We are all witnessing a huge paradigm shift right now. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Reddit have been the kings of the internet for the last 15ish years, with Google having an even longer...
Exemplary
We are all witnessing a huge paradigm shift right now. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Reddit have been the kings of the internet for the last 15ish years, with Google having an even longer reign than that. This is enshitification at work.
Google search sucks and people know it. That's why they add "reddit" to the end of their searches now. AI is going to kill them unless they are able (and they sure are trying) to get on top of this and utilize their own AI.
Amazon may not be dying quite yet, but people are getting tired of sorting through low-quality Chinese products and trying to decide which reviews are real. They can't maintain this forever and stay on top.
Twitter - sorry, I mean X - is dead already whether Musk knows it or not. Like all the other "free speech" platforms, it'll become more of a cesspool than it already is and the regular people will leave. This rebrand is going to accelerate this process. Whether Musk did it intentionally or not, this is a bit unfortunate because Twitter did enable the dissemination of a lot of left-leaning ideas. Granted, it was also toxic and awful.
Facebook might be able to stay the course, especially if their investment in VR pans out. I'm skeptical about this, but time will tell. I keep being surprised by how resilient Facebook is. I keep thinking it's the end for them, but it seems "too big to fail" in some regards.
Reddit is in the beginning stages of the end too, obviously. It'll take a long time to fully die, but the decline has been going for a while and users are just now collectively noticing.
I can't even imagine what the internet is going to look like in 10 years. Between Apple's VR headset, Facebook's VR research, the AI boom, and the rise of things like federated communities, we are in for an interesting ride. This will probably be a lot like the 90s/2000s shift in terms of scope. And it'll probably include its own "dot-com bubble" too, which I'm guessing will be AI-related. I am curious to see who will rise to the top after that.
I think it's simple: Facebook is boring. It's core features are done, and they have practically just been in maintenance mode since ~2011. Even Instagram (extremely limited features) and WhatsApp...
but time will tell. I keep being surprised by how resilient Facebook is.
I think it's simple: Facebook is boring. It's core features are done, and they have practically just been in maintenance mode since ~2011. Even Instagram (extremely limited features) and WhatsApp (again, limited) have barely had any major features or changes the past few years. VR is the one area they are actively evolving, and it's a hardware play which is definitely more "fun" for them and allows them to break conventions a little bit.
I am by no means a Meta/FB fan, but they are just... boring and their core audience knows what to expect when they login, no massive changes, no upheavals, everything is just there, the same as it has been for a decade.
Edit: and surprisingly they are the only social network that gives you proper privacy controls for everything on a granular scale, sure privacy from advertisers is different, but for your posts, comments, and messages to the public world? They are definitely the best option with strong variable privacy guards.
This is a great point. Imagine how long the reddit we knew would have continued on, fairly drama free, had reddit just ...done nothing. With the exception of third party apps and tools having to...
I think it's simple: Facebook is boring. It's core features are done, and they have practically just been in maintenance mode since ~2011
This is a great point. Imagine how long the reddit we knew would have continued on, fairly drama free, had reddit just ...done nothing. With the exception of third party apps and tools having to provide baseline functionality and accessibility (which is ridiculous, but the arrangement was working just fine) old.reddit has gotten the job done for many years, and no one asked for new.reddit or any of the bizarre changes they've made over the years. They really had to do a lot to piss people off.
I have actually heard about a lot of instagram changes over the past few years that IG users have been really unhappy with, but it seems they've been subtle or blew over easily enough that the upset hasn't harmed the platform much.
Has reddit made a single good change in the last ten years? Really everything they have done has either a) pissed off their user base or b) increased their operating costs for no real benefits....
Has reddit made a single good change in the last ten years? Really everything they have done has either a) pissed off their user base or b) increased their operating costs for no real benefits. Starting hosting images themselves increases server costs. Developing their own video player increased the further and made the user experience worse. They buy the most popular 3rd party app, incurring development costs, then progressively make it borderline unusable to piss of the users. Then they ban all of the other 3rd party apps, alienating the users their site depends on.
It's baffling. You could teach a class on how not to run a business based on nothing but reddit and their business decisions.
They are definitely chasing profitability, but only in the short sighted, short term profitability that is slowly ruining everything. And even that is failing, as they have repeatedly said they...
They are definitely chasing profitability, but only in the short sighted, short term profitability that is slowly ruining everything. And even that is failing, as they have repeatedly said they are not profitable. Probably because they continue to take on new and necessary costs.
I think fixing their search was a good change. Overall though if you look at every one of these changes it's about keeping users ON Reddit's servers and building a walled garden. If they serve the...
I think fixing their search was a good change. Overall though if you look at every one of these changes it's about keeping users ON Reddit's servers and building a walled garden. If they serve the videos they can keep the analytics and there's no chance you go create a profile at another site. They saw it with Imgur which started to cultivate it's little community.
The bottom line is all of these are businesses and they are trying to make money, regardless of whether their model actually supports making money.
I don't believe the Reddit model supports making money. It allows for too much guerrilla marketing (think of the Snap, Ugh that was incredibly annoying) without advertiser's having to pay Reddit. And people are simply not there for ads.
Reddit fixed their search? You could have fooled me... I do think it has improved over time, because it used to be completely useless, but it's still so bad that I would instead just go to Google...
Reddit fixed their search? You could have fooled me...
I do think it has improved over time, because it used to be completely useless, but it's still so bad that I would instead just go to Google and search for the thing on reddit I wanted. Google weirdly has become a worse search engine but a better reddit search engine.
I think the reddit model, as it was originally, could have been massively profitable. A link aggregator that doesn't host any of the content it links to while simultaneously having the kind of...
I think the reddit model, as it was originally, could have been massively profitable. A link aggregator that doesn't host any of the content it links to while simultaneously having the kind of traffic reddit has is a gold mine. Low overhead and incredibly value ad spece. It doesn't matter that a large portion of the user base is blocking ads when you have enough traffic. But when you start bringing all the outside processes in house, you're now paying for what you previously got for free and your overhead goes through the roof. I understand why they did it, but it was still a series of incredible stupid moves.
I'd argue image hosting was actually a smart move. Or at least not dumb. Having to rely on third-party hosts like Imgur—which was getting progressively less friendly about reddit posters direct...
Starting hosting images themselves increases server costs.
I'd argue image hosting was actually a smart move. Or at least not dumb.
Having to rely on third-party hosts like Imgur—which was getting progressively less friendly about reddit posters direct linking to Imgur—was always a risk. Imgur was making embedded albums more difficult, and making you go through extra steps just to get a direct image link to post on reddit so you wouldn't be linking to an Imgur landing page with the image.
With Imgur purging NSFW content, and now GfyCat going under, reddit doing their own image and video hosting certainly seems to be less stupid than it originally appeared.
The mistake was in permitting an ecosystem of unofficially "official" ways of doing things online. A world where there were many different image hosts that were largely interchangeable wouldn't...
The mistake was in permitting an ecosystem of unofficially "official" ways of doing things online. A world where there were many different image hosts that were largely interchangeable wouldn't have put Reddit over a barrel like that, but techbros adore a monoculture it seems.
At some point with user generated content you end up making it too easy for any user off the street to share their content. This has the effect of dramatically worsening the signal to noise ratio. There are certain things that aren't worth streamlining, and it's hard to hit that sweet spot. You want just enough to where people who care will bother to figure it out, but not so easy that there is no figuring out required.
Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that. But I guess it comes down to cost/benefit question. Is having control of the product worth no longer getting it for free? I don't know what reddit spends...
Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that. But I guess it comes down to cost/benefit question. Is having control of the product worth no longer getting it for free? I don't know what reddit spends on the infrastructure necessary for image hosting, but it isn't cheap. But you're right, it definitely a more complicated issue than it seems at first glance.
This is true, but doesn't absolve him entirely. He was well aware such subreddits existed and the reddit admins gave out awards and trophies to a certain moderator who "tended" the seediest parts...
This is true, but doesn't absolve him entirely. He was well aware such subreddits existed and the reddit admins gave out awards and trophies to a certain moderator who "tended" the seediest parts of reddit. That sub won "subreddit of the year" back in 2008.
This is back when reddit's philosophy had a much stronger libertarian free speech and anything goes bent than it does today.
In never made money though. Facebook does. And I'd say Facebook doesn't really do nothing, they're constantly tweaking the algorithm under the hood to hit whatever organizational KPIs they have....
Imagine how long the reddit we knew would have continued on, fairly drama free, had reddit just ...done nothing.
In never made money though. Facebook does.
And I'd say Facebook doesn't really do nothing, they're constantly tweaking the algorithm under the hood to hit whatever organizational KPIs they have. There's tons of moderation tweaks, tweaks to how ad sales are handled, ad management stuff, and on and on.
It's just all opaque to the end user because we are basically chattel for them to herd. A cow might notice when the rancher takes her to a different field to graze, but the grass is grass from one field to the next so as long as she gets enough feed and water and fresh air she's content enough (until. . . you know).
I wonder though how much of reddit's costs are associated with chasing new features and such, though. How much could they have cut costs if they'd switched to more of a maintenance mode and slow...
It never made money though. Facebook does.
I wonder though how much of reddit's costs are associated with chasing new features and such, though.
How much could they have cut costs if they'd switched to more of a maintenance mode and slow feature rollout? Instead, they completely rebuilt the GUI (engineers, designers, managers, etc) while trying to keep a lot of backward compatibility, add chat, added some kind of facebook-style profile thing, etc etc. According to Comparely, the highest paid executive(s) make nearly $800k a year. They also made official apps (more employees) rather than coming up with a way to monetize third-party apps (eg sane API pricing).
Maybe they would have been fine if they'd tried to add more monetization without also blowing money on all that stuff. But also maybe not; I have no idea. It's just interesting to think about.
Yeah that's my general feeling as well, but I have no idea what their actual financials are. I suspect they were in enough technical debt by the time people started complaining about the site a...
Yeah that's my general feeling as well, but I have no idea what their actual financials are. I suspect they were in enough technical debt by the time people started complaining about the site a lot that it was going to be a major cost just to fix it even if they didn't try to implement batcrap new features.
@Deimos used to work for them so he might have more insight, but I don't think he was that involved on the financial/corporate strategy side of things.
Since the time that I worked at reddit, they've taken around a billion dollars in venture capital, and have about 100 times the number of employees. Anything I knew about the company wouldn't have...
Since the time that I worked at reddit, they've taken around a billion dollars in venture capital, and have about 100 times the number of employees. Anything I knew about the company wouldn't have the slightest relation to what it's like now.
This is just one small data point, but reddit was hiring for a Legal Operations Manager a few months ago, and the job post popped up for me on LinkedIn since that's exactly the type of work that I...
According to Comparely, the highest paid executive(s) make nearly $800k a year.
This is just one small data point, but reddit was hiring for a Legal Operations Manager a few months ago, and the job post popped up for me on LinkedIn since that's exactly the type of work that I do. I remember being fascinated by the stated salary range, because it was nearly $100k higher than the typical range for that role/experience level, which is already a decently high paying role at most companies. Not that it's bad to compensate employees well, but it was such an extreme outlier that it made me wonder about how they run their business in general.
I’d argue the other major point in ‘support’ of Facebook is how much they supplanted individual business websites for a lot of small companies and restaurants. A lot of local businesses’ online...
I’d argue the other major point in ‘support’ of Facebook is how much they supplanted individual business websites for a lot of small companies and restaurants. A lot of local businesses’ online presences and info are only available through Facebook, and I can understand why, even if I’d prefer an alternative.
Not nearly as big a point, but I think Facebook marketplace is another niche role they’ve filled pretty effectively, to the point that I sometimes contemplate having an account again just to be able to access it.
I think you're onto something there. Meta/FB isn't really pushing forward anywhere except VR. Their newest product is Threads and it's just a Twitter alternative with a better environment and more...
I think you're onto something there. Meta/FB isn't really pushing forward anywhere except VR. Their newest product is Threads and it's just a Twitter alternative with a better environment and more data collection. They build a product that works and then maintain it, and I think long-term, that's a smart decision. Dramatic change is what pushes people away. FB does make layout changes and stuff but they seem more minor, I haven't used it in forever but it's been a long while since I've seen a big furor about a layout change.
I think that's what makes them "boring". They are fine giving that image of "we exist" in the PR for FB, but the real sausage behind the curtains is what makes it such a sneakily dark company.
sure privacy from advertisers is different
I think that's what makes them "boring". They are fine giving that image of "we exist" in the PR for FB, but the real sausage behind the curtains is what makes it such a sneakily dark company.
I agree with everything you said about being done. However, over the past maybe 2 years I've noticed a push to use the FB app rather than access it through the mobile browser (desktop browser is...
I agree with everything you said about being done. However, over the past maybe 2 years I've noticed a push to use the FB app rather than access it through the mobile browser (desktop browser is fine). I avoid installing apps whenever possible. At first it got difficult to message people through FB (cursor & scrolling control went haywire) and now it simply refuses to display your messages at all, instead telling you to install Messenger.
You can get around this either by requesting the desktop site or by using mbasic.Facebook.com. I like the mbasic version of the site because it’s fully missing Facebook’s annoying attention hack...
You can get around this either by requesting the desktop site or by using mbasic.Facebook.com.
I like the mbasic version of the site because it’s fully missing Facebook’s annoying attention hack bullshit. It’s designed for users in remote areas with really slow internet or data caps. But it’s also just a great way to social media without the dopamine doom loop.
I really dislike the "endshitification" definition because it's often a lazy sweeping together of nuances and tends to be heavily influenced by bias. With that said, while I don't think it's wrong...
I really dislike the "endshitification" definition because it's often a lazy sweeping together of nuances and tends to be heavily influenced by bias.
With that said, while I don't think it's wrong to say all these products have gotten shitty, I'm not seeing all these claims of them being "dead".
Just because something sucks doesn't mean it's on its way out the door. Cable TV STILL has a large market and it's an easy example of something most thought would be long gone by now. There's plenty of situations where a brand new service makes things better, falls to standard market/competitor pressure, and then just...sticks around because there's nothing to usurp it.
In the Cable TV example, what's the "streaming" alternative that's going to shake things up?
Google isn't going anywhere, because the people who "know it sucks" are an insanely small minority, and it's still the defacto engine even for them.
Amazon is still one of THE "shop for anything" storefronts, with major competitors like alibaba being the same thing essentially.
Twitter is maybe the most likely to lose steam, but even still it's just because of batshit poor management mixed with the relative ease of making a competing app since there's less logistics behind it (and even then i don't totally see it losing).
