This isn’t just bellyaching. There are serious questions about Reddit as a business. Reddit isn’t profitable. Reddit has never been profitable.
Yea that's the problem with capitalism. Something doesn't have to be profitable for it to be good. Sure, reddit is astroturfed af etc but it can be a useful forum for niche stuff.
Besides, it's generating money for other sites as a content aggregator.
Under capitalism you have to have something be profitable or be subsidized by some megacorp.
Decentralizing from reddit and making an open source alternative like Lemmy is the path forward. There isn’t anything uniquely innovative about Reddit that can’t be easily copied. The site itself is divided into subcommunities. Why do they all need to be linked under one domain and owner?
Reddit’s original innovation, if you can call it that — and they really weren’t the first anyway — is that it takes the old school forums, which were all the rage in the 00s, and makes them way more efficient to interact with via an algorithm which takes user input (votes). It’s not rocket science, it was obviously the next step beyond the simple sorts of old school forums.
Today, the benefit of Reddit is that it has the capital required for consistent uptime, resilience against DDoS, etc. but even that is solved by services from Amazon and Microsoft and Google…
The value is in the content, even we continue to go back to it by appending reddit to google searches as it’s the only way to get anything valuable out of that useless amalgamation of ai generated detritus.
One thing that could be interesting is to back up a sub’s entire history and add it to a lemmy instance then move a community including the history. I don’t know if that’s possible or not, seems like it should be. Content piracy essentially.
Anyway I see a general trend towards decentralization of the internet which is long overdue. Many of the services we were happy to outsource to the capitalists have become so shitty and/or expensive thanks to greed that more and more people are self hosting their own social media platforms, media servers, etc. It will be interesting to watch how the next 10 years unfold.
Now you got me thinking, it’d be interesting if Lemmy made a migration process like that to graft an entire subreddit into Lemmy. Even better if you make an account verification process that allows users to link their Lemmy profile with their Reddit profile, maybe by PMing some Lemmy bot account on Reddit.
I imagine Reddit would use every legal mechanism possible to prevent that sort of content piracy. Not that it can’t be done, but if I were a smol beans admin of a Lemmy instance running on Raspberry Pi’s and Red Bulls, I wouldn’t stand a chance against that honestly.
During the rise of social media and content aggregators there grew a misconception that crosstalk was dependent on centralization. That if you wanted a convenient sort of “deck” of the various forums, chat, social updates, videos, etc. that you enjoy, it had to be all under one company’s umbrella.
The irony being, the early internet was explicitly built around that concept. E-mail could be sent from any domain to any other domain, web browsers could access any website, they weren’t restricted to just the e-mail addresses associated with that company or just websites hosted by the company that made the the web browser. We did it before, we can do it again.
There’s a lot of good niche shit on there, don’t forget about the smaller communities. Things like car repair, woodworking, piracy knowledge, Linux etc.
But there's just no way Reddit NEEDS to be unprofitable. Lemmy is not exactly profitable, but because it's not bloated it can run on very little money. And it accomplishes the same as Reddit. Why can't we have nice things?
reddit relies on user generated content, if you make it paid there will be a fraction of the content there is currently.
Communists don't understand that.
I can understand it very well. For-profit ideology has crippled public infrastructure in almost every country implementing neoliberal policies. Enshittification is what happens when profit-seeking takes priority over everything else.
Also, everyone on hexbear is a communist or at the very least left-leaning.
And liberal death-cultists don't understand that not everything needs a profit motive at all costs, including the lives of those who toil for it but will never get to own it; see, I can do it too
woah woah buddy don't go pokin the 'bear, unless you want an inbox full of full-throated explanations of what communism actually is, vs whatever your opinion might be. I'll restrict my diatribe to explain that one thing commies understand very well is the profit-motive based policies of todays world.
The difference between you and I is probably a pretty small one, really. One of us has read a bit about what communism aspires to be as a system from the folks who tried to make it happen, and the history of propaganda and outright war against its very existence.
