reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).

the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.

another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.

size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.

we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.

  • hanke@feddit.nuEnglish
    0·
    18 hours ago

    Hmmm… I feel like this is only half the picture.

    Lemmy, as mentioned, don’t have an incentive for such things. But also very importantly, no single instance would get away with spam/ad accounts. If one instance becomes a neucianse (to tired, can’t spell), other users/instances will block it outright.

    This already happens to instances with high concentrations of stuff people don’t want to interact with. I don’t see how it wouldn’t happen to a commercialised instance as well?

    While thinking about it, this is exactly what happened to Facebooks “Threads”. The whole point is decentralisation, so no one wants to federate with big company instances.

    And commercialisation in the software for Lemmy is, while not impossible, very much neutered. If someone were to push features for ads or something else shittifying into the code, about 100 devs would immediately fork the codebase right before that change and carry on the work for an ad free decentralised platform.

    Not saying Lemmy is perfect, but it has self-correcting properties in many layers that prohibit a general enshittification of Lemmy as a whole.

    • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      18 hours ago

      no single instance would get away with spam/ad accounts. If one instance becomes a neucianse (to tired, can’t spell), other users/instances will block it outright.

      In a world where there are hundreds of millions of Fediverse users, that would be an impossible task. New instances and accounts would pop up faster than you could ever hope to ban them.

      While thinking about it, this is exactly what happened to Facebooks “Threads”

      That’s not what happened at all. Many of them defederated. Many also did not. Some of the largest ones did not. Fortunately Meta put almost zero effort into it and it wasn’t really a problem anyway.