users.

Twitters current issues are entirely the creation of Elon Musk.

Blue sales ultimately can't hope to come close to what big brand ads used to give.

And ironically enough, blue currently works as a crappy version of advertising thanks to the reply ranking. The promises of prioritizing "high-quality content" never came true; all we see are mid takes and, if you speak Mandarin, AI-powered sex scambots.

Well, worse for us plebs. Not sure if it's worse for the buyers.

> Blue sales ultimately can't hope to come close to what big brand ads used to give.

I don't know, I think the hope is there. With these rate limits and some Fermi estimates, we can guess what Twitter's hoped-for revenue per user might be.

Suppose that this move is designed to move regular users over to Twitter Blue, and a regular user might ordinarily see 2000 tweets per day. Suppose further that Twitter would show 1 ad per 10 tweets, and ad sells for 3$CPM on average, and a Blue user sees 33% fewer ads.

An ordinary user would then expect to give Twitter 200 ad impressions per day, at $0.60/day of ad revenue or $18. By seeing 1/3 fewer ads, that ad revenue drops to $12, but Twitter picks up $8/month in Blue subscription fees, increasing the gross revenue to $20.

That feels about right, and the math gets better in the short term for Twitter if it's having a hard time filling its ad spots — a proportionally greater share of its revenue would then come from the pushed-for Blue.

Likewise, if Twitter is having a hard time filling its advertising spots, kicking non-Blue viewers off the platform is not a short-term revenue loss: the marginal eyeball is unmonetized. In the medium to long term, of course, Twitter is strangling the very content that attracts those eyeballs, and this is still a bone-headed business decision.

We’re already well into the medium term. Content has been leaving since November, and a lot of people are already primed to exit if the site becomes unusable for more than a weekend.

Nope. Blue users aren't going to see ads at all.

Wrong, they see half the ads of regular users, and only on certain spots of the site

"Half ads: See approximately 50% fewer ads in the For You and Following timelines. As you scroll, you will see approximately twice as many organic or non-promoted Tweets placed in between promoted Tweets or ads. There may be times when there are more or fewer non-promoted Tweets between promoted Tweets. The half ads feature does not apply to promoted content elsewhere on Twitter, including but not limited to ads on profiles, ads in Tweet replies, promoted events in Explore, promoted trends, and promoted accounts to follow. Blue subscribers will have access to this feature after their account has been reviewed for eligibility and the blue checkmark has been applied."

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-blue

I think this analysis might work in a vacuum (but see sibling comments about the assumptions of how many ads are served to Blue users), but the biggest problem is the tremendous debt that the Musk takeover has saddled Twitter with. Perhaps you could run a social network sustainably at reasonable cost and profits.

Twitter has over 12 billion USD in debt though, and with rising interest rate the interest payments are going to be an absolute drag on financial performance. Those payments MUST be met, otherwise Musk will not own Twitter at all. Scaling down user numbers is unlikely to help. Even 3% interest rate on 10b is 300 million per year.

>> Suppose that this move is designed to move regular users over to Twitter Blue

I hope you don't work in marketing. Why would a non-paying user watch Twitter arbitrarily limit the number of Tweets a _paying user_ can view per day, and think "yeah, I'll pay for that".

> I hope you don't work in marketing.

Hell no, but also don't mistake me for thinking that this was a good idea.

However, particularly when I don't understand a subject well, I try to take all reasonable-sounding claims seriously at first and give them some back-of-the-envelope analysis. It seemed to me that the original claim was that Blue sales couldn't replace ads, but it seems like the numbers are close under some reasonable approximation.

I do agree that this move is likely to drive many users away from Twitter entirely, but a short-sighted company could still think that an acceptable tradeoff if they're having trouble selling all available advertising space.

Twitter replies used to occasionally have some funny content or (even more rarely) discussion.

Now the top level comments are all some variation of " lmao"

I think this is going to be known as "the Millennial subsidized lifestyle era." Not that it was exclusively used by Millennials, but it's largely what they grew up with.