Mister, my English is not anywhere close to decent enough to understand most of the things you and the previous commenter said. I am not a communist. That's true. But I just didn't know (or didn't remember) it was a communistic community. I didn't mean to say that communism is wrong or anything like that in a communistic place. It would be ridiculous to do so, at least without serious training. And I could just make a mistake about you all too. Oh and if someone tries to spam me, report it is
oops! well your english was good enough to fool me into thinking you were a native speaker, so take it as a compliment
Oh and if someone tries to spam me, report it is
Spam? No, you will get lots of responses from commies in here for insinuating "they don't get something" is all i am telling you, and a bunch of pissed off bears calling you a jerk for being ignorant will not be enough to convince a mod to remove them for you.
I think mostly our difficulty is the language barrier. Welcome to lemmy! Have yourself a good day.
Thank you. Actually it's really nice that you're not being aggressive to me. There are a lot of people here (I think most of them are liberal) that are being aggressive when someone just has a different opinion. It's not ok. Anyways have a good day too
Well yes and no. Afaik some distros do use alternative core utils (Alpine is one of them I think?) so it's not correct to call ALL of them GNU/Linux. Though when it comes to desktop, everyone uses GNU so in that case it is GNU/Linux
I don't think so. They don't seem to knowingly collaborate with intelligence or any kind of fed (beyond what they publicly do). If they did, they do a bad job of communicating between each other, or they wouldn't have made it public knowledge Eglin Air Base is the most Reddit addicted city.
Yea that's the problem with capitalism. Something doesn't have to be profitable for it to be good. Sure, reddit is astroturfed af etc but it can be a useful forum for niche stuff.
Besides, it's generating money for other sites as a content aggregator.
Under capitalism you have to have something be profitable or be subsidized by some megacorp.
Decentralizing from reddit and making an open source alternative like Lemmy is the path forward. There isn’t anything uniquely innovative about Reddit that can’t be easily copied. The site itself is divided into subcommunities. Why do they all need to be linked under one domain and owner?
Reddit’s original innovation, if you can call it that — and they really weren’t the first anyway — is that it takes the old school forums, which were all the rage in the 00s, and makes them way more efficient to interact with via an algorithm which takes user input (votes). It’s not rocket science, it was obviously the next step beyond the simple sorts of old school forums.
Today, the benefit of Reddit is that it has the capital required for consistent uptime, resilience against DDoS, etc. but even that is solved by services from Amazon and Microsoft and Google…
The value is in the content, even we continue to go back to it by appending reddit to google searches as it’s the only way to get anything valuable out of that useless amalgamation of ai generated detritus.
One thing that could be interesting is to back up a sub’s entire history and add it to a lemmy instance then move a community including the history. I don’t know if that’s possible or not, seems like it should be. Content piracy essentially.
Anyway I see a general trend towards decentralization of the internet which is long overdue. Many of the services we were happy to outsource to the capitalists have become so shitty and/or expensive thanks to greed that more and more people are self hosting their own social media platforms, media servers, etc. It will be interesting to watch how the next 10 years unfold.
Now you got me thinking, it’d be interesting if Lemmy made a migration process like that to graft an entire subreddit into Lemmy. Even better if you make an account verification process that allows users to link their Lemmy profile with their Reddit profile, maybe by PMing some Lemmy bot account on Reddit.
I imagine Reddit would use every legal mechanism possible to prevent that sort of content piracy. Not that it can’t be done, but if I were a smol beans admin of a Lemmy instance running on Raspberry Pi’s and Red Bulls, I wouldn’t stand a chance against that honestly.
The servers would just have to be run out of a country with robust piracy laws or just where this kind of bullshit is unenforceable
During the rise of social media and content aggregators there grew a misconception that crosstalk was dependent on centralization. That if you wanted a convenient sort of “deck” of the various forums, chat, social updates, videos, etc. that you enjoy, it had to be all under one company’s umbrella.