Facebook/Insta likely aren't going anywhere. If you want to stay in touch with someone you met across the world or do some mass notification thing, they're still one of the better tools (as much as I personally hate them). Again in this case it's because it's already established and unlike twitter they're not trying to speedrun failure.
Reddit is fine too? The exodus is over and what are the alternatives? Lemmy has it's issues, especially for casual users, tildes doesn't want a lot of the low effort "means well" posting, let alone the outright hostile "no fuck you and everyone like you" stuff that's common there. And people are still appending reddit to their searches because it's still the main community for niche stuff (want some possibly human/non marketing opinions about sun shades, vaccuum cleaners, this small game that just came out...welp looks like you're going to reddit).
Having typed that I do find it funny that if reddit spent more time working on their search tools they'd probably hurt google more and find a new niche there (only for it to become worse because even more targeted marketing would hit it).
VR doesn't change much, just interfaces, and I think it's going to be a VERY long time until it's casual friendly. As intuitive as "pick up the item you want and we'll add it to your cart" is, actually building that interface and justifying the cost vs a normal website is far from happening.
AI...well i'll just say the hype is way overblown. There's some interesting stuff, but if anything it's going to be a power tool FOR enshitification, not against it.
I'm all for things getting better, but I feel that this post is very naive when it comes to reality. Are they getting worse? Absolutely. Are they going away? I don't see it. Until there's a "streaming" to these apps "cable" they aren't in very much danger of losing. The main shift in all of this was "AI" really pointing out that free/cheap API access for mass scraping is going to vanish.
When it was just Facebook looking at VR, I was more apprehensive about its future. Now that Apple is jumping in with a consumer product that actually looks semi-interesting, I am seeing the...
When it was just Facebook looking at VR, I was more apprehensive about its future. Now that Apple is jumping in with a consumer product that actually looks semi-interesting, I am seeing the writing on the wall. The big tech companies know what each of the other big tech companies are doing. If Apple felt the need to throw their hat in the ring, I think we are about to see some interesting things happening in VR. Apple isn't always right, but they've usually made me eat my words when I thought they were doing something stupid. And I have only owned one Apple product in my life, so I'm not particularly biased toward them if that helps my credibility here.
Your example of the cable companies isn't the best in my opinion. Would you like to be the CEO in charge of a cable company right now? Do you want to be the guy whose job it is to grow your audience in a market that is 100% guaranteed to continue shrinking year after year? Cable TV isn't "dead" but it's on life support until the boomers are gone and plug gets pulled for real. I'm in no way saying that any of these companies are going to be totally irrelevant next month or the month after. They're huge and will take forever to die. Look at Kodak, Blockbuster, GM, Yahoo, AOL, Myspace, Nokia, Sears, or any other companies that thought they were too big to fail and then died slow, painful deaths. Oftentimes it happened over many years. Even then, there were a lot of people saying exactly what you're saying now. "People aren't going to just stop buying Kodak products. What if you're on vacation and your fancy digital camera runs out of battery? You'll still want a dispoable camera handy just in case. They're not going anywhere."
The ad-based internet is about to be struggling badly in my opinion. I'm not saying nobody will use Reddit, but we are seeing the early stages of the collapse. Lemmy kind of sucks right now, and I don't have a lot of confidence in it, but the fact that early-adopter types are moving away from Reddit at all is a bad sign for them in the next few years here. The fact that I'm here on Tildes is a bad sign for Reddit, considering I was a heavy contributor for well over a decade.
Either way, I really appreciate your counterargument. It's worth thinking about and predicting the future is a fool's game (I'm a fool, so it's perfect for me).
Agreed, enshittification is too broad. Amazon's superpower is its infrastructure. It has warehouses and drivers everywhere; it can cheaply get almost anything anywhere in 24 to 48 hours, at least...
Agreed, enshittification is too broad.
Amazon is still one of THE "shop for anything" storefronts, with major competitors like alibaba being the same thing essentially.
Amazon's superpower is its infrastructure. It has warehouses and drivers everywhere; it can cheaply get almost anything anywhere in 24 to 48 hours, at least in the US. It's a galactic moat that other companies can't cross.
Yeah this is one of the reason it's the least likely (in my eyes) to go anywhere. Twitter has infrastructure/logistics issues, but they're mostly "throw money at it" style problems. With infinite...
Yeah this is one of the reason it's the least likely (in my eyes) to go anywhere. Twitter has infrastructure/logistics issues, but they're mostly "throw money at it" style problems.
With infinite funds and them sitting on their hands you couldn't recreate amazon's reach in 2 years, let alone a more realistic budget.
I think that's part of it but IMO a larger part of 'enshittification' is rising interest rates and companies having to come up with additional revenue or at the very least stop heavily subsidizing...
The main shift in all of this was "AI" really pointing out that free/cheap API access for mass scraping is going to vanish.
I think that's part of it but IMO a larger part of 'enshittification' is rising interest rates and companies having to come up with additional revenue or at the very least stop heavily subsidizing their platform with investments based on future growth.
Which might not be terrible in the long run? Alternatives, especially ones not heavily tied to a VC model, are going to have an easier path forward in an environment where their competitors are trying to extract as much value as they can. Some stuff like video and search are impossible to do at a smaller scale but companies like Reddit, Twitter, etc. are going to be somewhat 'vulnerable' to this. (Probably not existentially vulnerable, but they'll allow space for a larger subset of users to migrate to alternatives than would happen otherwise).
I think the interest rates thing is tertiary to most of these companies and has a much heavier effect on startups. Not established giants. The decline in quality has been going on MUCH longer and...
I think the interest rates thing is tertiary to most of these companies and has a much heavier effect on startups. Not established giants. The decline in quality has been going on MUCH longer and mostly has to do with near or total monopoly power mixed with no government oversight allowing them to monetize as they see fit.
We might see these things fracture into smaller entities again (i'm personally hoping for the return of dedicated gaming forum communities), but I'm not getting my hopes up. Centralization is just a key convenience factor users gravitate to, and there's still major barriers to creating and maintaining such entities that many just can't be bothered with.
There will be more competition because of the quality drop, but most of these sites have been "worse" for over a decade, and they're still the main application in their niche.
When would you say important inflection points for the state of Reddit have been? I’ve been an addict there since 2012 (or perhaps 2011) and there has been a fringe of “Reddit ain’t what it used...
Reddit’s decline has been ongoing for a long while, and the mainstream users are just now noticing [paraphrased]
When would you say important inflection points for the state of Reddit have been? I’ve been an addict there since 2012 (or perhaps 2011) and there has been a fringe of “Reddit ain’t what it used to be” the entire time I’ve been there. IIRC, one of the comments made on the first day Reddit enabled comments in 2006(?) was along the lines of “It’s been a nice ride but quality is over.”
IMO, the sharpest decline in Reddit’s user base quality had nothing to do with a change in Reddit policy. Gamergate brought an influx of people spamming the same talking points. Annoying, but survivable. People doing close readings of comments to look for subtle tells that the other person is pro-GG and not arguing in good faith killed off what little remained of good-faith disagreements in the larger communities. I’ll leave it to others to discuss whether Reddit’s policy responses hastened or slowed the cultural decline.
I think the most notable inflection point was the Reddit redesign, although I can't tell you whether this caused the inflection or merely signposted it. Reddit has always had a tension between...
Exemplary
When would you say important inflection points for the state of Reddit have been?
I think the most notable inflection point was the Reddit redesign, although I can't tell you whether this caused the inflection or merely signposted it.
Reddit has always had a tension between discoverability and community. Small communities lead to a "talk with" effect, where the average comment interaction is between people who are generally familiar with each other. In such an environment, implicit norms can take hold and be enforced through relatively passive behaviour like voting. "Rediquette" policies, namely "the downvote button is not a disagree button," exist for this environment.
Large communities, however, have a "talk at" dynamic. The average comment interaction is anonymous, and comments themselves become a way to "play to the crowd." This is easily observable with voting, with the comment score merely being a popularity measure.
Reddit's accidental brilliance was that different parts of it could exist in different states. Large, default subreddits were performance spaces almost from the outset, but smaller subreddits occupied quiet niches and could grow (or not) at their own pace.
Enter the redesign. What strikes me most about the redesign is not really the atrocious interface, it's that links and threads are now "part of Reddit" rather than "part of a subreddit." In particular, opening a thread from one's main page opens the thread as a modal frame over top of the main page (with a click outside the frame closing the thread and returning to the front page), whereas in old!reddit opening a comment thread opened the subreddit. It's a very subtle distinction†, but I think it is emblematic of the transition. The redesign also greatly limited CSS-like subreddit styling, making it harder for subreddits to visually distinguish themselves from the rest of the site.
Algorithmic front-pages probably also contributed to this, exposing users to bits and pieces of a subreddit-community without inducting them (through subscription or a subreddit visit) to the community itself.
The borders between subreddits were always extremely porous; the Reddit commetariat was concerned with brigading and r/ShitRedditSays before Gamergate was even a story about ethics in gaming journalism. The transition to a fully generic social media site might have been inevitable, but I think it was hastened by management's priority of site engagement over sub-community health.
† — and also not unique to the new desktop. The desktop redesign really reflected trends that were common in mobile apps, so I suspect the same decline would have happened even without the redesign.
Is this a mobile app thing? I tried using Reddit just now on Edge (so, a browser I have zero extensions nor history on), and I seem to be opening pages as expected. Clicking on the link goes...
In particular, opening a thread from one's main page opens the thread as a modal frame over top of the main page (with a click outside the frame closing the thread and returning to the front page), whereas in old!reddit opening a comment thread opened the subreddit. It's a very subtle distinction†, but I think it is emblematic of the transition.
Is this a mobile app thing? I tried using Reddit just now on Edge (so, a browser I have zero extensions nor history on), and I seem to be opening pages as expected. Clicking on the link goes either to the self post or the actual article, clicking on comments goes to the comments page, each a new separate link. It's odd because I have seen that modal that you describe but I forget how you actually trigger that.
So I simultaneously understand exactly what you mean but also am confused, as if this is some odd Mandela effect. Did reddit change this behavior later on?
I do agree that the limited CSS does remove a lot of each sub's identity, though.
Well that's surprising. After playing around with it, I can reproduce your description: new.reddit moves you to the subreddit when not logged in. When logged in, it behaves as I described above;...
Well that's surprising.
After playing around with it, I can reproduce your description: new.reddit moves you to the subreddit when not logged in. When logged in, it behaves as I described above; when not logged in it behaves as you describe.
That's so weird that I can't imagine it to have been an intended feature. Maybe when logged in, Reddit considers the front page (of mostly, but not exclusively, your subscribed subreddits) to be something like a sub in its own right that "owns" threads, but when logged out it doesn't have that layer of indirection.
From the perspective of community-building, this behaviour is backwards. You'd think that the logged-out user, who can't post comments, is the one who should be spoon-fed the "engagement" feed of Reddit-as-a-whole, while the logged-in user who might/can contribute should be immersed in the specific identity of each subreddit community.
I miss the proliferation of CSS ponymotes. They still exist, but the redesign killed the momentum for new subreddits to pop up to create more. The redesign was one of my blind spots when...
I miss the proliferation of CSS ponymotes. They still exist, but the redesign killed the momentum for new subreddits to pop up to create more.
The redesign was one of my blind spots when considering inflection points because my first reaction to it was to turn on the "stick to old reddit" option in my profile, so I forget that my experience is a fringe one.
I've been using reddit since 2010 or so and you aren't wrong that there's always been comments like that, but that also happens everywhere. I would say the big inflection points, to me, are the...
Exemplary
I've been using reddit since 2010 or so and you aren't wrong that there's always been comments like that, but that also happens everywhere.
I would say the big inflection points, to me, are the following:
2015 - Reddit firing Victoria and taking over control of AMAs. For me personally and a lot of other people, IAMA was the thing that really drew us in. Not just celebrity AMAs but ones from people with unique perspectives. After they fired Victoria, I pretty much completely stopped paying attention to AMAs and they lost almost all appeal as it became more... corporatized.
2015-2016 - The political galvanization of the right-wing, and reddit becoming a big breeding ground for right-wing extremism. This, in turn, galvanized left-wingers in response to that. Reddit did pretty much dick all to quell the intense hate speech, harassment etc. coming out of the right-wing subreddits for years, after which point it was too late. This has in turn made reddit in general way more "political", more hostile, and I don't think these are necessarily reddit-specific problems but some internet sites have done a better job of controlling this issue whereas Reddit exacerbated it. This continues to be a problem today.
2016 - Reddit image hosting. You can still use imgur to host images of course, or some other hosts, but reddit started their own hosting and made it the default so most casual users use that. But the problem is twofold: 1) Reddit's image hosting sucks/their video hosting is god-awful to the point it doesn't work most of the time, even now in 2023... and 2) hosting all of that content is expensive, and drives Reddit's expenses up (and their expenses are important in a conversation about "what is ruining reddit" because their intense push recently to boost New Reddit/their mobile app is all about generating income through ads... and reddit doesn't generate much income, not enough to offset their expenses. They had a great solution that cost them nothing and they boofed it. This is one of the most affecting changes imo because Reddit's video hosting was/is SO bad that I moved away from subs where it was being used frequently.
2017 - Reddit goes mobile. They started redesigning the app and adding features for the mobile app that were only accessible through it. Pushing chat more, pushing user connections more. These are things that most old-school users didn't care about or want.
2018 - the redesign, which goes with the mobile app. The redesign has always been a huge deal re: the history of reddit, but the reason it hasn't had as big of an impact is that it is still optional. I expect that's going to change in the near future and when it does I'm done with reddit personally.
2023 - I don't think I need to explain but the changes happening this year have had the biggest impact in reddit history imo, and indicated to me something very important - it's been clear to me reddit was on a downward trajectory related to a mobile push and their push towards an IPO, but this year is when it became clear to me that reddit is going in a new direction and it is a direction I don't care for at all. I don't expect that will change. It's more likely to die than it is to return to the kind of site I enjoyed; the only reason I still engage with it is the amount of discussion happening. I like Tildes, but it doesn't have enough gaming discussion to keep me engaged on that matter, so I've been thinking of maybe joining a more old school gaming forum or something of the sort.
