Reddit Was a Good Business

I joined Reddit in 2008. I remember it as a perpetual series of discoveries. Every time I logged in, I would learn something I never would have seen otherwise. New technology. New comedy. New ideology. New pornography. New ability to interpolate a unique string of characters related to current events and suddenly take control of a fresh memetic stream of independent media. New feelings, identities, behavior patterns, collective ethical architectures, and business opportunities. I was an isolated adolescent allergic to all the authority and social structure in my churchy suburban youth. Reddit was an electric neon string dangling from infinity and buzzing with the secular hum of freedom, sex, and reason. I grabbed on and didn’t let go for fifteen years.

We must remember it was always a business. It was an advertising marketplace operated for profit. It happened to operate at a particular scale which afforded small groups of key thinkers subjective judgements of the value of abstract concepts. For example, the value of community trust in an ad business.

RIP Silly Moose.

I am guilty of describing recent events as “the death of Reddit.” While it’s cathartic to type after watching a community so formative to my identity sink into the swamp of astroturfed parasocial media hosting the U.S. Congress thinks is the same thing as “the Internet,” it’s wrong. Reddit didn’t die, it just outgrew its ideals. What died was that stupid moose. Furthermore, I’m glad it’s dead. It lied to me. It convinced me to forget something very important that Frank Herbert tried to tell me a long, long time ago.

The Spice Must Flow

Most people just want content. Sad but true. People living in specialized industrial/postindustrial societies have access to infinite sources of worry restricted only by the awareness of imminent death. The role of computers in society according to almost everyone alive is to help them hang on to their jobs or to temporarily distract them from their jobs. You can put the secret truth of the universe on tap and the vast majority of people simply won’t care unless it helps with one of those two things. It’s human nature; getting angry and vocal about it doesn’t change it. You are entitled to try.

It is because we know we will wither and die that we construct apparatuses to care for us in our impending weakness. For this reason, businesses of a certain size either grow or disappear.

"The world is a business, Mr. Beale."

Steve Huffman is taking a lot of shit right now, and that’s fair. That’s his job. My friends, do not confuse the face of the business for the inherent nature of the business. It is composed of mortals. Worse, it’s composed of software.

September Is a Function of Connectivity

If you’ve migrated to a federated Reddit substitute this week, you may have already encountered ActivityPub’s biggest limitation. Defederation is a massive pain in the ass. When a popular instance decides to take its toys and go home, everybody who was federated with them gets kicked in the metaphorical dick while the network figures out how to heal. On a technical level, the reason this is so expensive has to do with the inherent limitations of client-server architecture, but that’s a topic for another day. Right now, defederation is being used the way it was arguably intended: to protect communities who feel threatened by massive growth. Before you know it, the natural forces of conglomeration that killed our beloved Silly Moose will turn defederation into the same political token that’s represented by today’s private API. The gnashing of teeth will echo across the internet as pseudointellectuals like me bemoan the “death of the Fediverse.” They will be as wrong then as we are now, and we will be old.

In these fleeting moments preceding imminent death, we must use technology to love one another.

  • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That’s a lot of words just to boil down to “people want things they don’t have to pay for”.

    Reddit being a business means nothing. Every fucking thing is a business. Lemmy is a business. If you don’t think so, you’re a fuckin idiot.

    Instances aren’t yet, but the devs of software itself are 100% looking to make some money sometime, whether that’s from Lemmy itself (which it 100% will be now that it’s growing), or from being able to put it in their CV. Linux is open source but Redhat makes billions on their flavor, but mostly the support for their flavor.

    The devs, if they’re smart, will leave it open source but turn it into an upstream/downstream kind of thing and offer paid support for communities. It could be relatively small for the community but would add up over a thousand instances. If instances want to scale they’ll need support. Profit will scale as labor scales. Paid instances will get newer stable baselined versions before free instances.

    And before anyone says that it’s open source, this won’t change. It will just change the release schedule. Paid instances will be like redhat with support. Free instances will be centos where you get everything a little later and no support.

    • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The devs, if they’re smart, will leave it open source

      They have no other choice since Lemmy uses a Copyleft license.

      Not everything is created for profit. GNU/Linux and the Free Software movement were created to give people freedom. Starting those things didn’t make Richard Stallman rich. Another example is Debian - an operating system that is fully Free Software and developed for free by the community.

      • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Reddit was open source at one point too. Before it was rewritten and made closed source.

        I’m just saying that one day it’s more likely that people will want to profit from this. And there are ways to do that without compromising the vision.

        • Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          So they had to rewrite it, I see. That makes it harder at least, but you are right that it is still possible then.

          There is nothing wrong with making profit if it’s done in an ethical way.