The irony being, the early internet was explicitly built around that concept. E-mail could be sent from any domain to any other domain, web browsers could access any website, they weren’t restricted to just the e-mail addresses associated with that company or just websites hosted by the company that made the the web browser. We did it before, we can do it again.
off topic but thank you for teaching me the word detritus today.
ew... imagine wanting to keep anything from reddit
There’s a lot of good niche shit on there, don’t forget about the smaller communities. Things like car repair, woodworking, piracy knowledge, Linux etc.
But there's just no way Reddit NEEDS to be unprofitable. Lemmy is not exactly profitable, but because it's not bloated it can run on very little money. And it accomplishes the same as Reddit. Why can't we have nice things?
I'm curious about this, how can I help support lemmygrad/hexbear?
They have a Liberapay, check the donate link in the page footer.
ahhh, didn't see that before, thanks!
Communists don't understand that. Also, if you want something like Reddit to be profitable, just make it paid
reddit relies on user generated content, if you make it paid there will be a fraction of the content there is currently.
I can understand it very well. For-profit ideology has crippled public infrastructure in almost every country implementing neoliberal policies. Enshittification is what happens when profit-seeking takes priority over everything else.
Also, everyone on hexbear is a communist or at the very least left-leaning.
Oh I didn't know hexbear is communistic. I thought it's German or something. Now it all makes sense
How dare you call us Germans. Gross.
I'm sorry. I just saw this community only a few times and haven't seen the description yet
Excuse me.
Hexbear is not German. Hexbear servers are located on French soil and we're all French libs.
Lies
Hahaha The part about all of us being French liberals is debatable.
But our servers are located on French soil, true story.
And liberal death-cultists don't understand that not everything needs a profit motive at all costs, including the lives of those who toil for it but will never get to own it; see, I can do it too
woah woah buddy don't go pokin the 'bear, unless you want an inbox full of full-throated explanations of what communism actually is, vs whatever your opinion might be. I'll restrict my diatribe to explain that one thing commies understand very well is the profit-motive based policies of todays world.
The difference between you and I is probably a pretty small one, really. One of us has read a bit about what communism aspires to be as a system from the folks who tried to make it happen, and the history of propaganda and outright war against its very existence.
Mister, my English is not anywhere close to decent enough to understand most of the things you and the previous commenter said. I am not a communist. That's true. But I just didn't know (or didn't remember) it was a communistic community. I didn't mean to say that communism is wrong or anything like that in a communistic place. It would be ridiculous to do so, at least without serious training. And I could just make a mistake about you all too. Oh and if someone tries to spam me, report it is
oops! well your english was good enough to fool me into thinking you were a native speaker, so take it as a compliment
Spam? No, you will get lots of responses from commies in here for insinuating "they don't get something" is all i am telling you, and a bunch of pissed off bears calling you a jerk for being ignorant will not be enough to convince a mod to remove them for you.
I think mostly our difficulty is the language barrier. Welcome to lemmy! Have yourself a good day.
Thank you. Actually it's really nice that you're not being aggressive to me. There are a lot of people here (I think most of them are liberal) that are being aggressive when someone just has a different opinion. It's not ok. Anyways have a good day too
completely offtopic: Just remember, it's not Linux, its GNU/Linux :)
Well yes and no. Afaik some distros do use alternative core utils (Alpine is one of them I think?) so it's not correct to call ALL of them GNU/Linux. Though when it comes to desktop, everyone uses GNU so in that case it is GNU/Linux
Do they make money under the table from various mk ultra-esque propaganda funds?
I don't think so. They don't seem to knowingly collaborate with intelligence or any kind of fed (beyond what they publicly do). If they did, they do a bad job of communicating between each other, or they wouldn't have made it public knowledge Eglin Air Base is the most Reddit addicted city.