I think another point that didn't strike me at the time, but has in retrospect, came much earlier in 2011-2012. This was when Reddit banned r/jailbait and r/creepshots among other subreddits. These had been around since before I joined up, and there was a shift in perception of them over the years. In the late 2000s, they were hugely popular, and celebrated by Reddit itself. People have been repeating the misinformation that Spez was a moderator of r/jailbait (he was added without his consent so I wouldn't say that), but the reality is much worse -- he and the others running the site fed off of r/jailbait's popularity, celebrated it as Subreddit of the Year, allowed it to continue to exist and benefitted from its existence. Frankly, that underage-sexualization content is what took reddit from dinky little webpage to noticeably sizable web forum. Then, the Digg exodus happened and people looked at it as a Digg alternative, and THAT is when things started to change and as a larger number of people started to join Reddit those subreddits were looked upon less favorably. And STILL Reddit administration did nothing about them... until they were featured on the news, and brought a lot of negative press, which is when Reddit banned them and acted as if they were unaware of them before that point. At the time, I didn't really process any of this. But in retrospect it set up what has become a recurring pattern for Reddit's admin: invite the worst of the worst, feed off of it, and then ban it when it is no longer useful. r/the_donald was the exact same thing. It was quarantined and threatened with a ban -- but only after it was no longer drawing large amounts of traffic to the site.
It's weird to me that you bring up GG as a big inflection point because personally I don't really see it that way. Even as someone who is HEAVILY involved in gaming subreddits (it's most of what I comment on, and now that I am reducing my reddit use heavily it's only gaming subs and my local sub I'm subbed to)... I never really saw all that much Gamergate business flooding in everywhere outside of maybe a couple weeks when it was the topic du jour. And I'm sure it had even less of an impact outside of gaming subs, where people probably don't even know what Gamergate was. In fact, sometimes I feel like I don't even know what it was. But maybe that's just different experiences.
GamerGate was an inflection point where various personas who weren't really part of the target Reddit or Gamer demographics started to figure out ways to stir up ornery mobs to crowdsource...
It's weird to me that you bring up GG as a big inflection point because personally I don't really see it that way.
GamerGate was an inflection point where various personas who weren't really part of the target Reddit or Gamer demographics started to figure out ways to stir up ornery mobs to crowdsource cyberbullying. It's when the noxious parts of Gamer culture metastasized and infected culture at large. What set it apart was that a lot of washed up actors who tried to pivot to podcasting or YouTube or streaming found a very easy outrage bait strategy to get big fast.
Once they unlocked that strategy there was no stopping it and much of the toxicity you've seen on the internet since, from all corners, is coming from people who cut their teeth in that moment.
It's a very odd topic (Note: for some disclosure I do work in games so that will show some bias). r/games pretty much blocked off all the discussion on the topic pretty quickly and of course...
I never really saw all that much Gamergate business flooding in everywhere outside of maybe a couple weeks when it was the topic du jour. And I'm sure it had even less of an impact outside of gaming subs, where people probably don't even know what Gamergate was. In fact, sometimes I feel like I don't even know what it was. But maybe that's just different experiences.
It's a very odd topic (Note: for some disclosure I do work in games so that will show some bias). r/games pretty much blocked off all the discussion on the topic pretty quickly and of course r/gaming never cared about anything other than memes. So it was very easy to ignore unless you were very specifically looking for the war yourself amongst a specific hub of subs (or part of the "drama hub". it says something when r/drama and r/subredditdrama have more coverage of a gaming sub than most gaming subs. ). But when you peek into that hub, it was an absolute bloodbath between surprisingly active maybe 20-50k sized subs. It's a whole rabbit hole of the internet in an of itself.
The odd part about it was that is came up occasionally in my personal life (hence my disclosure). Normally these internet drama's may get one mention the week of (and I'm never going to bring it up) and fade out into its niche, but I remember hearing about gamergate as recently as some company call meeting in 2021. I'm eternally online and I long forgot about GG by that point, so it was very odd hearing it pop up after some decade or whatever, in a professional capacity.
I guess a lot of this happened not just on Reddit, but Twitter as well so that may explain a lot of this. I can forget how active and vocal my industry can be on Twitter, for better and for worse.
Based on this and other responses, I'm beginning to believe that GG has a deeper and lasting impact on meta-Reddit (which I was heavily addicted to at the time) than on the gaming sphere (or...
It's weird to me that you bring up GG as a big inflection point because personally I don't really see it that way…
Based on this and other responses, I'm beginning to believe that GG has a deeper and lasting impact on meta-Reddit (which I was heavily addicted to at the time) than on the gaming sphere (or anywhere outside of it). However, meta-Reddit also set the tone for moderation elsewhere, hence the sibling reply to yours mentioning the shift in moderation philosophy from "don't spam or be annoying" to "fighting hate" in mainstream subreddits.
the timeline
Even if we include GG as a turning point, it looks like there was a big dustup each year between 2014–2018, then a gap until this year. Anecdotally, this checks out. Meta-Reddit got STALE for a while. Yes, Reddit's quality was felt to continue to decrease by many, but it mirrored the decline in quality on every other social media site—nothing Reddit-specific. This year was a return to Reddit-powered footguns.
Also, New Reddit feels like it's been around for much longer than 2018. Not like I haven't been sticking to Old Reddit this entire time. I think the original /r/place was also a celebration of the "new" official app, too.
Comparison of Jailbait and T_D
I find it fascinating that this pattern hasn't been successfully replicated on all the extreme free speech replacements for Reddit or Twitter. I somewhat suspect that it's because the early adopters of such a platform are the kind of people who can't keep their creepshots to /r/jailbait or their MAGA posting to T_D, thus infecting the rest of the site with that tenor. Alternate hypothesis: they do keep their posts in their respective not-subreddits, but those are the only active subreddit replacements, leading to the same effect.
I think it's because "extreme free speech" isn't really a draw for the average user. Those drawn in are disproportionately people who have had their hobbies kicked off the existing popular...
I find it fascinating that this pattern hasn't been successfully replicated on all the extreme free speech replacements for Reddit or Twitter.
I think it's because "extreme free speech" isn't really a draw for the average user. Those drawn in are disproportionately people who have had their hobbies kicked off the existing popular networks, so the new network is seeded with the "wrong crowd." This is exactly the story of Voat, after all.
To me, the competing theory is that the pattern is one of semi-benign neglect. A community that starts for anodyne reasons develops its own shady corners with questionable content, but in moderation that content turns some users of the site into dedicated users. It's still tickling the dragon's tail, since exposure is bad news for the site as a whole.
Another instance of this pattern would be Tumblr, where many of its users stayed precisely for the kind of adult or adult-adjacent content that the site sought to restrict.
In addition to the problems you mention, I think there's one to add: image hosting marked Reddit's change in focus from a link aggregator to a social media platform. A link aggregator's job is to...
2016 - Reddit image hosting. You can still use imgur to host images of course, or some other hosts, but reddit started their own hosting and made it the default so most casual users use that. But the problem is twofold
In addition to the problems you mention, I think there's one to add: image hosting marked Reddit's change in focus from a link aggregator to a social media platform.
A link aggregator's job is to connect the user with an outbound link. The user leaving the site is the point, since the link (hopefully) directs them to interesting content elsewhere on the Internet. However, that's a failure state for a social media platform, which values (and monetizes) "user engagement" measured by time spent interacting with the main site.
By hosting images and then video, Reddit hoped to keep users engaging with its own comment threads, driving up engagement and hopefully exposing the user to more ad-monetization. Most of Reddit's user-questionable decisions (such as built-in chat) also seem to have a similar focus†, keeping user eyeballs somewhere on reddit.com rather than an external provider.
The redesign also has nods in this direction. Under the redesign, the title of a link-post does not open the link itself, it opens the comment section. Opening the link requires clicking on the URL itself, which has much less visual weight than the title, comparable to the domain on old.reddit. It's a subtle nudge towards the idea that even for link posts, users should treat the link as optional while feeling free to engage in the comment section.
† — In my opinion, the biggest feature introduced here wasn't image/video hosting or even chat, it was turning user pages into content-hosting places equivalent to subreddits themselves. As far as I can tell this hasn't had much impact, but it seems to me to have been designed as an answer to Facebook walls, turning users themselves into content-display points.
Piggybacking off of what majromax just said about the "talk with" and "talk at" dynamics being different between the larger and smaller subreddits, this is one huge cause of the enshitification...
When would you say important inflection points for the state of Reddit have been? I’ve been an addict there since 2012 (or perhaps 2011) and there has been a fringe of “Reddit ain’t what it used to be” the entire time I’ve been there. IIRC, one of the comments made on the first day Reddit enabled comments in 2006(?) was along the lines of “It’s been a nice ride but quality is over.”
Piggybacking off of what majromax just said about the "talk with" and "talk at" dynamics being different between the larger and smaller subreddits, this is one huge cause of the enshitification process. I recently posted a Marginalia blog entry on Tildes that seemed to resonate with the recent Reddit refugees. To summarize the incredibly well-written blog post, one which you should absolutely read, communities die when money gets involved and they grow too large, too quickly. A small, steady influx of new users can be molded to the community standards - bad behavior is corrected by experienced users. A large influx of new users mold the community to their bad standards. They are no longer a minority being corrected by the majority, but rather a sizeable majority themselves.
To answer your question, I will rephrase it if you don't mind. You're asking (sort of), "When did Reddit get shitty?" Well, it got shitty at different times for different people. If you are an older, experienced forum user who is looking for a small, close-knit community of intelligent people, then Reddit died in like 2009 or maybe 2010 during the Digg migration. Hard to remember back that far. It died as soon as you could no longer recognize some of the more active and well-respected users because there were just too many people. I enjoyed that aspect of Reddit, but for me it was still really enjoyable for a few more years. I think there were many different small things over the years - the loss of Victoria on the AMAs, the shift to the new design, obviously the death of 3rd party apps, the rise of shallower communities like r/AmIUgly, and various other things. I think that I didn't notice so much day to day, but when I looked back a few years I noticed that the amount of learning/intelligent discussion had gone down and I was spending a couple hours a day browsing a site I wasn't actually enjoying anymore. Based on your response, I can tell when it got shitty for you.
The_Donald, no contest. The 2016 elections brought about a site-wide spread of cynicism and utter disdain for the fellow redditor and mods that I feel it never fully recovered from. This isn't...
When would you say important inflection points for the state of Reddit have been?
The_Donald, no contest. The 2016 elections brought about a site-wide spread of cynicism and utter disdain for the fellow redditor and mods that I feel it never fully recovered from. This isn't unique to reddit, but it feels like reddit got hit the hardest for a multitude of reasons.
I'm guessing it's not simply because of the climate either. I wouldn't be surprised if T_D gave reddit a HUGE surge of traffic and that is why they kept that sub around for so long. The surge in users that were highly politicized (and/or politicizing existing users) would explain the shift in tone overtime.
But for a few other inflection points:
2015's blackout seemed to represent a shift in moderation in many communities. that plus the rise of t_d seemed to be the point where mods shifted away from the "just don't spam or be annoying mentality" to "I am here to fight hate". Some of that is obviously needed, but it started to feel like that time where even smaller-medium sized subs would scrutinize any comment and become ban happy. The automated block lists happens around this time too
this is much less concrete, but I think around 2017-8 there was a rise in what I'd call "rage subs". r/idiotsincars, r/publicfreakout, r/justiceserved, etc. This felt around the time where suddenly these sorts of communities grew and grew fast. Content that is being fed to incite anger. Even if it's justified anger, it felt like this is when empathy for other users really fell down the drain, not necessarily in 2016 itself. This happened to be around the time of the site redesign, but I don't know how much that correlates (new design -> promotes more pictures/video -> promotes the most primal content?)
2020 is another big inflection point. Not just from COVID-19 and that whole subset of culture (and ofc a huge urge of traffic once again), but from the rise of the r/antiwork sort of culture. Reddit has always been anti-coropoate and backing up alternative philosophies like libertarianism, but this felt like the time all the socialism memes (as well as a 2nd wave of Bernie Sanders flagging) started to rise up. that corporate cynicism really exploded around this time and talks of unions and boycotts and whatnot were again, spreading sitewide, not just in its own little bubble. Ironic when it came time for a Reddit boycott, but I digress.
And I think we might be in the middle of another inflection point now. I guess we'll see how the dust settles this time. I think we both agree the biggest turning points weren't the work of the admins, but I feel gamergate was a relatively small footnote in the annuls of history. One that happened just close enough to the elections to really stick in people's minds.
While a point-by-point response to your comment would be redundant with how I plan to respond to the other responses, I appreciate that you included the 2020 /r/antiwork socialism inflection point...
While a point-by-point response to your comment would be redundant with how I plan to respond to the other responses, I appreciate that you included the 2020 /r/antiwork socialism inflection point in your list. I can't tell if you find it to be a net benefit or detraction from the quality of discussion, but its presence does make clear that inflection points in community quality aren't strictly bad.
The move from "just don't spam or be annoying" to "I am here to fight hate" is THE primary reason I selected GG as my main inflection point. That shift in moderation philosophy was a straightforward response to GG—GG itself may be a footnote, but the responses to it had lasting consequences. Reddit users have always dunked on the jannies, but that seems to have marked a shift from moderators being beat cops walking street patrols to unaccountable police in cruisers from across town. The shift inadvertently helped propel the spread of disinformation and conspiracies when there are documented instances of subreddits repressing hate facts (a.k.a. true stories that conflict with the mission to fight hate speech), leading to "what else are they hiding?" rhetoric flourishing.
Facebook lives on because they've embedded themselves into all parts of the internet. Many sites, links, searches and a variety of other things touch Facebook at some point or another. They get...
Facebook lives on because they've embedded themselves into all parts of the internet. Many sites, links, searches and a variety of other things touch Facebook at some point or another. They get paid per click after that but Facebook.com isn't the primary way people arrive at Facebook. Any sign in with Facebook app, Instagram, and any other product managed by this shitty company touches Facebook several times a minute and that's all money. They could care less if people visit Facebook.com, the entire internet touches Facebook at some point or another.
Remember when the internet broke a few years ago and they had to fly an engineer out on a redeye because no one locally knew wtf happened? It was Facebook. Some admin made a change not to DNS, but the other service that directs traffic on the internet, I can't remember the name of it, there was a metaphor about the phone book of the internet and the map of the internet. Well Facebook made a change to the map which broke the internet in a lot of ways for a bit.
That part of the internet that was now unaccessible was the part that Facebook touches and as it turns out, it was pretty big.
It’d be great if the internet became more fragmented as a result of enshittification, and sites like Tildes that focus on quality/community rather than scale start popping up all over the place.
