If I was a VC, I would want a glut of ad-sensitive, lowest common denominator users. Think your Aunt on Facebook, or your sister on VSCO, or your young nephew on TikTok. I don’t think those people are necessarily attracted to the overall community attitude(s) currently on Reddit.

I would never call the ex-Hacker News/Digg Redditors smart. But.

Those users do have certain proclivities that make them EXTREMELY unattractive to investment dollars. Strong interest in anti-mainstream topics, including the 3Ps (Privacy, Piracy, and Pornography) doth not good ROI make. This exodus of users and elimination of features, outside looking in, seems like a misstep. I’d be skeptical.

Same. Block is a key feature. That said, I’m actually fascinated at how many furry communities there are. You’d think blocking c/furry would take care of 90% of the problem, but who knew c/MidCenturyYiffsOnAnEamesChair had such a dedicated following.

I was going to say… the only times I ever used Reddit search, it just prompted me to question why I was wasting my time, then googling “xyz problem statement reddit”

Others have basically captured it, but my read is a massive change in the overall risk profile held by venture capital firms. The time of reckoning has come, and it’s time for everyone’s (or at least VCs’) favourite three letters: ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

The last twenty years, we’ve seen this sort of spray-and-pray model, where 99 bad investments could be offset by 1 “unicorn”. The risk appetite seems to have shifted largely because 1.) there’s a higher volume of early stage concepts (so there’s more bad ideas), and 2.) there’s either fewer unicorns, or the unicorns that mature are ultimately less valuable.

Crunchbase put out a good analysis of the current trend of global venture dollar flow:

The Party’s Still Over: The VC Downturn In 6 Charts

You can read news from various outlets - some say it’s a post-pandemic correction. Some say it’s because labour is too expensive. But the bottom line is that VCs aren’t willing to spend money on “users-in-lieu-of-revenue” like they once were, and I honestly don’t blame them. There were a lot of really, egregiously stupid ideas coming out of SV, and their wax wings melted. sad_trombone.mp4

Adam Kotsko summed this entire phenomena up nicely:

For me personally, I never saw too many powermod-driven issues on Reddit (not that they didn’t occur, just that I didn’t experience them in the communities in which I participated).

One solution was to create a fork; lots of “r/actual___” or “r/true___” communities were born this way. To Little8Lost’s point, I think this will be even easier on Lemmy.

Bingo. The Reddit app wasn’t designed for UX; it was designed as an IAA engine for their ad network. I know we’re tired of the “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” adage, but reading through the Reddit for Business page, you realize that’s what you are:

https://www.redditforbusiness.com

Having lived in that whole gross mobile attribution / AdMob / CPx world for a hot minute, I’m especially appreciative of platforms that don’t all immediately race to the bottom. Cory Doctorow calls it “enshittification”. Good times.

Super shilly comment incoming, but YouTube Premium is maybe the only subscription I pay for (other than Game Pass) that I think is worthwhile. I was also blown away by how much I like YouTube Music. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully anticipating the platform to race to the bottom and go to complete and utter shit, but for the time being, I think it’s solid.

I commented this on the other thread, and reading your comment, I think you’re 100% right. The IPO dream right now is to try and tap in to the type of casual audiences that YouTube and Twitch maintain, and the best way to accomplish that is a dedicated fleet of power users that generate content, are barely compensated, and do 99% of the marketing for the platform.

Others have touched on this, but isn’t this a good thing? You should NEVER quit without recourse - it makes you ineligible for unemployment. Scenarios:

• you want to leave, you tell your manager, they resolve the issue, you stay and are happier

• you want to leave, you tell your manager, they don’t resolve the issue, you engage in getting fired, you get fired, you file for unemployment

• you want to leave, you tell your manager, they don’t resolve the issue, you engage in getting fired, you don’t get fired, you collect wages for little/no work while job hunting

• you want to leave, you don’t tell your manager, you engage in getting fired, you get fired, you file for unemployment

• you want to leave, you don’t tell your manager, you engage in getting fired, you don’t get fired, you collect wages for little/no work while job hunting

• you quit, you get nothing

It’s like a weird game theory problem, but IMO quitting is the WORST choice. Sure, the employer could challenge the unemployment claim, but many don’t, and those who do don’t typically win.

