cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37870004
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
Yes I think you’ve put your finger on it there. This obsession with being able to see EVERYTHING in some kind of omega feed.
Like I was showing a friend lemmy and he was like “how can I see ALL the communities [in the whole world]?” or “what if there are duplicate communities?”
He didn’t get that it’s GOOD that you don’t automatically connect to every single lemmy server, or that it’s actually fine if two servers have the “same” community. They’ll just end up being their own thing.