It’d be great if the internet became more fragmented as a result of enshittification, and sites like Tildes that focus on quality/community rather than scale start popping up all over the place.
My subjective perception with regards to Facebook is, that the main platform "Facebook" itself mainly stuck around in the US though. At least for the younger generation (30 and below) I hardly...
I keep being surprised by how resilient Facebook is.
My subjective perception with regards to Facebook is, that the main platform "Facebook" itself mainly stuck around in the US though. At least for the younger generation (30 and below) I hardly know anyone who uses Facebook over here in my corner of Europe anymore.
They have however successfully established themselves on the market with secondary platforms they bought several years ago - namely WhatsApp and Instagram. Those still seem to do quite well with a larger part of the European population.
Personally, I think the right-wing of America has become increasingly dangerous, deranged, and violent. I think Fox News, OAN, and about a million other more subtle things which are woven into the...
Personally, I think the right-wing of America has become increasingly dangerous, deranged, and violent. I think Fox News, OAN, and about a million other more subtle things which are woven into the fabric of American capitalism promote far-right ideologies. So having a website or two where Left-Wing views are being shared doesn't feel bad...to me. However, if you're a right-winger and disagree with me, I understand why and I absolutely see your point about the way I phrased that (perhaps deep down, on some level, I really did mean it that way too). I think you and I might have to not debate that whole issue here. But I do take your point.
No need to debate our opposing views, but I think having a neutral platform is a good thing. Elon's not nerfing the leftist ideas, nor is he promoting the right. He himself, yeah, that might be...
No need to debate our opposing views, but I think having a neutral platform is a good thing. Elon's not nerfing the leftist ideas, nor is he promoting the right. He himself, yeah, that might be different... but truly believe that Elon doesn't have his finger on the scale.
I don't think he's talking about Twitter boosting them, just that the platform was there for their dissemination. So for leftists, it's a shame to see a platform once used to disseminate ideas...
I don't think he's talking about Twitter boosting them, just that the platform was there for their dissemination. So for leftists, it's a shame to see a platform once used to disseminate ideas being used for attempted coup on the US government.
But again, that's not what he said. He said it's a shame that the service leftists used to share their ideas also became the service that allowed the far right in the US to attempt to co-ordinate...
But again, that's not what he said. He said it's a shame that the service leftists used to share their ideas also became the service that allowed the far right in the US to attempt to co-ordinate a coup d'etat.
Leftists can still use it just fine. It just sucks that it can be misused so horribly like that. And given the current ownership, likely to happen again.
I think Google (search) is great. Google's default experience is good enough for casual users and it has plenty of query option for power users. if you have a specific site in mind and it's...
I think Google (search) is great. Google's default experience is good enough for casual users and it has plenty of query option for power users. if you have a specific site in mind and it's indexable you can query that site. You have a specific date range you remember you can restrict it. It generally does a good job differentiating homonyms, but you can use subtractive queries to filter out if it gets confused (e.g. "Football -nfl" to make sure it focuses on the World Cup),
Some search results get worse nowadays, but that's because SEO has been abused for a good decade now. Google also does a lot to get around that (which sadly means, it will throw specific but high quality blogs into a sewer and focus on mainstream sites) but it's not perfect. And I miss the Discussions/Forums tab to search through. But there's still a reason why it has been heads over any other search engine, though.
P.S. Your comment on reddit's query more suggest that Reddit's search-ability sucks. Which has been my experience (and it lost a lot of its query options over the years to boot!).
Sorry that this comment is a bit low-content - I've been off my game lately - but would it be accurate to call this a paradigm shit, since it's specifically a shift toward services being worse...
Sorry that this comment is a bit low-content - I've been off my game lately - but would it be accurate to call this a paradigm shit, since it's specifically a shift toward services being worse (i.e., enshittified)?
A paradigm shift is defined (on Google, ironically) as "a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions." I think that the enshitification process is only a small part of the paradigm...
A paradigm shift is defined (on Google, ironically) as "a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions." I think that the enshitification process is only a small part of the paradigm shift. Rather, it's the spark that will blow the powderkeg. The real paradigm shift is what's coming after. We have all been operating under the assumption that the majority of the internet is made up of a few very large companies who get rich (or try to) by offering free services, harvesting your data, and selling that data to advertisers.
My best guess is that the ad-based internet is going to struggle here pretty soon. I'm not sure what happens next. Either we move toward smaller communities where people choose to donate or pay a subscription fee, or we move to something even more dystopian in my opinion - media and internet funded by individuals and companies who are willing to burn capital for the sole reason of disseminating their views. Tik Tok is reported to be making boatloads of money right now, but a cynical part of me thinks that the CCP would probably prop it up even if it wasn't just because it's such a powerhouse for spreading whatever views they want to spread around the globe.
Haha, no but I chose this name precisely because the podcast. I feel a bit guilty admitting this, but Wolf 359 is my favorite piece of media ever. I'm not saying it's the best or most brilliant...
Haha, no but I chose this name precisely because the podcast. I feel a bit guilty admitting this, but Wolf 359 is my favorite piece of media ever. I'm not saying it's the best or most brilliant thing I've ever consumed in any category (though I do consider it a masterpiece of an audiodrama), but I listen to Wolf 359 the same way my wife watches Friends before bed - it's comfort food and super entertaining. I love the characters deeply. I'm also a bit of a casual space nerd, so I enjoy sharing a username with a Red Dwarf Star too. Great catch. Nobody has ever called me on my various Wolf 359 related usernames before. btw, I labelled your comment noise since you said it was off topic and didn't want it to get in the way of the other discussion.
Don’t worry about the noise thing. I’m glad I was right about the podcast. And I hear you on it being a comfort thing. That’s Ars Paradoxica for me. :)
Don’t worry about the noise thing. I’m glad I was right about the podcast. And I hear you on it being a comfort thing. That’s Ars Paradoxica for me. :)
Man, they actually went through with it. That logo looks so generic and lifeless. Also X is like the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of some edgy placeholder name. No way a trademark...
Man, they actually went through with it. That logo looks so generic and lifeless. Also X is like the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of some edgy placeholder name. No way a trademark will be enforcable on that. (Or at least I hope so. Seriously - it's a single letter of the alphabeth that has had that edgy connotation for decades now...)
Sad to see yet another platform die. :(
Thanks, I was trying to work out why I recognised it. At first I thought Xerox but it's not quite right, that is definitely the X Window System logo I've occasionally seen though.
Thanks, I was trying to work out why I recognised it. At first I thought Xerox but it's not quite right, that is definitely the X Window System logo I've occasionally seen though.
It's a 1990s, early 2000s thing. Think Xbox, PSX, The X-Files, Triple X, The Matrix, Aeon Flux, X (the 2001 anime), etc. The letter "X" used to be shorthand for "look how this is cool, edgy, and...
Also X is like the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of some edgy placeholder name.
It's a 1990s, early 2000s thing. Think Xbox, PSX, The X-Files, Triple X, The Matrix, Aeon Flux, X (the 2001 anime), etc.
The letter "X" used to be shorthand for "look how this is cool, edgy, and unique".
Trademarks are always limited. You can register a trademark for your password, super unique, and sell apples under that name. Someone in another city can happily open up shop selling computers...
No way a trademark will be enforcable on that. (Or at least I hope so. Seriously - it's a single letter of the alphabeth that has had that edgy connotation for decades now...)
Trademarks are always limited. You can register a trademark for your password, super unique, and sell apples under that name. Someone in another city can happily open up shop selling computers under that same name: clearly it must be stolen because your randomly generated password was unique to begin with, yet this is legal. Trademarks are both geographically and topically limited. Making a car with a specific red color might get you an angry letter from Ferrari, but a red hard drive is not something they can legally care about. (In the case of online businesses, I'm not sure how the geographic limitation works. Probably you would have to prove that your brand is known in, or targets, a certain geographic area for it to be enforceable when someone else opens up with the same name in that area.)
If you start a website called X where people can message each other, well, that's stupid because that's entirely ungoogleable even before this news, but if you did, I expect that: yes, you are infringing on that trademark, at least if you can't establish that you were first to market. Afaik it also doesn't have to be registered, though registration of a trademark helps establish your case if it does come to be a legal matter.
I'm not a lawyer and this is all to the best of my knowledge. It's been a while since I read up on this, but I expect it to be generally accurate.
X is already registered with MS for a ton of stuff, and registered with Meta for social media purposes. Meta: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch...
X is already registered with MS for a ton of stuff, and registered with Meta for social media purposes.
Well that's gonna be fun, though I'm going to need a popcorn refill at this point I'm not sure anymore what the rules around unused marks are btw, it's not like I've heard anyone use this as...
Well that's gonna be fun, though I'm going to need a popcorn refill at this point
I'm not sure anymore what the rules around unused marks are btw, it's not like I've heard anyone use this as brand, and by the Internet's "wtf is this" reaction, nobody else either. The first reactions about "others have this trademark" were from people directly linking to a trademark office, not people linking to in-use products. Elon might just be like "come at me bro" and fight it out in court
Maybe he'll just have to call it Cyberspace X. He does seem to really like pushing X as a company name. I'm sure eventually we'll get Tesla renamed to Ground X.
Maybe he'll just have to call it Cyberspace X. He does seem to really like pushing X as a company name. I'm sure eventually we'll get Tesla renamed to Ground X.
How ironic, given that 'x' is sort of the universal icon for closing out an application. The new icon hopefully signals that we'll soon be closing out of hearing anything else from Musk or Twitter...
How ironic, given that 'x' is sort of the universal icon for closing out an application. The new icon hopefully signals that we'll soon be closing out of hearing anything else from Musk or Twitter ever again. Some day, maybe.
A letter individually considered, with only minimal stylization, will have lots of issues being protected and enforced as a trademark. Regardless of whether it may be considered a 'nondescript...
A letter individually considered, with only minimal stylization, will have lots of issues being protected and enforced as a trademark.
Regardless of whether it may be considered a 'nondescript mark', lacking distinctiveness, failing to function, etc., enforceability will be limited as the owner will not have an exclusive right to the use of the letter itself. Essentially, the distinctive character of the mark will be limited to the stylization of the "X", which... is also not very distinctive.
As mentioned in the article, the stylization of the 'X' logo is just the "Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X" Unicode character (𝕏). That would seem to preclude strong trademark protection on...
As mentioned in the article, the stylization of the 'X' logo is just the "Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X" Unicode character (𝕏). That would seem to preclude strong trademark protection on the logo itself.
𝕏 (né Twitter) could still claim a trademark on the name/logo's use for a social media company, but it couldn't stop (e.g.) people from putting the Unicode character on t-shirts and selling them.
The article says that Musk claims this is an 'interim' logo. The 'final' logo might be more distinctive and trademarkable, but of course that just raises the question of why the company needed to rebrand itself with interim art.
I'm no billionaire CEO, but if I was to launch a major rebrand, I'd try to have a new logo ready to go on day 1 instead of burning all my publicity on an "interim" icon. But what do I know, it's...
The article says that Musk claims this is an 'interim' logo.
I'm no billionaire CEO, but if I was to launch a major rebrand, I'd try to have a new logo ready to go on day 1 instead of burning all my publicity on an "interim" icon. But what do I know, it's just the centerpiece of the branding.
Youngsters these days have had a trend for a while of using x in place of one or more vowels in online usernames. Not sure how much that has translated into global mainstream for the bigger...
Youngsters these days have had a trend for a while of using x in place of one or more vowels in online usernames.
Not sure how much that has translated into global mainstream for the bigger influencers online, but teenagers be teenaging still.
My "hot take" (sorry I know I shouldn't publish these on Tildes) is that Elmo is really an actor first and foremost, who appeals to middle-aged white men who are likely to invest in his companies...
My "hot take" (sorry I know I shouldn't publish these on Tildes) is that Elmo is really an actor first and foremost, who appeals to middle-aged white men who are likely to invest in his companies and give him money. He tries to construct this persona of "Elmo the Engineer" and a sort of Thomas Carlyle-style great man of history, when (as we can see with Twitter) he is not particularly good at solving problems (except fundraising problems). The X fetish fits into this – mathematicians tend to use x as a placeholder for an unknown (this trend was started by Arab mathematicians) and he thinks that it makes him seem more mathsy to name stuff after this.
I don't know much about this kind of thing - is there are chance a part of the strategy here is to eventually sell the Twitter name and logo to someone willing to capitalize on people who miss...
I don't know much about this kind of thing - is there are chance a part of the strategy here is to eventually sell the Twitter name and logo to someone willing to capitalize on people who miss Twitter and want a return?
Doubt Musk will get his 44bil back but he'll have bought the organs of an established social media platform that likely won't be going anywhere anytime soon, while still owning the brand assets for the old platform to sell to the highest bidder.
Anyway, I suspect Zuck is waking up with a big smile this morning.
Which I'm pretty sure is to do with the trademark carrying over to a product of 'substantial similarity' and that the assignment of the trademark would not be deceptive to a customer. Now, who...
Which I'm pretty sure is to do with the trademark carrying over to a product of 'substantial similarity' and that the assignment of the trademark would not be deceptive to a customer.
Now, who could possibly have a substantially similar product to Twitter?
The short version is that no one who could afford that would buy it. At that point you could build your own, and the “brand” won’t mean jack just being sold to some random company
The short version is that no one who could afford that would buy it. At that point you could build your own, and the “brand” won’t mean jack just being sold to some random company
It's still the #5 most visited site in 2023, only falling one place to Instagram in 2022. So yes, it's still very much a centerpiece of the internet. And for completeness, Google, Youtube, and...
It's still the #5 most visited site in 2023, only falling one place to Instagram in 2022. So yes, it's still very much a centerpiece of the internet.
And for completeness, Google, Youtube, and Facebook are #1/2//3 respectively, in both 2022 and 2023.
This kind of highlights how rapidly the online monoculture drops off as soon as you leave Meta and Google. Only something like 20% of Americans had a Twitter account as of its peak of popularity....
This kind of highlights how rapidly the online monoculture drops off as soon as you leave Meta and Google. Only something like 20% of Americans had a Twitter account as of its peak of popularity. A fraction of those people actually engage actively on the platform, and a fraction of that fraction actually have their posts read by anyone.
It's weird because I literally don't know a single person who uses it. Of course I follow plenty of celebrities, influencers, journalists, etc. who do but nobody IRL. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok,...
It's weird because I literally don't know a single person who uses it. Of course I follow plenty of celebrities, influencers, journalists, etc. who do but nobody IRL.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and every other usual social media site (even Reddit) but none of my IRL contacts say they use Twitter.