AirBnb was maybe the worst of the bunch, because it has such a dramatic negative externality on housing markets. Entire areas of Barcelona have essentially no real residents because even those who didn't sell to AirBnb investors found it unlivable with drunk tourists screaming around the apartment buildings at 3 am. I stopped using AirBnb because it was making it enjoyable to visit other cities, but destroying my own. It's also a lot more expensive for fewer amenities.

Spotify hasn't made any money yet. I wonder if they're going to start charging $30/month. Time for the return of CDs, vinyl, MP3s?

Try bandcamp

How does Spotify lose money? Audio isn't nearly as big as video files. Likely they are just going to make the free tier absolutely suck.

Are they still paying exorbitantly for podcaster exclusivity?

Oh yeah, podcasts. I honestly don't know why they're so desperate on attracting people for podcasts. Podcasts are much more unprofitable compared to normal music

Probably harder to cut a good deal negotiating with the legal team of capital records vs a random podcaster.

Estimated $200M for Rogan. I mean... did that really move the needle for them? Who thought, yes, they have practically every piece of music I want to listen to, but it's the Joe Rogan thing that made me finally sign up.

The graph of subscribers shows really no change in the rate of subscribers:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/244995/number-of-paying-...

Probably just more stock-pumping ZIRP big exit nonsense.

They pay the record companies a lot of money to have their music on their platform.

Were these apps made possible with VC money, or just made monopolizable? In a different world, I could see most of these areas spawning smaller companies—on a slower timeline, sure—if VC-backed companies couldn't use massive up-front capital to suck the air out of the room. We could certainly have app-based taxis and restaurant delivery without Uber or DoorDash; hardware and bandwidth have gotten cheap enough that we could have more Vimeos and Floatplanes instead of one big YouTube; Slashdots and Diggs and HNs without Reddit... etc.

I'm hoping for a return of smaller communities and forums that were (more) common before facebook and reddit.

Absolutely, it really was pouring gasoline on fire rather than the sole cause of the ideas. All the functions they provide would have turned up but on a smaller more sustainable scale, more like the older traditional companies of the past.

They wouldn't have been able to support consumer scale without the up front capital. Otherwise they would need private betas and stuff but this would have not created the value of the same network effects and robust marketplaces.

A larger number of smaller firms each supporting the consumer scale they can sustainably and profitably support instead of selling below cost to capture the entire market then turning into hell when the bill comes due.

> we were putting everything on a credit card and not worrying about the bill that eventually had to be paid

We (consumers) didn't put anything on a CC. VCs did.

And I count that for the blessing it was. I ordered tons of subsidized food on DoorDash, cheap rides on Uber, etc.

Now that golden era is over, and I will not be ordering any more of that stuff at the now exorbitant prices.

Thank you based VCs, for comping a bunch of stuff for me the last 10 years.

Except a lot of the formers ways of doing things / getting things have been pushed out of the market with all the capital influx. So there aren’t any small stores anymore, small restaurants don’t do delivery anymore, etc etc.

Small restaurants doing delivery doesn’t make sense as an example.

The only structures that were torn down were things that required capital and upkeep. So for example, once you starve the beast of the taxi industry, then the fleet decays and they can’t compete without new capital investment.

For a small restaurant delivery, they can at any point hire another person to run orders just as they always could, with no loss. The reason this is not viable is because the whole economy got disrupted by covid and now it’s not actually feasible for someone to earn a living just moving parcels of food around locally. Like literally the unit economics don’t resolve positively because CA minimum wage is $15 an hour and you need even more than that to have a decent life.

Are you living in the same world as me? When I go into town there's a ton of small shops. Small restaurants are absolutely everywhere, either to eat in or to get delivery from using one of several delivery apps. I cannot relate to your comment at all.

Thank you, Boomer pension fund managers, for giving nonboomers like me some of that pension fund money!

Uber and doordash yes, they operate a physical business with large costs per customer transaction. Twitter and reddit? No, I disagree. Those businesses should be relatively cheap to host (compared to ad revenue) with focused management and engineering. The only thing about them that could cost a lot is moderation, and twitter should have followed reddit’s lead to leave that to a volunteer brigade. If twitter and reddit lost money, it is because they were not being run efficiently, and they weren’t being run efficiently because the way to show investors they were creating value is launching a bunch of hyped but mostly pointless features and by having a high burn rate.

