Cannibal take seems accurate, kinda how it feels looking in too. Not glad about any of these people in charge, but at least they hurt each other right now.

Most certainly if this grows big enough corporations will join in if only to market whatever products to the userbase.

What you can do is to work on supporting/curating instances which don‘t want this. Try to see what kind of people are in charge and what their reaction would be. For example I‘m also on an instance (http://lemmy.dbzer0.com/) created by a r/piracy mod who I‘m fairly certain wouldn‘t federate with corporations or let his instance be controlled by them.

Lemmy.ml which I‘m also on, probably not positive with US companies, but might federate with Chinese companies.

What makes all this not a big concern for me is how easy it is for me to drop an instance and go to another one, but I‘m also not attached to my users in general, hopefully we can get some export/import functions for cases where we need to abandon somewhere (unless it exists and I haven‘t seen it yet?).

Lol critical reacting to this is a weird vertigo moment for me. He hit some good points there, if only he mentioned fediverse it would‘ve been perfect.

I think Reddit will be kept alive by sycophants and bots for a long, long time. However, to me it is dead and gone right now. I‘m not even following links to it anymore, only through archives, can‘t get more dead than that.

You just got me to go on Twitter for the first time in a long while to see if he had said anything on this whole fiasco. So here is what I found from him. Someone asked about it and he responded “no comment” and then when he got challenged on that:

I resigned in protest 3 years ago to push the company to ban Hate communities. I have nothing to say.

Feels like the API stuff or monetary loss wouldn’t be a the issue here, but he had an understandable disgust with some of the communities that were on Reddit and the inaction on them. Most likely wouldn‘t support fediverse (which also contains hate communities) and is still on Twitter unbothered by Musk and all that mess, which I think is fascinating considering how many more Q crazy MAGA racists I see now whenever I follow a Twitter link.

I‘m not even his target audience (I‘m further left), but I‘ve seen some clips of his show and he‘s funny, would be neat to have a sort of “Downfall of Corporate Social Media” episode featuring spez. I‘d watch that.

Now things click into place. Friends with Musk, probably didn‘t enjoy reading negative things about him on Reddit so much so he‘s imitating him to get all left-leaning or in general free thinking people off his platform, only permitting these standardised liberal right of center views. These two guys straight up want their own little propaganda echo chamber that some groups don‘t fit into and this is how to get rid of them.

I hope so much the fediverse takes off, they don‘t deserve to be rewarded for this behaviour. There needs to be a degrowth of these platforms to a point in time where we don‘t even talk about it. Unless referencing it‘s death, who talks about Digg? That is what I want for Reddit, Twitter and those that destroyed them.

All lies, they‘ve straight up been removing mods like they want to cleanse them from the website and forcibly reopen their subs, NO voting on it! It‘s “reopen of gtfo”, that‘s the message they are sending.

This moral appeal to democracy is transparent and laughable, they must think Redditors are completely brainless to swallow that turd, and maybe he is right seeing those who cheer for this.

I love you for explaining this so clearly, I was actually so confused about this I may or may not have misinformed someone else, oops.

Oooh I consume these types of anti-labour news a lot, so I can provide at least a few examples of open disdain for unions (or those they represent).

https://www.wcbi.com/barstool-sports-co-founder-settles-over-anti-union-rant/

Me too. Just so I can crush it and reassert my dominance.

Mask off indeed, more clearly it couldn‘t have been said. Authority and dominance seems to be the root of this struggle of CEOs against those lower in the hierarchy.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/20/business/nightcap-ceos-behaving-badly/index.html

An article detailing a few more such cases, which a few of them I had heard about on Reddit before. I doubt we‘ll hear of it as much in the future. I would highlight this nugget:

Her response was, more or less: Shut up about the dang bonuses and focus on your jobs. (She later apologized in an email to staff, saying she was sorry her message “seemed insensitive.” (A sentiment that would probably go a bit further if she’d subbed “was” for “seemed,” but whatever.))

https://fortune.com/2022/12/29/bernie-marcus-home-depot-woke-people-socialism-labor-shortage/

"People just hate capitalism now. Because of “socialism,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times published Thursday, “nobody works. Nobody gives a damn. ‘Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work—I’m too lazy, I’m too fat, I’m too stupid.’’

Great view he has of the working class huh? How nice of him to put it all out there so nobody has to wonder.

If you continue the article, you can find even more shining examples of this condescending mentality right out in the open:

Last year, online mortgage company Better.com fired more than 900 employees after CEO Vishal Gard publicly accused hundreds of staffers of being unproductive, not working long or hard enough, and therefore “stealing” from the company and its clients. Much of the criticism has been aimed at younger members of the workforce, who earlier this year were referred to as a “very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice” by BlackRock President Robert Kapito.

Cryptobros are gross too (I even like using Monero and before that Bitcoin but fuck me do I hate these Crypto CEOs with a passion!)

https://cryptoslate.com/kraken-ceo-lashes-out-against-some-employees-for-being-bad-fit/

If you look at his tweets, he entertained debate for a bit because he is openminded, but then “back to dictatorship it is” since they need to “help billions of people” … by making billions off scamming people with shitcoins I guess.

https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2023/06/05/jeff-blau-to-class-b-office-owners-take-what-you-can-and-run/

“It’s like a social movement,” said the 40-something, who struck a resemblance to his online identity: a cartoon brown-haired guy in a sweater vest. “Our next generation is very against going to the office. It’s a big issue that’s a lot bigger than a lot of us realize.”

Oh no, a social movement!! Scary! Workers have opinion and say them on Twitter! He had to stop tweeting at them that WFH sucks cause they said mean words. :(

Funny to me is how many of those articles are on websites you‘d think of as serving business interests, and yet they seem critical of CEOs anyway, maybe because there is no way you can twist their actions or words to the positive. At least not for me.