I feel like this is a common anecdote but I could be wrong.
I find it really useful with live news, like the war in Ukraine. I found it really upsetting when they restricted the free usage, which killed most of my sources
I find it really useful with live news, like the war in Ukraine. I found it really upsetting when they restricted the free usage, which killed most of my sources
I work closely with a number of small agencies that rely in-large-part on Twitter for networking and publicising, posting jobs and opportunities etc. Often when people ask 'do people use Twitter'...
I work closely with a number of small agencies that rely in-large-part on Twitter for networking and publicising, posting jobs and opportunities etc.
Often when people ask 'do people use Twitter' they're imagining it being soley hosting hot political opinions or mundane life sharing, but I really do wonder where these small online organisations will go. I imagine it'll impact me financially in the long run. I don't imagine they'll want to stick around if X becomes just Musk's ideological hub.
I dislike the whole super app idea and the fact he thought it was a good idea after looking at WeChat is even worse. Edit; Ok, apparently not that either. Stick to founding cool stuff and...
I dislike the whole super app idea and the fact he thought it was a good idea after looking at WeChat is even worse.
Stick to Rockets please.
Edit; Ok, apparently not that either.
Stick to founding cool stuff and supplying people the capital to pull it off!*
Even more dumb: the country with the next largest number of Twitter users after the US is Japan, where LINE is huge. The typical notion seems to be that Twitter is the default social networking...
Even more dumb: the country with the next largest number of Twitter users after the US is Japan, where LINE is huge. The typical notion seems to be that Twitter is the default social networking site for public things, and LINE is far and away the most popular way to communicate with people you know.
A rebrand and the recent rate limiting thing, are excellent ways to start chasing away more users there, when there was previously a little bit of an insulating barrier compared to how front-and-center Musk's idiocy is in the US. And nobody is going to choose his app over LINE...
LINE works much better in a more urbanized and interconnected society like Japan, too. It is ubiquitous there. I also think part of the reason it's so popular is that it is incredibly friendly and...
LINE works much better in a more urbanized and interconnected society like Japan, too. It is ubiquitous there. I also think part of the reason it's so popular is that it is incredibly friendly and cute, which has big appeal in Japan/Asia and frankly here too.
Rebranding Twitter to x is pretty much putting a shotgun to the head of any notion that Twitter had any personality.
Call me crazy but this won't help nor hurt the-platform-formerly-known-as-twitter. Musk needs to fuck off to have any chance to recover, and even then it would be a long shot. But he needs to be...
Call me crazy but this won't help nor hurt the-platform-formerly-known-as-twitter. Musk needs to fuck off to have any chance to recover, and even then it would be a long shot. But he needs to be the hero in his story and not the incompetent ketamine fueled boss.
Lol he actually wants to go the WeChat route (at least I think this is what this is). I hope it's a colossal failure. I already stopped using twitter altogether and can't wait for more people to...
Lol he actually wants to go the WeChat route (at least I think this is what this is). I hope it's a colossal failure. I already stopped using twitter altogether and can't wait for more people to do the same.
The great thing is WeChat super apps only really work when you have an authoritarian government hell bent on tracking everyone's payments, spending, transfers, and making sure not too much of the...
The great thing is WeChat super apps only really work when you have an authoritarian government hell bent on tracking everyone's payments, spending, transfers, and making sure not too much of the national currency leaves the country. It just won't work in the rest of the planet unless you get a bunch of different countries to enforce it (and I mean enforce, not just support).
Now, while I think that Twitter/"X's" days are limited, this ridiculous, sudden rebranding is going to leave hundreds-of-thousands of sites with "the bird" logo. Then I have to imagine that...
Now, while I think that Twitter/"X's" days are limited, this ridiculous, sudden rebranding is going to leave hundreds-of-thousands of sites with "the bird" logo. Then I have to imagine that there's, for instance, linear television that does 15-30 second interstitial segments that are calls-to-action to all of their online presences
("You've been watching WABC news. Find us online on our website at... on Facebook... and check our Twitter @ WABC for the latest news happening in your area!")
which will all need to be redone. Radio, application about pages, product packaging, documentation, "Share to" menus. It's a branding nightmare.
I get strong X.org Foundation vibes from the new logo. Seems Musk also went back to his root claiming back x.com, I guess this was long planned and the end goals are even odder than we can figure.
I get strong X.org Foundation vibes from the new logo.
Seems Musk also went back to his root claiming back x.com, I guess this was long planned and the end goals are even odder than we can figure.
There are rumors that Meta might have a trademark on "X" when it comes to social media. Edit: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch On a more...
There are rumors that Meta might have a trademark on "X" when it comes to social media.
I can't help but read these headlines as "Twitter is now closed" as that is what the icon most typically represents. Quite fitting really... Watching the demise of Twitter before our eyes,...
I can't help but read these headlines as "Twitter is now closed" as that is what the icon most typically represents. Quite fitting really... Watching the demise of Twitter before our eyes, punctuated with a "X" as the logo.
Twitter rebranding to X just seems like an odd move, like it just seems like Musk is doing changes just to prove he can. Twitter as a brand had so much brand recognition to it, now it's just all...
Twitter rebranding to X just seems like an odd move, like it just seems like Musk is doing changes just to prove he can. Twitter as a brand had so much brand recognition to it, now it's just all gonna be "X"?
Combine this with all the other recent changes, my question is, is he trying to just kill the platform, or just spur of the moment "why not" type decisions?
He's gotta be killing it and I wish it would just die already. But a one letter name is a terrible idea. Try searching for "How to join x" you'll never find it!
He's gotta be killing it and I wish it would just die already. But a one letter name is a terrible idea. Try searching for "How to join x" you'll never find it!
I'm sure it'll have to go bye bye soon, he did say they where down 50%; I'm sure all the "ad money" he gave to those big accounts isn't helping; Me and a bunch of other people I know who just...
I'm sure it'll have to go bye bye soon, he did say they where down 50%; I'm sure all the "ad money" he gave to those big accounts isn't helping; Me and a bunch of other people I know who just browse twitter normally got suspended today, and it's been getting worse with suspensions recently. Maybe the end is sooner than expected.
Wait, he renamed it X Corp... like the company in the X-Men comics? So when you post will it be called X'ing? Oh, I've got it! His goal was to destroy Twitter from the start and use the shriveled...
Wait, he renamed it X Corp... like the company in the X-Men comics? So when you post will it be called X'ing?
Oh, I've got it! His goal was to destroy Twitter from the start and use the shriveled husk of a company to hide human experiments to make real x-men! Why else would he be removing the iconic bird and name from twitter, which would do nothing but make the company die faster?
If you still have one then yes please! I find social media fascinating as an outside observer rather than a direct contributor, and I would love to have a snoop around :)
If you still have one then yes please! I find social media fascinating as an outside observer rather than a direct contributor, and I would love to have a snoop around :)
This idiot really did get the force to buy the Twitter(after he signed, so not force more like made accountable for his actions) , cause the only valuable thing about Twitter it’s is brand...
This idiot really did get the force to buy the Twitter(after he signed, so not force more like made accountable for his actions) , cause the only valuable thing about Twitter it’s is brand recognition.
Hahahahahaha.* *I think the laughter for this should be enough but I will add I don't care for twitter and never have but watching the death spiral of a toxic platform is great fun.
Hahahahahaha.*
*I think the laughter for this should be enough but I will add I don't care for twitter and never have but watching the death spiral of a toxic platform is great fun.
We are all witnessing a huge paradigm shift right now. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Reddit have been the kings of the internet for the last 15ish years, with Google having an even longer reign than that. This is enshitification at work.
Google search sucks and people know it. That's why they add "reddit" to the end of their searches now. AI is going to kill them unless they are able (and they sure are trying) to get on top of this and utilize their own AI.
Amazon may not be dying quite yet, but people are getting tired of sorting through low-quality Chinese products and trying to decide which reviews are real. They can't maintain this forever and stay on top.
Twitter - sorry, I mean X - is dead already whether Musk knows it or not. Like all the other "free speech" platforms, it'll become more of a cesspool than it already is and the regular people will leave. This rebrand is going to accelerate this process. Whether Musk did it intentionally or not, this is a bit unfortunate because Twitter did enable the dissemination of a lot of left-leaning ideas. Granted, it was also toxic and awful.
Facebook might be able to stay the course, especially if their investment in VR pans out. I'm skeptical about this, but time will tell. I keep being surprised by how resilient Facebook is. I keep thinking it's the end for them, but it seems "too big to fail" in some regards.
Reddit is in the beginning stages of the end too, obviously. It'll take a long time to fully die, but the decline has been going for a while and users are just now collectively noticing.
I can't even imagine what the internet is going to look like in 10 years. Between Apple's VR headset, Facebook's VR research, the AI boom, and the rise of things like federated communities, we are in for an interesting ride. This will probably be a lot like the 90s/2000s shift in terms of scope. And it'll probably include its own "dot-com bubble" too, which I'm guessing will be AI-related. I am curious to see who will rise to the top after that.
I think it's simple: Facebook is boring. It's core features are done, and they have practically just been in maintenance mode since ~2011. Even Instagram (extremely limited features) and WhatsApp (again, limited) have barely had any major features or changes the past few years. VR is the one area they are actively evolving, and it's a hardware play which is definitely more "fun" for them and allows them to break conventions a little bit.
I am by no means a Meta/FB fan, but they are just... boring and their core audience knows what to expect when they login, no massive changes, no upheavals, everything is just there, the same as it has been for a decade.
Edit: and surprisingly they are the only social network that gives you proper privacy controls for everything on a granular scale, sure privacy from advertisers is different, but for your posts, comments, and messages to the public world? They are definitely the best option with strong variable privacy guards.
This is a great point. Imagine how long the reddit we knew would have continued on, fairly drama free, had reddit just ...done nothing. With the exception of third party apps and tools having to provide baseline functionality and accessibility (which is ridiculous, but the arrangement was working just fine) old.reddit has gotten the job done for many years, and no one asked for new.reddit or any of the bizarre changes they've made over the years. They really had to do a lot to piss people off.
I have actually heard about a lot of instagram changes over the past few years that IG users have been really unhappy with, but it seems they've been subtle or blew over easily enough that the upset hasn't harmed the platform much.
Has reddit made a single good change in the last ten years? Really everything they have done has either a) pissed off their user base or b) increased their operating costs for no real benefits. Starting hosting images themselves increases server costs. Developing their own video player increased the further and made the user experience worse. They buy the most popular 3rd party app, incurring development costs, then progressively make it borderline unusable to piss of the users. Then they ban all of the other 3rd party apps, alienating the users their site depends on.
It's baffling. You could teach a class on how not to run a business based on nothing but reddit and their business decisions.
Ah, but see, merely coasting along doing nothing may be the right thing to do but it isn’t profitable.
They are definitely chasing profitability, but only in the short sighted, short term profitability that is slowly ruining everything. And even that is failing, as they have repeatedly said they are not profitable. Probably because they continue to take on new and necessary costs.
Just keep stacking on more and more technical and design debt and eventually the profitability will arrive right?
I think fixing their search was a good change. Overall though if you look at every one of these changes it's about keeping users ON Reddit's servers and building a walled garden. If they serve the videos they can keep the analytics and there's no chance you go create a profile at another site. They saw it with Imgur which started to cultivate it's little community.
The bottom line is all of these are businesses and they are trying to make money, regardless of whether their model actually supports making money.
I don't believe the Reddit model supports making money. It allows for too much guerrilla marketing (think of the Snap, Ugh that was incredibly annoying) without advertiser's having to pay Reddit. And people are simply not there for ads.
Reddit fixed their search? You could have fooled me...
I do think it has improved over time, because it used to be completely useless, but it's still so bad that I would instead just go to Google and search for the thing on reddit I wanted. Google weirdly has become a worse search engine but a better reddit search engine.
I think the reddit model, as it was originally, could have been massively profitable. A link aggregator that doesn't host any of the content it links to while simultaneously having the kind of traffic reddit has is a gold mine. Low overhead and incredibly value ad spece. It doesn't matter that a large portion of the user base is blocking ads when you have enough traffic. But when you start bringing all the outside processes in house, you're now paying for what you previously got for free and your overhead goes through the roof. I understand why they did it, but it was still a series of incredible stupid moves.
I'd argue image hosting was actually a smart move. Or at least not dumb.
Having to rely on third-party hosts like Imgur—which was getting progressively less friendly about reddit posters direct linking to Imgur—was always a risk. Imgur was making embedded albums more difficult, and making you go through extra steps just to get a direct image link to post on reddit so you wouldn't be linking to an Imgur landing page with the image.
With Imgur purging NSFW content, and now GfyCat going under, reddit doing their own image and video hosting certainly seems to be less stupid than it originally appeared.
The mistake was in permitting an ecosystem of unofficially "official" ways of doing things online. A world where there were many different image hosts that were largely interchangeable wouldn't have put Reddit over a barrel like that, but techbros adore a monoculture it seems.
At some point with user generated content you end up making it too easy for any user off the street to share their content. This has the effect of dramatically worsening the signal to noise ratio. There are certain things that aren't worth streamlining, and it's hard to hit that sweet spot. You want just enough to where people who care will bother to figure it out, but not so easy that there is no figuring out required.
Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that. But I guess it comes down to cost/benefit question. Is having control of the product worth no longer getting it for free? I don't know what reddit spends on the infrastructure necessary for image hosting, but it isn't cheap. But you're right, it definitely a more complicated issue than it seems at first glance.
Yes, removing /r/jailbait, which the current CEO used to moderate
iirc people would get added as mods to jailbait without their permission. That's seems more likely than spez being that kind of pervert.
This is true, but doesn't absolve him entirely. He was well aware such subreddits existed and the reddit admins gave out awards and trophies to a certain moderator who "tended" the seediest parts of reddit. That sub won "subreddit of the year" back in 2008.
This is back when reddit's philosophy had a much stronger libertarian free speech and anything goes bent than it does today.
In never made money though. Facebook does.
And I'd say Facebook doesn't really do nothing, they're constantly tweaking the algorithm under the hood to hit whatever organizational KPIs they have. There's tons of moderation tweaks, tweaks to how ad sales are handled, ad management stuff, and on and on.
It's just all opaque to the end user because we are basically chattel for them to herd. A cow might notice when the rancher takes her to a different field to graze, but the grass is grass from one field to the next so as long as she gets enough feed and water and fresh air she's content enough (until. . . you know).