New reddit launched 5 years ago, and many people still prefer using old reddit. Twitter also did not add any feature in the past 5 years the majority of its users cared about losing. If most of your users are fine with giving up everything you’ve built in the past 5 years, and you have a large staff of engineers, then you’ve not been running the business effectively.

With all of these companies outspending their revenue by so much, cash getting 5% more expensive or so seems like a drop in the bucket.

It doesn't feel like that to me. Elon reported that Twitter hit a new all time high of "user seconds" last week. Reddit usage doesn't seem to have gone down much. In my opinion, what you are really experiencing is wishful thinking.

Elon says a lot of things, like last fall when he was crowing about how Twitter had the bot problem licked. Fast forward to today and bot spam is worse than ever before.

You can believe what you want. I choose to believe what I see with my eyes.

I’m not taking a side of whether Elon is right or wrong.

However, you mentioned that today is an admission that the bot problem is worse. However that not true, the restrictions are specifically on viewing data (scrapers) rather than creating data (bots).

It's going to be hard to continue hitting record highs if you're limiting how much of your content people are able to see.

That's probably why the limits are temporary.

They're not temporary they're indefinite

How is user seconds defined?

Users coming for seconds, because they've been rate limited and deprived of their dopamine hits.

According to Elon, it's screen time as reported by Android & iOS.

| Elon reported that Twitter hit a new all time high of "user seconds" last week

I’m not inclined to take Elon’s words at face value, he has an incentive to pump any statistic that makes it seem Twitter is growing.

That's pretty much majority of data science at tech companies. Stakeholders want numbers that make things look good, not accurate or useful numbers.

> Elon reported that Twitter hit a new all time high of "user seconds" last week.

A famously trustworthy source.

Doesn't the current situation imply that a lot of those users were bots/scrapers?

I don’t have an account so all my interactions with twitter are via discord bots. I don’t know where that falls into scraping vs bots but I ain’t an organic user from their perspective.

In theory the goal would be to push people like me to register and get an account to at least view, and force me into their platform/ecosystem so I can be measure and monetized.

Unfortunately, much like ape pics, printscreen key exists and people will simply pivot to posting png’s of twitter instead of direct linking

How many times must Elon lie before people stop taking is word as truth?

Instagram doing a fediverse thing is a big deal, and makes me really optimistic about the future of ActivityPub. We don't have it all figured out just yet, but I do think we're going to see a decentralized future of social media, which is pretty exciting.

* * *

Their use of ActivityPub is just a way to quickly bootstrap social media functionality using time tested libraries. Just like they did with XMPP.

It's likely more a way for Instagram to avoid monopoly and associated regulatory discussions.

By basing it on an open protocol they can be one of many trusted clients rather than a closed, proprietary service.

Instagram is also apparently building a Twitter-like app, which as much as I hate FB/IG, would probably convince me to switch into their ecosystem again.

I don’t use Facebook because of all the crimes against humanity but I’ll be honest. If the cage match happens and Zuckerberg beats the snot out of Musk, I’m a Facebook user for life. I think a lot of people would feel the same. Meta has a chance to turn everything around.

The rest of the fediverse seems to disagree and is now in an obnoxious war to preblock Meta or not.

It’ll probably get worse if anything

I'm all for a complete reboot of a 100% non-commercial version of the web.

Really it looks like the commercial web is about to lock itself down hard into strongly walled gardens.

It is definitely time to rebuild. I don't know if that'll be ActivityPub and decentralization, but it needs to be something else.

The weirdest thing of this era is that we don't see the big players (eg. Google) trying to take advantage of this situation and create an alternative.

Googs has showed us in the past it is unable to make a product that people want to use, and that they have no stomach for a slow grind to get a product to beat the establishment.

au contraire, they can definitely make products people like but then insist on either ruining them or shutting them down.

fine, I'll rephrase: social products. Remember Google+? You and 10 other people do. Most people's memory of Google+ was how to avoid it after it became a mandatory thing for all gmail users, and then it was just gone. So yeah, people really liked that product

Imo Google (basically by accident) owns the best place social network for the next decade - YouTube.

Human generated content will become rare and more valuable, which is why the remaining non walled gardens (Reddit and Twitter) are quickly raising the drawbridge.

