Reddit Migration

Both Twitter and Reddit have failed to become profitable. And Twitter's in a far worse position right now than Reddit, because of its massive debt and lack of employees to fix or moderate issues. And since Reddit, who never had to pay for moderation, could not become profitable, it had to make some drastic changes toward that goal. Even if that dissatisfies users.

I was on Reddit for almost 10 years when I deleted my account. And while the platform will survive, it's difficult to say the same about Twitter. Not only was it a far worse experience to be on the platform after Musk acquired it, but now it's almost impossible to use it. People paying for the subscription have fewer issues, but I doubt that's going to drive up subscriptions, as Musk most probably expects.

Just my guess, but the timing may partially has something to do with believing a recession is coming.

Simultanous enshittification. If they see that the competitors are enshittifying, then it's the perfect opportunity to enshittify themselves without the risk of losing significant market share to the competitors! Every gets worse; no one loses except the users, and who gives a shit about those poors? /s

No idea, but I'm here to help them finish the job.

As users of these platforms, you are not the customer, you are the product. Your attention, your eyeballs, your information. That product is sold to the real customers - advertising agencies, marketing groups, retail companies, service companies, etc. Now that production of that product has gone through the design phase and scale up, it's time to monetize.

The real issue with Reddit didn't have anything to do wtih API rates. It had to do with product value. Third party apps don't carry through their ads, thus reducing their value to their customers (again, not you). Moving NSFW subs, which significantly increases their product (you), increases the value to their customers. If they were going to allow third party apps to exist, they desire recompense for the dilution in value, hence the high API costs.

This is the future of centralized web services.

It's called enshittification of platforms. The article is not about Reddit, but applies just as well.

Heard it may have to do with data scrapping from AI training. Both Reddit and Twitter have massive amounts of user generated data and through API that data scrapping would be too accesible.

Gotta get the money from the data I guess (separating the data from the user that generated it in the process).

It's the age of Techtalitarianism. They've become more brazen and less discreet in the fact they want everyone to pay to access what has become an essential communication method. Soon enough, the "free" aspect of social media will be on par with a video game demo. One or two levels (or features in this instance), certain amount of posting and reading privileges per day, just enough to get a feel for the real thing hidden behind an increasingly hefty paywall.

My favourite part was when spez said they don't make any profits right before they IPO. Nothing instills confidence in investors like no profit

Most of them aren't profitable, especially twitter and reddit. YouTube is also doing it now, they're going after adblocks. They even threatened invidious recently.

But tbh discord change is for good. It's easier to invite someone, especially if they have special chars in nickname.

I don't think Discord's username change is on the same level as what Twitter and Reddit have done. It's annoying for sure but it's not as harmful. It's not like the username change prevents you from using it.

I know the common answer is something around the lines of “because companies only care about making money”, but I still don’t get why it seems like all these social media companies have suddenly agreed to screw themselves during pretty much the period of March-June.

It seems like the proximate trigger for many of these decisions has been the rise of ChatGPT at the end of last year. Before this, they saw the best way to monetise their platforms as being about encouraging new content to create new clicks for advertising revenue. Since ChatGPT, they realised they're all sitting on goldmines of old content that could be used to train their own AI models - so suddenly they're prepared to take a range of seemingly-mad actions that will harm the quality and quantity of new content being created, because they think they've got enough revenue-generating potential from the existing content.

Of course the problem here is that a) they're killing the golden goose - monetising the back book while degrading the new content means they can only do this once, so they better hope it works and makes them a shit load of money, whilst b) although there's loads of potential in AI, we're yet to see someone actually make money through it and it has the potential to be a huge bubble where the hype eventually dissipates and the market collapses upon itself, with only a handful of players making it through unscathed to become the big success story.

All of these social media companies are betting the future of their platforms on them being the one that makes it through the AI bubble. Most of them will fail.

It’s advertising revenue collapsing and people realizing you can’t just run things for free. I am fine with not having these things if it means I get digital privacy

Elon's tweet limit decision was a pretty bad one. Spez has been more of a disaster than the others recently though.

themselves? I haven't seen Twitter Reddit or Fuckerberg file for bankruptcy. what they destroy is their communities and your ability to speak.

that's much worse

Like any other company, they are trying to make more money. Since inflation is high, the amount they want to "stay ahead of the competition" (and feed the pockets of investors or owners) is higher too. Productive companies like the one I work at do this by "making more with less", so less labour (layoffs, hiring freeze) and higher prices typically.

With the products of social media companies being people and the price they are willing to pay being somewhat low and elastic (not necessary for life like say food and housing so easy to drop), they have to enshittify it in various ways to press more profit out of the products in less direct ways than price increases.

We‘ll see if ultimately this aggressive business model works out for them, I personally hope it doesn‘t.