I wonder though how much of reddit's costs are associated with chasing new features and such, though.
How much could they have cut costs if they'd switched to more of a maintenance mode and slow feature rollout? Instead, they completely rebuilt the GUI (engineers, designers, managers, etc) while trying to keep a lot of backward compatibility, add chat, added some kind of facebook-style profile thing, etc etc. According to Comparely, the highest paid executive(s) make nearly $800k a year. They also made official apps (more employees) rather than coming up with a way to monetize third-party apps (eg sane API pricing).
Maybe they would have been fine if they'd tried to add more monetization without also blowing money on all that stuff. But also maybe not; I have no idea. It's just interesting to think about.
Yeah that's my general feeling as well, but I have no idea what their actual financials are. I suspect they were in enough technical debt by the time people started complaining about the site a lot that it was going to be a major cost just to fix it even if they didn't try to implement batcrap new features.
@Deimos used to work for them so he might have more insight, but I don't think he was that involved on the financial/corporate strategy side of things.
Since the time that I worked at reddit, they've taken around a billion dollars in venture capital, and have about 100 times the number of employees. Anything I knew about the company wouldn't have the slightest relation to what it's like now.
This is just one small data point, but reddit was hiring for a Legal Operations Manager a few months ago, and the job post popped up for me on LinkedIn since that's exactly the type of work that I do. I remember being fascinated by the stated salary range, because it was nearly $100k higher than the typical range for that role/experience level, which is already a decently high paying role at most companies. Not that it's bad to compensate employees well, but it was such an extreme outlier that it made me wonder about how they run their business in general.
I’d argue the other major point in ‘support’ of Facebook is how much they supplanted individual business websites for a lot of small companies and restaurants. A lot of local businesses’ online presences and info are only available through Facebook, and I can understand why, even if I’d prefer an alternative.
Not nearly as big a point, but I think Facebook marketplace is another niche role they’ve filled pretty effectively, to the point that I sometimes contemplate having an account again just to be able to access it.
I think you're onto something there. Meta/FB isn't really pushing forward anywhere except VR. Their newest product is Threads and it's just a Twitter alternative with a better environment and more data collection. They build a product that works and then maintain it, and I think long-term, that's a smart decision. Dramatic change is what pushes people away. FB does make layout changes and stuff but they seem more minor, I haven't used it in forever but it's been a long while since I've seen a big furor about a layout change.
They're also pretty active in the AI boom of the past year or two. A lot of the tools folks use these days for LLMs are Meta/Facebook in origin.
I think that's what makes them "boring". They are fine giving that image of "we exist" in the PR for FB, but the real sausage behind the curtains is what makes it such a sneakily dark company.
I agree with everything you said about being done. However, over the past maybe 2 years I've noticed a push to use the FB app rather than access it through the mobile browser (desktop browser is fine). I avoid installing apps whenever possible. At first it got difficult to message people through FB (cursor & scrolling control went haywire) and now it simply refuses to display your messages at all, instead telling you to install Messenger.
You can get around this either by requesting the desktop site or by using mbasic.Facebook.com.
I like the mbasic version of the site because it’s fully missing Facebook’s annoying attention hack bullshit. It’s designed for users in remote areas with really slow internet or data caps. But it’s also just a great way to social media without the dopamine doom loop.
Thanks, great tip!
I really dislike the "endshitification" definition because it's often a lazy sweeping together of nuances and tends to be heavily influenced by bias.
With that said, while I don't think it's wrong to say all these products have gotten shitty, I'm not seeing all these claims of them being "dead".
Just because something sucks doesn't mean it's on its way out the door. Cable TV STILL has a large market and it's an easy example of something most thought would be long gone by now. There's plenty of situations where a brand new service makes things better, falls to standard market/competitor pressure, and then just...sticks around because there's nothing to usurp it.
In the Cable TV example, what's the "streaming" alternative that's going to shake things up?
Google isn't going anywhere, because the people who "know it sucks" are an insanely small minority, and it's still the defacto engine even for them.
Amazon is still one of THE "shop for anything" storefronts, with major competitors like alibaba being the same thing essentially.
Twitter is maybe the most likely to lose steam, but even still it's just because of batshit poor management mixed with the relative ease of making a competing app since there's less logistics behind it (and even then i don't totally see it losing).
Facebook/Insta likely aren't going anywhere. If you want to stay in touch with someone you met across the world or do some mass notification thing, they're still one of the better tools (as much as I personally hate them). Again in this case it's because it's already established and unlike twitter they're not trying to speedrun failure.
Reddit is fine too? The exodus is over and what are the alternatives? Lemmy has it's issues, especially for casual users, tildes doesn't want a lot of the low effort "means well" posting, let alone the outright hostile "no fuck you and everyone like you" stuff that's common there. And people are still appending reddit to their searches because it's still the main community for niche stuff (want some possibly human/non marketing opinions about sun shades, vaccuum cleaners, this small game that just came out...welp looks like you're going to reddit).
Having typed that I do find it funny that if reddit spent more time working on their search tools they'd probably hurt google more and find a new niche there (only for it to become worse because even more targeted marketing would hit it).
VR doesn't change much, just interfaces, and I think it's going to be a VERY long time until it's casual friendly. As intuitive as "pick up the item you want and we'll add it to your cart" is, actually building that interface and justifying the cost vs a normal website is far from happening.
AI...well i'll just say the hype is way overblown. There's some interesting stuff, but if anything it's going to be a power tool FOR enshitification, not against it.
I'm all for things getting better, but I feel that this post is very naive when it comes to reality. Are they getting worse? Absolutely. Are they going away? I don't see it. Until there's a "streaming" to these apps "cable" they aren't in very much danger of losing. The main shift in all of this was "AI" really pointing out that free/cheap API access for mass scraping is going to vanish.
When it was just Facebook looking at VR, I was more apprehensive about its future. Now that Apple is jumping in with a consumer product that actually looks semi-interesting, I am seeing the writing on the wall. The big tech companies know what each of the other big tech companies are doing. If Apple felt the need to throw their hat in the ring, I think we are about to see some interesting things happening in VR. Apple isn't always right, but they've usually made me eat my words when I thought they were doing something stupid. And I have only owned one Apple product in my life, so I'm not particularly biased toward them if that helps my credibility here.
Your example of the cable companies isn't the best in my opinion. Would you like to be the CEO in charge of a cable company right now? Do you want to be the guy whose job it is to grow your audience in a market that is 100% guaranteed to continue shrinking year after year? Cable TV isn't "dead" but it's on life support until the boomers are gone and plug gets pulled for real. I'm in no way saying that any of these companies are going to be totally irrelevant next month or the month after. They're huge and will take forever to die. Look at Kodak, Blockbuster, GM, Yahoo, AOL, Myspace, Nokia, Sears, or any other companies that thought they were too big to fail and then died slow, painful deaths. Oftentimes it happened over many years. Even then, there were a lot of people saying exactly what you're saying now. "People aren't going to just stop buying Kodak products. What if you're on vacation and your fancy digital camera runs out of battery? You'll still want a dispoable camera handy just in case. They're not going anywhere."
The ad-based internet is about to be struggling badly in my opinion. I'm not saying nobody will use Reddit, but we are seeing the early stages of the collapse. Lemmy kind of sucks right now, and I don't have a lot of confidence in it, but the fact that early-adopter types are moving away from Reddit at all is a bad sign for them in the next few years here. The fact that I'm here on Tildes is a bad sign for Reddit, considering I was a heavy contributor for well over a decade.
Either way, I really appreciate your counterargument. It's worth thinking about and predicting the future is a fool's game (I'm a fool, so it's perfect for me).
Agreed, enshittification is too broad.
Amazon's superpower is its infrastructure. It has warehouses and drivers everywhere; it can cheaply get almost anything anywhere in 24 to 48 hours, at least in the US. It's a galactic moat that other companies can't cross.
Yeah this is one of the reason it's the least likely (in my eyes) to go anywhere. Twitter has infrastructure/logistics issues, but they're mostly "throw money at it" style problems.
With infinite funds and them sitting on their hands you couldn't recreate amazon's reach in 2 years, let alone a more realistic budget.
I think that's part of it but IMO a larger part of 'enshittification' is rising interest rates and companies having to come up with additional revenue or at the very least stop heavily subsidizing their platform with investments based on future growth.
Which might not be terrible in the long run? Alternatives, especially ones not heavily tied to a VC model, are going to have an easier path forward in an environment where their competitors are trying to extract as much value as they can. Some stuff like video and search are impossible to do at a smaller scale but companies like Reddit, Twitter, etc. are going to be somewhat 'vulnerable' to this. (Probably not existentially vulnerable, but they'll allow space for a larger subset of users to migrate to alternatives than would happen otherwise).
I think the interest rates thing is tertiary to most of these companies and has a much heavier effect on startups. Not established giants. The decline in quality has been going on MUCH longer and mostly has to do with near or total monopoly power mixed with no government oversight allowing them to monetize as they see fit.
We might see these things fracture into smaller entities again (i'm personally hoping for the return of dedicated gaming forum communities), but I'm not getting my hopes up. Centralization is just a key convenience factor users gravitate to, and there's still major barriers to creating and maintaining such entities that many just can't be bothered with.
There will be more competition because of the quality drop, but most of these sites have been "worse" for over a decade, and they're still the main application in their niche.
When would you say important inflection points for the state of Reddit have been? I’ve been an addict there since 2012 (or perhaps 2011) and there has been a fringe of “Reddit ain’t what it used to be” the entire time I’ve been there. IIRC, one of the comments made on the first day Reddit enabled comments in 2006(?) was along the lines of “It’s been a nice ride but quality is over.”
IMO, the sharpest decline in Reddit’s user base quality had nothing to do with a change in Reddit policy. Gamergate brought an influx of people spamming the same talking points. Annoying, but survivable. People doing close readings of comments to look for subtle tells that the other person is pro-GG and not arguing in good faith killed off what little remained of good-faith disagreements in the larger communities. I’ll leave it to others to discuss whether Reddit’s policy responses hastened or slowed the cultural decline.
I think the most notable inflection point was the Reddit redesign, although I can't tell you whether this caused the inflection or merely signposted it.
Reddit has always had a tension between discoverability and community. Small communities lead to a "talk with" effect, where the average comment interaction is between people who are generally familiar with each other. In such an environment, implicit norms can take hold and be enforced through relatively passive behaviour like voting. "Rediquette" policies, namely "the downvote button is not a disagree button," exist for this environment.
Large communities, however, have a "talk at" dynamic. The average comment interaction is anonymous, and comments themselves become a way to "play to the crowd." This is easily observable with voting, with the comment score merely being a popularity measure.
Reddit's accidental brilliance was that different parts of it could exist in different states. Large, default subreddits were performance spaces almost from the outset, but smaller subreddits occupied quiet niches and could grow (or not) at their own pace.
Enter the redesign. What strikes me most about the redesign is not really the atrocious interface, it's that links and threads are now "part of Reddit" rather than "part of a subreddit." In particular, opening a thread from one's main page opens the thread as a modal frame over top of the main page (with a click outside the frame closing the thread and returning to the front page), whereas in old!reddit opening a comment thread opened the subreddit. It's a very subtle distinction†, but I think it is emblematic of the transition. The redesign also greatly limited CSS-like subreddit styling, making it harder for subreddits to visually distinguish themselves from the rest of the site.
Algorithmic front-pages probably also contributed to this, exposing users to bits and pieces of a subreddit-community without inducting them (through subscription or a subreddit visit) to the community itself.
The borders between subreddits were always extremely porous; the Reddit commetariat was concerned with brigading and r/ShitRedditSays before Gamergate was even a story about ethics in gaming journalism. The transition to a fully generic social media site might have been inevitable, but I think it was hastened by management's priority of site engagement over sub-community health.
† — and also not unique to the new desktop. The desktop redesign really reflected trends that were common in mobile apps, so I suspect the same decline would have happened even without the redesign.
Is this a mobile app thing? I tried using Reddit just now on Edge (so, a browser I have zero extensions nor history on), and I seem to be opening pages as expected. Clicking on the link goes either to the self post or the actual article, clicking on comments goes to the comments page, each a new separate link. It's odd because I have seen that modal that you describe but I forget how you actually trigger that.
So I simultaneously understand exactly what you mean but also am confused, as if this is some odd Mandela effect. Did reddit change this behavior later on?
I do agree that the limited CSS does remove a lot of each sub's identity, though.
Well that's surprising.
After playing around with it, I can reproduce your description: new.reddit moves you to the subreddit when not logged in. When logged in, it behaves as I described above; when not logged in it behaves as you describe.
That's so weird that I can't imagine it to have been an intended feature. Maybe when logged in, Reddit considers the front page (of mostly, but not exclusively, your subscribed subreddits) to be something like a sub in its own right that "owns" threads, but when logged out it doesn't have that layer of indirection.
From the perspective of community-building, this behaviour is backwards. You'd think that the logged-out user, who can't post comments, is the one who should be spoon-fed the "engagement" feed of Reddit-as-a-whole, while the logged-in user who might/can contribute should be immersed in the specific identity of each subreddit community.
I miss the proliferation of CSS ponymotes. They still exist, but the redesign killed the momentum for new subreddits to pop up to create more.
The redesign was one of my blind spots when considering inflection points because my first reaction to it was to turn on the "stick to old reddit" option in my profile, so I forget that my experience is a fringe one.
I've been using reddit since 2010 or so and you aren't wrong that there's always been comments like that, but that also happens everywhere.
I would say the big inflection points, to me, are the following:
I think another point that didn't strike me at the time, but has in retrospect, came much earlier in 2011-2012. This was when Reddit banned r/jailbait and r/creepshots among other subreddits. These had been around since before I joined up, and there was a shift in perception of them over the years. In the late 2000s, they were hugely popular, and celebrated by Reddit itself. People have been repeating the misinformation that Spez was a moderator of r/jailbait (he was added without his consent so I wouldn't say that), but the reality is much worse -- he and the others running the site fed off of r/jailbait's popularity, celebrated it as Subreddit of the Year, allowed it to continue to exist and benefitted from its existence. Frankly, that underage-sexualization content is what took reddit from dinky little webpage to noticeably sizable web forum. Then, the Digg exodus happened and people looked at it as a Digg alternative, and THAT is when things started to change and as a larger number of people started to join Reddit those subreddits were looked upon less favorably. And STILL Reddit administration did nothing about them... until they were featured on the news, and brought a lot of negative press, which is when Reddit banned them and acted as if they were unaware of them before that point. At the time, I didn't really process any of this. But in retrospect it set up what has become a recurring pattern for Reddit's admin: invite the worst of the worst, feed off of it, and then ban it when it is no longer useful. r/the_donald was the exact same thing. It was quarantined and threatened with a ban -- but only after it was no longer drawing large amounts of traffic to the site.
