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.
The issue is really that it’s not really possible to do good moderation (i.e. censorship) at scale.
When the site is centralized, all users have to get the same basic experience. That means someone needs to decide for the entire world what’s allowed and what isn’t. It isn’t just whether you’ll have porn or no porn. It isn’t just whether you’ll have hate subs, or subs dedicated to violence. It’s where you draw the line at politics. Is sexism allowed? What if it’s just a sort-of sexist joke? Can people talk about Nazi ideology? What if it’s a sub for historians?
What makes something like Lemmy better is that each instance can make their own choices of where to draw the line, and other instances can decide whether to federate with them or not. That way an instance running in Germany might have different ideas of where the lines is when it comes to Nazi imagery, and sex, and violence. One in New Zealand might have completely different ideas. If you’re a user from NZ the NZ instance might match your tastes better, but if not, you’re free to sign up for the German one.
Subreddits basically acted like that in the early days of Reddit. Nobody is making anyone go to any subreddit no?
You’d still see them pop up in /r/all or similar spots that showed big posts from other subs.
Yep.
And lots of the users on your site will be idiots with think historians talking about Nazi Germany are Nazis and have a idiot extremist stance that any reference to Nazi Germany must be wiped from the history books or something.
The whole feddit thing awhile ago was wild. It’s German hosted, so abides by German laws, and people here accused them of being being biased/censoring content, but it was literally illegal for them to have Nazi content, but folks were spamming Nazi imagery as criticism of Israeli, and when the admin/mods took it down they were ‘pro genocide’.