Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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As much as I want to hate Reddit's management, this is not a move that will affect the average user too much. It's really bad from a privacy standpoint, but a huge percentage of people don't care too much about privacy (until it bites them). So this does (unfortunately) make ton of sense from a business standpoint.
Sure, why not? As the user base narrows, those who are left are the ones willing to put up with the most shit, so that is what they get.
Does it narrow? Let's be realistic, Reddit isn't the wasteland you want it to be.
Most of the subs I used to care about are more of a wasteland than I could've imagined. And come to think of it I'm starting to suspect that the demographics of social media participation in general are beginning to get narrower as well. After starting with a select few early adopters in the 1980s and then taking 30-some years to gradually broaden out to include basically "everyone" (in the anglosphere at least), people who are tired of the whole affair are perhaps starting to drop out or at least reduce their participation in significant numbers. I wonder how many of the people perceptive enough to leave reddit for one reason or another simply didn't find anything worthy of replacing it.
Yeah, this is no different from how every other social media platform operates. Unfortunately it's just the way these websites make money to stay "free for consumers".
The only (distant) solution I can see will be the fediverse, paid for by UBI and decreasing server costs (i.e. green energy and tech breakthroughs)
What years of neoliberal propaganda does to a mfer.
Okay so what I really mean by UBI is the point that humans have successfully created an autonomous supply chain that keeps everyone fed and sheltered. AI has taken the majority of necessary jobs that humans do not wanna do, creating a surplus of resources that (in a utopia) even if 1% is distributed among the population, could be more than enough to keep fediverse software running on a server farm powered by green energy.
I don't mean some fox news version of UBI that they think just means higher taxes and everyone becoming fat and lazy.
UBI is a compromise made by neoliberals to distract people from socialism. In practice, it challenges none of the contradictions of capitalism and will, given enough time, decay into neofeudalism. Does the idea of your life becoming an enclosure sound like a utopia?