See another one which is less about words and more about perceptions: https://www.business.com/articles/broken-pedestals-the-dark-sides-of-popular-ceos/

I went for that cause it‘s got one quote by Fuckerberg that fits nicely with what I am presenting in this comment:

“You can be unethical and still be legal; that’s the way I live my life.”

How well put! That is exactly it, no ethics or ethics they do have and actively choose to ignore. Our leaders, ladies and gentlemen.

I could go further here and give examples in German too since I am aware of those as well, and politicians jump on it too to appease their sponsors I guess, but at least here our unions are representing workers too so it‘s less unipolar torrent of shit falling down, we can sling it right back up.

Oh wow thanks for searching it up I could have done that too, not sure if I trust Renzo on that attribution though, he was a wild guy who played fast and loose with quoting people just like I am doing lol.

Anyways, I don‘t blame you for falling for it and I did too and then clung onto it until the metaphorical frog was boiling. Reddit started with a genuine spirit of being “the frontpage of the internet” and managed to capture this spirit of community and collaboration so well since the original founders, at least those on the dev side like Aaron, genuinely meant what they set out to do.

This is a problem that is big now, but I think can also be solved with maturing the technology in the future.

Right now I have multiple accounts for multiple bubbles, but I can easily imagine some app or website that can congregate the content coming from multiple instances and choosing the appropriate account for it to post/view with.

Thus allowing one to access bubbles that have shut each other off in one central place. Unless they do it by completely blocking sign ups in which case they isolate themselves willingly and that is also good in a way to have as an option.

If I can imagine all this as a random system engineer, surely some developers with a passion for this and open source collaboration etc. can too.

I read right up until I encountered the word duty and then my now so familiar disgust overcame me and I had to back out again. I‘m just going to quote I think it was Bakunin (I have a bad habit to save quotes I like without the author lmao):

Oafs and weaklings! Every duty that they would like to impose on us we will furiously trample under our sacrilegious feet. Every shady phantom that they would place before our eyes, greedy for light, we will angrily rip up with our daringly profaning hands.

They could pay me now and I wouldn‘t to back, and if my habit to type re… into my browser doesn‘t go away soon I‘m gonna block it on my router for myself. A place I went to for 10+ years and all I feel now looking at it is disgust, well done spez!

Nice article though, didn‘t pull any punches.

That current model IS capitalism, the big companies are big precisely because they follow these profit > sustainability tactics, if they didn‘t follow these tactics they would stay small and potentially get gobbled up by the bigger companies. The company I work at is one of the biggest for it’s market worldwide and the tactic is basically buying up the competitors. So it‘s part of their regular business to buy out some cute small family business and enshittify it (ty lemmy for teaching me this word) by integrating it into their “business processes”. Which means often layoffs and hiring freezes and as they succinctly put it “making more product with less labor” (also raising prices to get more profit for less product).

I mean, I say all this knowing it‘s as pointless to do as trying to suck up a tornado with a vacuum cleaner, even if I managed to find the right words to convince you and some other readers of what I see here, we‘re still likely to perpetuate the system out of a lack of feasible alternatives until such a point where the planet can‘t bear it anymore.

Sorry, now I went completely off into my usual doom mindset. It‘s all good, maybe you are the correct one and some friendly people will overcome the greed and consolidation processes I see as inherent to the system and save us all by only allowing small companies or something.

Companies in general are just designed to make more profit, that‘s it. All their decisions make sense from a business perspective, they are just shitty for us from a human perspective. This is why we need decentralised platforms which aren‘t inherently profit seeking.

Funny also how every time someone criticises capitalism someone shows up attributing all technological advances to capitalism. No. It‘s the people, under any economic system there will be inventions, it is small minded to think people only innovate or work out of greed, if that were so the entire open source just wouldn‘t exist and volunteering wouldn‘t exist.

Good to have you, I think you made a good decision. We‘re early adopters of a technology that can make all of these social media kingdoms obsolete and I’m excited to be here for it!

Wow I had never heard of it, but it was interesting to read. A shame what this endless greed for more capital does to online communities.

I don‘t think I‘ll be able to trust any website that has a corporation behind it with anything at this point. Which is why this whole fediverse thing is exciting, devs who give their knowledge to projects like this and mods and others who work on it are all heroes to me.

I have considered it, but I didn‘t do it cause I had bad experiences with police in my life leading me to think of them and more broadly the state as useless at best or harmful at worst. I don‘t want anyone to shoot the dog, I just want it to be quiet. I tried communicating that with my neighbours, but that didn‘t work either as they said they would try to train it or something and just didn‘t.

Either way, I found some coping mechanisms like my noise machine, going to the office to avoid WFH (I like it, but not here!) and noise cancelling and in a year I want to move again and this time I plan to spend a few hours at any apartments to check for loud dogs first.

The new spez company strategy will work because it has been tried and tested in many dictatorships in human history. The elites and workers (mods) in institutions (subs) critical to the state (company) regularly need to be purged of dissenters (protesters) to signal the strength of the dictator and make a coup (change in leadership) seem impossible. This lets those who are against the current course of the state lose their will to fight and pursue other avenues like flight (why I‘m here). It also gives a feeling of safety to those who don‘t care or support, since they need to see less of us dissenters.

It is similar to a coup but from the top, so it‘s more like “consolidating power” phase which dictatorships do go through. Dissenters get removed and replaced by willing servants until the platform is more spez and less “The People”. Meanwhile he pretends like somehow the mods are the actual dictators or some shit to make all this palatable to those that still use Reddit, which in my cynical view they will eat up. Reddit is dead and done for anyone who values actual community over ads.