Video will be the last medium to fall to AI generated content pretending to be human generated, and by cloning tiktok across to YouTube shorts they remove the barriers to entry for humans.

Social media nowdays is not about friends, it’s about algorithms & creator monetization. YouTube is #1 on monetization by a huge margin.

Any text based social media network will be absolutely overrun with LLMs.

> Imo Google (basically by accident) owns the best place social network for the next decade - YouTube.

That's pretty damn sad. Limiting discussion to some video link is just not very social to me. Facebook was the best overall to me until they fucked it up. As a concept, it is the most diverse in allowing users to be social with the various types of posts. Sure, you can do videos, images, text only, but also the events, direct messaging, and other features that i don't really remember because i haven't been there in 10 years.

> Imo Google (basically by accident) owns the best place social network for the next decade - YouTube.

Does it? I mostly use YouTube on my Apple TV, and the few times I open it elsewhere, I barely check the comments other than to check the audience reception. There are no conversations there.

Google and new products…

Hahahahahhhaha

Meta is reportedly working on some mastodon thing

A platform where everyone but nazis could say whatever they want (as long as it isn’t something a nazi would say) would be so popular.

I like the shadow ban system. Let users decide which other users get bannedthrough down or upvotes on comments.

What big players are in a position to make an alternative, as well as be trusted enough that people will migrate to it? What an inane comment.

Meta. I’d move to a Meta-run Twitter in a moment. I use FB Messenger and Instagram every day, and Zuck has so far resisted the pull to the far right that Elon and Jack have.

I’d theoretically trust Apple/Google/MS to own the data and governance, but I don’t think any are capable of executing.

I bet Digg said the same thing ca. 2010

They can give it a catchy name too with their branding, because it adds so much value to their services. Maybe call it Google+?

Nobody would join anything social based run by Google anymore. For one thing we all know it would already be in the phase of being closed down, not to mention nobody (Even Google customers) trusts them.

Imagine spending countless hours building up your follower base and accumulating the social media cachet, if you will, only to have Google shut it down in three years. Because that's exactly how that would go.

Instagram has a Twitter-like product in the pipeline now.

Google had their foray into social media more than a decade ago and it failed miserably. Starting from that point they've produced a continuous stream of failed products that never received enough support to last long enough to see viability.

If Meta were smart, they'd immediately shift away from their Metaverse nonsense and use this as a massive opportunity to do things they are pretty good at (hate them or love them.) I know they are working on a Twitter competitor, but they need to find a way to help get the followers they once had back, if they were to switch. They could even ultimately challenge Reddit. I know that would not be an ideal outcome, but as a business with that core competency, I'd be putting a huge effort to take advantage of all of this.

I d say the opposite. Their headsets are great and affordable, but their obsession with making everything social is ... annoying at this point? They keep adding social stuff to the oculus, but why the hell would i want to be stalked while i m deep into another world wearing glasses. They need to quit their old habits and focus on the future not the past

The future in question is not profitable (yet, if at all anytime soon). Social media is and will be for a long time in competent hands. You can think that their VR stuff is cool but also know their core competency is good social experiences. You can hate Facebook and Instagram all you want but they are both very popular and profitable.

> They could even ultimately challenge Reddit.

Frankly I feel Google would be more motivated to challenge Reddit. Since so many of Google’s search results go to Reddit, they might as well try to take over that part of the web rather than leaving it in the hands of mercurial leadership of Reddit.

The only problem is possible retaliation from Reddit and potential antitrust problems if other similar sites feel threatened.

Google should be hyper-motivated, they just appear to be incapable of executing on anything social.

Surprised they aren’t visibly scrambling to get it done anyway though

Except Google seems completely incompetent at creating new products (though maybe YT shorts is the exception that proves the point) and very bad at handling community

YT shorts isn't a new product. It's a feature of an existing product, which happens to be the second biggest website.

I wouldn't say YT shorts is a good example of a well executed product. They all seem shit.

Call a spade a spade. YT shorts is a terribly named, half assed, years late copy.

Same with Instagram Reels, and they're also fairly popular.

If you think about it Google Groups could have been Reddit if presented in this way.