It's weird to me that you bring up GG as a big inflection point because personally I don't really see it that way. Even as someone who is HEAVILY involved in gaming subreddits (it's most of what I comment on, and now that I am reducing my reddit use heavily it's only gaming subs and my local sub I'm subbed to)... I never really saw all that much Gamergate business flooding in everywhere outside of maybe a couple weeks when it was the topic du jour. And I'm sure it had even less of an impact outside of gaming subs, where people probably don't even know what Gamergate was. In fact, sometimes I feel like I don't even know what it was. But maybe that's just different experiences.
GamerGate was an inflection point where various personas who weren't really part of the target Reddit or Gamer demographics started to figure out ways to stir up ornery mobs to crowdsource cyberbullying. It's when the noxious parts of Gamer culture metastasized and infected culture at large. What set it apart was that a lot of washed up actors who tried to pivot to podcasting or YouTube or streaming found a very easy outrage bait strategy to get big fast.
Once they unlocked that strategy there was no stopping it and much of the toxicity you've seen on the internet since, from all corners, is coming from people who cut their teeth in that moment.
It's a very odd topic (Note: for some disclosure I do work in games so that will show some bias). r/games pretty much blocked off all the discussion on the topic pretty quickly and of course r/gaming never cared about anything other than memes. So it was very easy to ignore unless you were very specifically looking for the war yourself amongst a specific hub of subs (or part of the "drama hub". it says something when r/drama and r/subredditdrama have more coverage of a gaming sub than most gaming subs. ). But when you peek into that hub, it was an absolute bloodbath between surprisingly active maybe 20-50k sized subs. It's a whole rabbit hole of the internet in an of itself.
The odd part about it was that is came up occasionally in my personal life (hence my disclosure). Normally these internet drama's may get one mention the week of (and I'm never going to bring it up) and fade out into its niche, but I remember hearing about gamergate as recently as some company call meeting in 2021. I'm eternally online and I long forgot about GG by that point, so it was very odd hearing it pop up after some decade or whatever, in a professional capacity.
I guess a lot of this happened not just on Reddit, but Twitter as well so that may explain a lot of this. I can forget how active and vocal my industry can be on Twitter, for better and for worse.
Based on this and other responses, I'm beginning to believe that GG has a deeper and lasting impact on meta-Reddit (which I was heavily addicted to at the time) than on the gaming sphere (or anywhere outside of it). However, meta-Reddit also set the tone for moderation elsewhere, hence the sibling reply to yours mentioning the shift in moderation philosophy from "don't spam or be annoying" to "fighting hate" in mainstream subreddits.
Even if we include GG as a turning point, it looks like there was a big dustup each year between 2014–2018, then a gap until this year. Anecdotally, this checks out. Meta-Reddit got STALE for a while. Yes, Reddit's quality was felt to continue to decrease by many, but it mirrored the decline in quality on every other social media site—nothing Reddit-specific. This year was a return to Reddit-powered footguns.
Also, New Reddit feels like it's been around for much longer than 2018. Not like I haven't been sticking to Old Reddit this entire time. I think the original /r/place was also a celebration of the "new" official app, too.
I find it fascinating that this pattern hasn't been successfully replicated on all the extreme free speech replacements for Reddit or Twitter. I somewhat suspect that it's because the early adopters of such a platform are the kind of people who can't keep their creepshots to /r/jailbait or their MAGA posting to T_D, thus infecting the rest of the site with that tenor. Alternate hypothesis: they do keep their posts in their respective not-subreddits, but those are the only active subreddit replacements, leading to the same effect.
I think it's because "extreme free speech" isn't really a draw for the average user. Those drawn in are disproportionately people who have had their hobbies kicked off the existing popular networks, so the new network is seeded with the "wrong crowd." This is exactly the story of Voat, after all.
To me, the competing theory is that the pattern is one of semi-benign neglect. A community that starts for anodyne reasons develops its own shady corners with questionable content, but in moderation that content turns some users of the site into dedicated users. It's still tickling the dragon's tail, since exposure is bad news for the site as a whole.
Another instance of this pattern would be Tumblr, where many of its users stayed precisely for the kind of adult or adult-adjacent content that the site sought to restrict.
In addition to the problems you mention, I think there's one to add: image hosting marked Reddit's change in focus from a link aggregator to a social media platform.
A link aggregator's job is to connect the user with an outbound link. The user leaving the site is the point, since the link (hopefully) directs them to interesting content elsewhere on the Internet. However, that's a failure state for a social media platform, which values (and monetizes) "user engagement" measured by time spent interacting with the main site.
By hosting images and then video, Reddit hoped to keep users engaging with its own comment threads, driving up engagement and hopefully exposing the user to more ad-monetization. Most of Reddit's user-questionable decisions (such as built-in chat) also seem to have a similar focus†, keeping user eyeballs somewhere on reddit.com rather than an external provider.
The redesign also has nods in this direction. Under the redesign, the title of a link-post does not open the link itself, it opens the comment section. Opening the link requires clicking on the URL itself, which has much less visual weight than the title, comparable to the domain on old.reddit. It's a subtle nudge towards the idea that even for link posts, users should treat the link as optional while feeling free to engage in the comment section.
† — In my opinion, the biggest feature introduced here wasn't image/video hosting or even chat, it was turning user pages into content-hosting places equivalent to subreddits themselves. As far as I can tell this hasn't had much impact, but it seems to me to have been designed as an answer to Facebook walls, turning users themselves into content-display points.
Piggybacking off of what majromax just said about the "talk with" and "talk at" dynamics being different between the larger and smaller subreddits, this is one huge cause of the enshitification process. I recently posted a Marginalia blog entry on Tildes that seemed to resonate with the recent Reddit refugees. To summarize the incredibly well-written blog post, one which you should absolutely read, communities die when money gets involved and they grow too large, too quickly. A small, steady influx of new users can be molded to the community standards - bad behavior is corrected by experienced users. A large influx of new users mold the community to their bad standards. They are no longer a minority being corrected by the majority, but rather a sizeable majority themselves.
To answer your question, I will rephrase it if you don't mind. You're asking (sort of), "When did Reddit get shitty?" Well, it got shitty at different times for different people. If you are an older, experienced forum user who is looking for a small, close-knit community of intelligent people, then Reddit died in like 2009 or maybe 2010 during the Digg migration. Hard to remember back that far. It died as soon as you could no longer recognize some of the more active and well-respected users because there were just too many people. I enjoyed that aspect of Reddit, but for me it was still really enjoyable for a few more years. I think there were many different small things over the years - the loss of Victoria on the AMAs, the shift to the new design, obviously the death of 3rd party apps, the rise of shallower communities like r/AmIUgly, and various other things. I think that I didn't notice so much day to day, but when I looked back a few years I noticed that the amount of learning/intelligent discussion had gone down and I was spending a couple hours a day browsing a site I wasn't actually enjoying anymore. Based on your response, I can tell when it got shitty for you.
The_Donald, no contest. The 2016 elections brought about a site-wide spread of cynicism and utter disdain for the fellow redditor and mods that I feel it never fully recovered from. This isn't unique to reddit, but it feels like reddit got hit the hardest for a multitude of reasons.
I'm guessing it's not simply because of the climate either. I wouldn't be surprised if T_D gave reddit a HUGE surge of traffic and that is why they kept that sub around for so long. The surge in users that were highly politicized (and/or politicizing existing users) would explain the shift in tone overtime.
But for a few other inflection points:
2015's blackout seemed to represent a shift in moderation in many communities. that plus the rise of t_d seemed to be the point where mods shifted away from the "just don't spam or be annoying mentality" to "I am here to fight hate". Some of that is obviously needed, but it started to feel like that time where even smaller-medium sized subs would scrutinize any comment and become ban happy. The automated block lists happens around this time too
this is much less concrete, but I think around 2017-8 there was a rise in what I'd call "rage subs". r/idiotsincars, r/publicfreakout, r/justiceserved, etc. This felt around the time where suddenly these sorts of communities grew and grew fast. Content that is being fed to incite anger. Even if it's justified anger, it felt like this is when empathy for other users really fell down the drain, not necessarily in 2016 itself. This happened to be around the time of the site redesign, but I don't know how much that correlates (new design -> promotes more pictures/video -> promotes the most primal content?)
2020 is another big inflection point. Not just from COVID-19 and that whole subset of culture (and ofc a huge urge of traffic once again), but from the rise of the r/antiwork sort of culture. Reddit has always been anti-coropoate and backing up alternative philosophies like libertarianism, but this felt like the time all the socialism memes (as well as a 2nd wave of Bernie Sanders flagging) started to rise up. that corporate cynicism really exploded around this time and talks of unions and boycotts and whatnot were again, spreading sitewide, not just in its own little bubble. Ironic when it came time for a Reddit boycott, but I digress.
And I think we might be in the middle of another inflection point now. I guess we'll see how the dust settles this time. I think we both agree the biggest turning points weren't the work of the admins, but I feel gamergate was a relatively small footnote in the annuls of history. One that happened just close enough to the elections to really stick in people's minds.
While a point-by-point response to your comment would be redundant with how I plan to respond to the other responses, I appreciate that you included the 2020 /r/antiwork socialism inflection point in your list. I can't tell if you find it to be a net benefit or detraction from the quality of discussion, but its presence does make clear that inflection points in community quality aren't strictly bad.
The move from "just don't spam or be annoying" to "I am here to fight hate" is THE primary reason I selected GG as my main inflection point. That shift in moderation philosophy was a straightforward response to GG—GG itself may be a footnote, but the responses to it had lasting consequences. Reddit users have always dunked on the jannies, but that seems to have marked a shift from moderators being beat cops walking street patrols to unaccountable police in cruisers from across town. The shift inadvertently helped propel the spread of disinformation and conspiracies when there are documented instances of subreddits repressing hate facts (a.k.a. true stories that conflict with the mission to fight hate speech), leading to "what else are they hiding?" rhetoric flourishing.
Facebook lives on because they've embedded themselves into all parts of the internet. Many sites, links, searches and a variety of other things touch Facebook at some point or another. They get paid per click after that but Facebook.com isn't the primary way people arrive at Facebook. Any sign in with Facebook app, Instagram, and any other product managed by this shitty company touches Facebook several times a minute and that's all money. They could care less if people visit Facebook.com, the entire internet touches Facebook at some point or another.
Remember when the internet broke a few years ago and they had to fly an engineer out on a redeye because no one locally knew wtf happened? It was Facebook. Some admin made a change not to DNS, but the other service that directs traffic on the internet, I can't remember the name of it, there was a metaphor about the phone book of the internet and the map of the internet. Well Facebook made a change to the map which broke the internet in a lot of ways for a bit.
That part of the internet that was now unaccessible was the part that Facebook touches and as it turns out, it was pretty big.
Edit: found it so I don't sound like a fool:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage
Bgp is what they broke and they took down so much with them because everything is in bed with Facebook.
It’d be great if the internet became more fragmented as a result of enshittification, and sites like Tildes that focus on quality/community rather than scale start popping up all over the place.
My subjective perception with regards to Facebook is, that the main platform "Facebook" itself mainly stuck around in the US though. At least for the younger generation (30 and below) I hardly know anyone who uses Facebook over here in my corner of Europe anymore.
They have however successfully established themselves on the market with secondary platforms they bought several years ago - namely WhatsApp and Instagram. Those still seem to do quite well with a larger part of the European population.
Am I reading you right that "Finger on the scale" is ok so long as it's left leaning ideology?
Personally, I think the right-wing of America has become increasingly dangerous, deranged, and violent. I think Fox News, OAN, and about a million other more subtle things which are woven into the fabric of American capitalism promote far-right ideologies. So having a website or two where Left-Wing views are being shared doesn't feel bad...to me. However, if you're a right-winger and disagree with me, I understand why and I absolutely see your point about the way I phrased that (perhaps deep down, on some level, I really did mean it that way too). I think you and I might have to not debate that whole issue here. But I do take your point.
No need to debate our opposing views, but I think having a neutral platform is a good thing. Elon's not nerfing the leftist ideas, nor is he promoting the right. He himself, yeah, that might be different... but truly believe that Elon doesn't have his finger on the scale.
I don't think he's talking about Twitter boosting them, just that the platform was there for their dissemination. So for leftists, it's a shame to see a platform once used to disseminate ideas being used for attempted coup on the US government.
Are leftists not able to share anymore? Or is it because the right gets to as well, they are upset? Nothing has changed for the leftists... or has it?
But again, that's not what he said. He said it's a shame that the service leftists used to share their ideas also became the service that allowed the far right in the US to attempt to co-ordinate a coup d'etat.
Leftists can still use it just fine. It just sucks that it can be misused so horribly like that. And given the current ownership, likely to happen again.
I think Google (search) is great. Google's default experience is good enough for casual users and it has plenty of query option for power users. if you have a specific site in mind and it's indexable you can query that site. You have a specific date range you remember you can restrict it. It generally does a good job differentiating homonyms, but you can use subtractive queries to filter out if it gets confused (e.g. "Football -nfl" to make sure it focuses on the World Cup),
Some search results get worse nowadays, but that's because SEO has been abused for a good decade now. Google also does a lot to get around that (which sadly means, it will throw specific but high quality blogs into a sewer and focus on mainstream sites) but it's not perfect. And I miss the Discussions/Forums tab to search through. But there's still a reason why it has been heads over any other search engine, though.
P.S. Your comment on reddit's query more suggest that Reddit's search-ability sucks. Which has been my experience (and it lost a lot of its query options over the years to boot!).
Sorry that this comment is a bit low-content - I've been off my game lately - but would it be accurate to call this a paradigm shit, since it's specifically a shift toward services being worse (i.e., enshittified)?
A paradigm shift is defined (on Google, ironically) as "a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions." I think that the enshitification process is only a small part of the paradigm shift. Rather, it's the spark that will blow the powderkeg. The real paradigm shift is what's coming after. We have all been operating under the assumption that the majority of the internet is made up of a few very large companies who get rich (or try to) by offering free services, harvesting your data, and selling that data to advertisers.
That's going to change. Advertisers are tired of the inflated numbers being put forward by social media companies.