Top 100 anywhere is INSANE. So proud of Memmy. Happy to be here. Congrats Gavin!

Good write up.

You know… I don’t agree with it, but I totally get it. For people outside of the community, many people have INTENSE relationships with their watches. I think they tie part of their identity with certain milestones, and when a watch is also so tightly bound to said milestone - certain jobs, certain incomes, certain life events - any perceived cheapening is seen as a direct assault to their identify.

It’s like… your dad handed down his Speedy when you got married. You bought your first Speedy when you made partner at your law firm. Whatever it is, now there’s this perceived slight that some 15 year old now owns a bastardised version of something you achieved and they didn’t.

All of it’s made up. It’s jewellery. I’m sure the Hayeks are sitting in Biel/Bienne laughing their asses off. But still… my dream watch is the VC 222, and when they did the rerelease, I was kinda like - wtf, guys. Even though I have zero affiliation with the original 222 and will never own one, I tricked myself into an emotional attachment with it.

I agree wholeheartedly. Whenever some is doing app design, I always tell them - just because the PNG submission recommendation is 1024x1024px, there’s only one time people will ever see it at that res (in the store); after that, it gets scaled down as small as 120x120 for Home Screen use (or 58x58 in settings).

There’s a reason boring, flat vector design wins - fast, universal legibility.

I think what Reddit fails to realise is that there’s a large contingent of their base that aren’t Reddit users… they’re Apollo/RIF/Boost/etc. users. They’re a population seeking a very specific type of UX which Reddit either can’t or won’t deliver. People didn’t willingly use their trash can fire of a site when Alien Blue was termed - they migrated to Apollo.

I’m WILDLY impressed with Memmy so far, partially because it’s answering the user pain point above - as a casual user, I don’t want to get into the Fediverse weeds. I want an incredible streamlined experience that’s reliable, fast, and with a responsive developer.

Can’t wait for Memmy to blow up and to use it heavily over many years.

Is Sobe still for sale? I can’t recall the last time I saw it anywhere.

I mean yes, but also… ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I see shit like this in EVERY community. Cars. Dogs. Guitars. Coffee. PC Parts. Booze. If there’s any thing where the core components of the hobby have variable pricing and scarcity of the “best” stuff, the most dedicated to that hobby will find a way to invent hierarchy. Humanity is beautiful and gross.

TL;DR - you should. We collectively need to reassess how we tackle this kind of behaviour.

We have weird partitions for things. It’s sort of clear the division isn’t really state v. state or country v. country, it’s urban pockets versus rural spreads. You can make inferences regarding accesses to resources, education, meaningful work, etc. as you will.

The political delta between Northern/Southern California, Eastern/Western Colorado+Washington, Upstate/Downstate New York, is FAR more significant than USA/Canada.

Alberta would slot in easily into the US Southeast. Ontario would slot in easily into the US Northeast/Northwest.

I worry for Canada (and the US, and many countries), because people are more or less the same everywhere (despite their grandest objections), and are quite susceptible to the same rhetoric and influential activity across the board.

Yeah, for $1 (between 9.99 and 10.99) this is just a price decoy / asymmetric dominance exercise.

Wiki

Core will go away (or at least deprioritized from a marketing perspective) once they’ve successfully transitioned everyone off GfG.

I have been an Unsplash power users for years. Also love Pexels! Both amazing platforms.

I love this game so much, thanks for kicking off <3333333

This is a really good oversight (see: insight, overview, etc). Honestly, for anyone actually interested in this stuff and what makes the internet tracking/advertising machine tick, take some of the HubSpot Academy’s courses. There’s definitely other courses out there, but the HubSpot ones are all free, and the topics aren’t hard once you get immersed in it.

Plus afterwards you can put the faux-certs on your resume and knife fight with the 20,000,000 other adtech people that just got laid off.