I mean Google Groups was just the colony of crustaceans living on the whale-fall of Usenet.

The shift is that the content itself now has tangible value.

So far it's been the attention of the users that has been monetized, primarily via advertising.

But now the content generated by the users has value as input into AI training sets. And AI companies are scrambling to gather as much as they can as rapidly as they can.

The data itself, not the attention of the users, is what is now being harvested.

The companies hosting the data are right to intervene, there's no reason to allow incredibly well-funded AI organizations hoover it all up for free.

Where it's going wrong is how the social companies are intervening. Their goal is correct, their methods are not.

And yet, by shrinking the reach of posts, there must be far less content being generated. Isn't that the tightrope social networks have always been walking?

This seems to become this year’s biggest unanticipated second order effect of LLMs: UGC and organic human-generated content in general is suddenly valuable in a different way than before. This should totally accelerate the move of “quality content” behind paywalls or signup walls. Only commodity and low quality content will remain on the open web.

> What technologies will take their place?

Someones going to say Lemmy and Mastedon - they're wrong.

There will be no observable long term impact from Reddit banning third party apps.

Only a few power users cared about it and no one cared about them.

I would estimate 90% of worthwhile content on Reddit is posted by power users. Most subreddits are only alive because a few power users take the time to compile and post content. Nobody cares about them, but people will care once their content is gone.

Power mods suck, but power users are the backbone of the site. I predict information quality and density will continue to decrease rapidly on Reddit until it becomes no different from Instagram.

(I’m not personally a power user, I’ve just been on Reddit for a while)

Sample size of one, but I suppose maybe I’m in that category of power users - given that I’d post 3-10 “effort posts” per day.

Apollo finally went dark yesterday, I deleted it, and haven’t felt a single compulsion to check the mobile Reddit site. About the only Reddit related thing on my mind is whether I’m petulant enough to mass overwrite my posts - I’m only too familiar with the struggle of searching for something and finding dead blogs and forums a few years back.

I don’t think Reddit the company owes me anything, but I wonder how many other “high value” users (in terms of both content and value to marketers) simply drifted away once the iOS apps went dark.

I think this is a pretty naïve viewpoint - just look at what the mods of e.g. /r/iama announced today.

On social network websites, the vast majority of people are only lurkers, a relatively few people commenting, even fewer people posting, and fewer people still who want to put in the effort to build up a community.

Reddit's soul sits in those handcrafted small communities, the big ones sure will stay around and be popular, but there's lots of other places where one can get 5 second cat videos, and memes.

This event eroded a lot of the remaining trust between moderators and the admins, and while that can feel like it's not relevant to normal users, over time this will cause fewer people to be interested in starting a community on Reddit.

Yes I agree. What some seem to be missing is that public forums are a cesspit by default. While often invisible, the work of community managers and moderators is essential to maintain spaces people actually want to spend time in. These free workers are in limited supply. Once they leave, sites fill up with unmoderated spam and junk.

I would love for an RSS reader/HN/Reddit thing to exist. You could get you personal news on one side, and subs/communities whith two columns, one for news from sources curated by the admins/mods of the sub, and other column for news, links and text posts submittes by the users.

You could only join by invitation, so as to make F2F social networks in self-hosted instances, or in a Discord-esque "server". I think the value here would be in exchanging opinions, information and new interests with an expanded social network (you woukd probably like and find interesting your friends' friends). Although I admit this model would be a closed community, if it's only one instance then it's not a problem because there are not a lot of people, and if it proves to be successful, it could span a renaissance of blogs or independent content-generation, i.e. these communities would be closed but reinforcing an open Web, instead of mega-silos with captive audience.

I think that a limit in size for each community would be essential, the first member/admin can invite, let's say, 80, people, each of those can invite 40 people, and the third "generation" just another 20 people. This way you get at most 64k people to interact with. There was a post here on HN a couple months [0] ago with a back of the envelope calulation of subreddits being hostile when reaching a 300k userbase.

[0] https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/scaling-problems-in-soc...

You can already follow hn and reddit and youtube channels and tweets on rss

Lemmy has been great. I went SDF as a host. Never going back to Reddit. I left Twitter almost a decade ago so I can’t compare to mastodon but that’s been really nice too.