In addition, users are getting good at ignoring or side-stepping ads and advertising companies are pretty much at the at the end of the arms race for bigger, bolder, more intrusive ads to get users' attention. Add the fact that laws around user data are only likely to get more strict in the coming years.
My best guess is that the ad-based internet is going to struggle here pretty soon. I'm not sure what happens next. Either we move toward smaller communities where people choose to donate or pay a subscription fee, or we move to something even more dystopian in my opinion - media and internet funded by individuals and companies who are willing to burn capital for the sole reason of disseminating their views. Tik Tok is reported to be making boatloads of money right now, but a cynical part of me thinks that the CCP would probably prop it up even if it wasn't just because it's such a powerhouse for spreading whatever views they want to spread around the globe.
Totally unrelated, so I apologize to everyone in advance, but I saw your username and am now curious if you were involved in the podcast.
Haha, no but I chose this name precisely because the podcast. I feel a bit guilty admitting this, but Wolf 359 is my favorite piece of media ever. I'm not saying it's the best or most brilliant thing I've ever consumed in any category (though I do consider it a masterpiece of an audiodrama), but I listen to Wolf 359 the same way my wife watches Friends before bed - it's comfort food and super entertaining. I love the characters deeply. I'm also a bit of a casual space nerd, so I enjoy sharing a username with a Red Dwarf Star too. Great catch. Nobody has ever called me on my various Wolf 359 related usernames before. btw, I labelled your comment noise since you said it was off topic and didn't want it to get in the way of the other discussion.
Don’t worry about the noise thing. I’m glad I was right about the podcast. And I hear you on it being a comfort thing. That’s Ars Paradoxica for me. :)
We should probably share some podcast recommendations because we have similar interests. If I make a post about it, would you share a few?
Totally. If you make a thread, ping me or something. :)
Just created a post under Hobbies. Eagerly awaiting your suggestions.
Man, they actually went through with it. That logo looks so generic and lifeless. Also X is like the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of some edgy placeholder name. No way a trademark will be enforcable on that. (Or at least I hope so. Seriously - it's a single letter of the alphabeth that has had that edgy connotation for decades now...)
Sad to see yet another platform die. :(
Looks like the logo for some really boring unix window manager with really square folders.
Thanks, I was trying to work out why I recognised it. At first I thought Xerox but it's not quite right, that is definitely the X Window System logo I've occasionally seen though.
It's a 1990s, early 2000s thing. Think Xbox, PSX, The X-Files, Triple X, The Matrix, Aeon Flux, X (the 2001 anime), etc.
The letter "X" used to be shorthand for "look how this is cool, edgy, and unique".
Nostalgia can be a great thing! Unfortunately for Twitter, he is also a terrible businessman.
Trademarks are always limited. You can register a trademark for your password, super unique, and sell apples under that name. Someone in another city can happily open up shop selling computers under that same name: clearly it must be stolen because your randomly generated password was unique to begin with, yet this is legal. Trademarks are both geographically and topically limited. Making a car with a specific red color might get you an angry letter from Ferrari, but a red hard drive is not something they can legally care about. (In the case of online businesses, I'm not sure how the geographic limitation works. Probably you would have to prove that your brand is known in, or targets, a certain geographic area for it to be enforceable when someone else opens up with the same name in that area.)
If you start a website called X where people can message each other, well, that's stupid because that's entirely ungoogleable even before this news, but if you did, I expect that: yes, you are infringing on that trademark, at least if you can't establish that you were first to market. Afaik it also doesn't have to be registered, though registration of a trademark helps establish your case if it does come to be a legal matter.
I'm not a lawyer and this is all to the best of my knowledge. It's been a while since I read up on this, but I expect it to be generally accurate.
X is already registered with MS for a ton of stuff, and registered with Meta for social media purposes.
Meta:
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch
MS:
https://trademarks.justia.com/760/41/x-76041368.html
Well that's gonna be fun, though I'm going to need a popcorn refill at this point
I'm not sure anymore what the rules around unused marks are btw, it's not like I've heard anyone use this as brand, and by the Internet's "wtf is this" reaction, nobody else either. The first reactions about "others have this trademark" were from people directly linking to a trademark office, not people linking to in-use products. Elon might just be like "come at me bro" and fight it out in court
Maybe this is what Zuck and Elon can cage match for, use of the X trademark in social media.
Maybe he'll just have to call it Cyberspace X. He does seem to really like pushing X as a company name. I'm sure eventually we'll get Tesla renamed to Ground X.
TeXla, surely.
How ironic, given that 'x' is sort of the universal icon for closing out an application. The new icon hopefully signals that we'll soon be closing out of hearing anything else from Musk or Twitter ever again. Some day, maybe.
A letter individually considered, with only minimal stylization, will have lots of issues being protected and enforced as a trademark.
Regardless of whether it may be considered a 'nondescript mark', lacking distinctiveness, failing to function, etc., enforceability will be limited as the owner will not have an exclusive right to the use of the letter itself. Essentially, the distinctive character of the mark will be limited to the stylization of the "X", which... is also not very distinctive.
As mentioned in the article, the stylization of the 'X' logo is just the "Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X" Unicode character (𝕏). That would seem to preclude strong trademark protection on the logo itself.
𝕏 (né Twitter) could still claim a trademark on the name/logo's use for a social media company, but it couldn't stop (e.g.) people from putting the Unicode character on t-shirts and selling them.
The article says that Musk claims this is an 'interim' logo. The 'final' logo might be more distinctive and trademarkable, but of course that just raises the question of why the company needed to rebrand itself with interim art.
I'm no billionaire CEO, but if I was to launch a major rebrand, I'd try to have a new logo ready to go on day 1 instead of burning all my publicity on an "interim" icon. But what do I know, it's just the centerpiece of the branding.
Musk decided one day that this was what the new brand would be, and demanded it be launched the next day.
That's how he operates, and it's terrible.
First thing I thought of was the X water bottle company that many companies use to make their merch.
https://etsexpress.com/pg_home/m_index.php
What's with Musk and the letter X? SpaceX, names his kid X, now Twitter is also X?
I think he's been sitting on x.com since the Paypal days and he just wanted to finally be able to use that domain.
Partially, he bought it back from PayPal for an undisclosed sum back in 2017 iirc.
There also was that pre-Paypall company Xcorp or whatever
Putting X in stuff is such a 1990s thing to do. My guess is that it's generational.
He's Gen X so yes, it's generational (literally and figuratively).
Youngsters these days have had a trend for a while of using x in place of one or more vowels in online usernames.
Not sure how much that has translated into global mainstream for the bigger influencers online, but teenagers be teenaging still.
I think he may be the first person to try and buy a letter.
They do it all the time on Wheel of Fortune.
He's a 12 year old boy stuck in a 52 year old man's body.
My "hot take" (sorry I know I shouldn't publish these on Tildes) is that Elmo is really an actor first and foremost, who appeals to middle-aged white men who are likely to invest in his companies and give him money. He tries to construct this persona of "Elmo the Engineer" and a sort of Thomas Carlyle-style great man of history, when (as we can see with Twitter) he is not particularly good at solving problems (except fundraising problems). The X fetish fits into this – mathematicians tend to use x as a placeholder for an unknown (this trend was started by Arab mathematicians) and he thinks that it makes him seem more mathsy to name stuff after this.
He is the owner of X.com
I don't know much about this kind of thing - is there are chance a part of the strategy here is to eventually sell the Twitter name and logo to someone willing to capitalize on people who miss Twitter and want a return?
Doubt Musk will get his 44bil back but he'll have bought the organs of an established social media platform that likely won't be going anywhere anytime soon, while still owning the brand assets for the old platform to sell to the highest bidder.
Anyway, I suspect Zuck is waking up with a big smile this morning.
Unlikely. In the US for an assignment of a trademark to be valid, the assignment must also include the ‘goodwill’ associated with the mark.
Which I'm pretty sure is to do with the trademark carrying over to a product of 'substantial similarity' and that the assignment of the trademark would not be deceptive to a customer.
Now, who could possibly have a substantially similar product to Twitter?
Oh yeah. Let's stick with 'Unlikely'.
The short version is that no one who could afford that would buy it. At that point you could build your own, and the “brand” won’t mean jack just being sold to some random company
Do people still use twitter? At the risk of sounding like an old man
It's still the #5 most visited site in 2023, only falling one place to Instagram in 2022. So yes, it's still very much a centerpiece of the internet.
And for completeness, Google, Youtube, and Facebook are #1/2//3 respectively, in both 2022 and 2023.
This kind of highlights how rapidly the online monoculture drops off as soon as you leave Meta and Google. Only something like 20% of Americans had a Twitter account as of its peak of popularity. A fraction of those people actually engage actively on the platform, and a fraction of that fraction actually have their posts read by anyone.
It's weird because I literally don't know a single person who uses it. Of course I follow plenty of celebrities, influencers, journalists, etc. who do but nobody IRL.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and every other usual social media site (even Reddit) but none of my IRL contacts say they use Twitter.
I feel like this is a common anecdote but I could be wrong.
I find it really useful with live news, like the war in Ukraine. I found it really upsetting when they restricted the free usage, which killed most of my sources
I work closely with a number of small agencies that rely in-large-part on Twitter for networking and publicising, posting jobs and opportunities etc.
Often when people ask 'do people use Twitter' they're imagining it being soley hosting hot political opinions or mundane life sharing, but I really do wonder where these small online organisations will go. I imagine it'll impact me financially in the long run. I don't imagine they'll want to stick around if X becomes just Musk's ideological hub.
Yes, left leaning people dislike it but it is still really active.
I dislike the whole super app idea and the fact he thought it was a good idea after looking at WeChat is even worse.
Stick to Rockets please.Edit; Ok, apparently not that either.
Stick to founding cool stuff and supplying people the capital to pull it off!*
He better keep letting Gwynn Shotwell run SpaceX probably the smartest thing the guy has ever done.
Even more dumb: the country with the next largest number of Twitter users after the US is Japan, where LINE is huge. The typical notion seems to be that Twitter is the default social networking site for public things, and LINE is far and away the most popular way to communicate with people you know.
A rebrand and the recent rate limiting thing, are excellent ways to start chasing away more users there, when there was previously a little bit of an insulating barrier compared to how front-and-center Musk's idiocy is in the US. And nobody is going to choose his app over LINE...
LINE works much better in a more urbanized and interconnected society like Japan, too. It is ubiquitous there. I also think part of the reason it's so popular is that it is incredibly friendly and cute, which has big appeal in Japan/Asia and frankly here too.
Rebranding Twitter to x is pretty much putting a shotgun to the head of any notion that Twitter had any personality.
Call me crazy but this won't help nor hurt the-platform-formerly-known-as-twitter. Musk needs to fuck off to have any chance to recover, and even then it would be a long shot. But he needs to be the hero in his story and not the incompetent ketamine fueled boss.
Lol he actually wants to go the WeChat route (at least I think this is what this is). I hope it's a colossal failure. I already stopped using twitter altogether and can't wait for more people to do the same.
The great thing is WeChat super apps only really work when you have an authoritarian government hell bent on tracking everyone's payments, spending, transfers, and making sure not too much of the national currency leaves the country. It just won't work in the rest of the planet unless you get a bunch of different countries to enforce it (and I mean enforce, not just support).
Now, while I think that Twitter/"X's" days are limited, this ridiculous, sudden rebranding is going to leave hundreds-of-thousands of sites with "the bird" logo. Then I have to imagine that there's, for instance, linear television that does 15-30 second interstitial segments that are calls-to-action to all of their online presences
("You've been watching WABC news. Find us online on our website at... on Facebook... and check our Twitter @ WABC for the latest news happening in your area!")
which will all need to be redone. Radio, application about pages, product packaging, documentation, "Share to" menus. It's a branding nightmare.
I get strong X.org Foundation vibes from the new logo.
Seems Musk also went back to his root claiming back x.com, I guess this was long planned and the end goals are even odder than we can figure.
There are rumors that Meta might have a trademark on "X" when it comes to social media.
Edit: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87980831&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch
On a more joke-y turn of events, someone has already brought up a Mastodon instance under wayland.social: https://wayland.social/@compositor/110768798303454842, because of course.
Well, they evidently managed to cock that one up too, because it hasn't yet taken effect.
I can't help but read these headlines as "Twitter is now closed" as that is what the icon most typically represents. Quite fitting really... Watching the demise of Twitter before our eyes, punctuated with a "X" as the logo.
Twitter rebranding to X just seems like an odd move, like it just seems like Musk is doing changes just to prove he can. Twitter as a brand had so much brand recognition to it, now it's just all gonna be "X"?
Combine this with all the other recent changes, my question is, is he trying to just kill the platform, or just spur of the moment "why not" type decisions?
He's gotta be killing it and I wish it would just die already. But a one letter name is a terrible idea. Try searching for "How to join x" you'll never find it!
I'm sure it'll have to go bye bye soon, he did say they where down 50%; I'm sure all the "ad money" he gave to those big accounts isn't helping; Me and a bunch of other people I know who just browse twitter normally got suspended today, and it's been getting worse with suspensions recently. Maybe the end is sooner than expected.
Wait, he renamed it X Corp... like the company in the X-Men comics? So when you post will it be called X'ing?
Oh, I've got it! His goal was to destroy Twitter from the start and use the shriveled husk of a company to hide human experiments to make real x-men! Why else would he be removing the iconic bird and name from twitter, which would do nothing but make the company die faster?
I have 2 invite codes to BlueSky. If anyone wants one let me know :)
I'm interested! Some people I follow on formerly-twitter are talking of moving over there and I'd like to be able to follow them over.
Sent!
Thanks a lot, received and was able to sign up.
Sent!
I also have some if anyone else wants to check it out.
EDIT: All out of codes for now.
I wouldn't be opposed to taking one if you still have some.
I'd appreciate getting a code, since it seems a bunch of people I follow on Twitter are starting to move there.
If you still have one then yes please! I find social media fascinating as an outside observer rather than a direct contributor, and I would love to have a snoop around :)
This idiot really did get the force to buy the Twitter(after he signed, so not force more like made accountable for his actions) , cause the only valuable thing about Twitter it’s is brand recognition.
He paid 44 billion dollars for an email list…..
Ex twitter
Hahahahahaha.*
*I think the laughter for this should be enough but I will add I don't care for twitter and never have but watching the death spiral of a toxic platform is great fun.
Elon killing and replacing the twitter bird is ironically kinda what he is doing to Twitter...