I didn’t know Discord also has a weird CEO?!
A big part of the issue is that there is a general assumption that the execs are making the companies MORE profitable, as opposed to the reality that they are trying to make them profitable at all.
Enshitification happens because things start awesome and free to attract users. Once there is enough base they start to change things such that they can eventually make money.
The only way to avoid this is to self fund and stop assuming Web apps are free.
The only way to about this is to self fund and stop assuming Web apps are free.
It’s possible to make web apps that are close to free, but that isn’t how developers work these days. Everybody has to use JavaScript, Kubernetes, Docker, and a 500-person developer/infrastructure team. When in reality, 99.999% of websites could be made without JavaScript, hosted on a single VPS with SQLite.
A couple of my side projects run on 1GB VPS that cost $10/month, and they would easily run on a 512MB VPS if those were still offered.
Everybody has to use JavaScript, Kubernetes, Docker, and a 500-person developer/infrastructure team. When in reality, 99.999% of websites could be made without JavaScript, hosted on a single VPS with SQLite.
There are legit reasons to use k8s and docker even on a small project. It ensures that your dependencies are isolated from those of the host OS. Gone are the days where you have to worry about multiple different services clashing because they all want to use the same ports, directories etc by default or different versions of the same service.
I’m also done being called at 2AM in the morning because the security team decided to automatically update all servers and forgot we were on the exemption list. Now our install is broken and nobody remembers what the original configuration was. So we spend 8 hours in a “war room” trying to unscramble our eggs.
Docker makes everything infinitely more stable and it’s not that big of a deal to get running. It’s better than the old days of controlled chaos.
None of those things require Docker or Kubernetes… You can use containers + cgroups without adding complexity on top.
I don’t necessarily disagree. There are many ways to achieve the same or similar results. But docker seems to have become the popular option to the point where services are offering docker configurations out of the box. Meaning I have a standard, officially sanctioned way of doing what you described. Someone has already figured out how to properly containerize what to me is only a dependency and I can focus my efforts elsewhere. The option to get my hands dirty is still available, but it becomes a choice.
Turns out, pretending the entire Internet is equal to 5 apps from mega corps (largely fueled by pretend money) wasn’t the best long term play.
Who would have thought?nobody thought. that’s a big part of the problem-- late-stage capitalism doesn’t plan beyond this quarter’s profit statement.
This has become the prevailing opinion for most of the tech-savvy folks that I know, but it’s gaining traction with a wider audience.
Having steeped in corpo-climate for two decades, it’s naïve to say that the C-Suite has ever maintained a realistic perspective on the business that they run; but it is baffling to me that corporations like Reddit have completely lost sight of their actual product - a clearinghouse of perpetually donated content - and seem to believe that their platform cannot be easily duplicated, or made obsolete nearly overnight.
It’s exciting to be an insider as new paradigms like the fediverse become more widely known. If the last week is any indicator, there is a non-zero chance that ultra-capitalist hubris will be punished.
Whether their hubris is punished or not is of no consequence to me. In some ways the ultimate karma is waking up every day to find out we are ourselves. I’m more concerned with building cool stuff for us to use than with anyone getting what I think is their comeuppance.
seem to believe that their platform cannot be easily duplicated, or made obsolete nearly overnight.
As much as it pains me to say it, I think they are right. The value in social media is in the size of their user base and I don’t see a mass migration to another platform really happening unless reddit itself went completely offline for several weeks. People do not like change and Reddit will continue to be just “good enough” despite the API changes. If anything their decline will be extremely gradual since moderators will have lost most of their third party moderation tools. And niche communities can probably keep ticking along without them for the most part.
I don’t mind if most of reddit users stay there, we just need to attract the valuable ones. Back on reddit I wouldn’t have welcomed the entirety of Twitter for example, too many bad contributors.
Contributors also want their content to be seen and communities with 500 subscribers aren’t all that attractive. So I don’t expect anyone to abandon the mainstream options. The most we can hope for (and all I’m really asking for) is cross-site posting and participation.
Go ahead and visit Reddit, just be sure to post/comment on on the fediverse as well.
The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
It’s nice to see an article which finally states the obvious truth–that Reddit wants the third party apps to die so they can have a captive audience to advertise to.
The pricing Reddit is charging is obscene and would mean that Apollo would be forced to pay $20 million per year to keep the app running. Other popular third-party apps would have to pay similarly outrageous costs. It’s clearly a blatant attempt to run them off Reddit so the site can force users to use its first-party app instead.
I wish all articles covering the debacle but it at clearly as this.
They have something else in common: Bots.
And then there’s one more thing in common: they get paid for bot activity just the same as organic activity so they’re incentivized to under-report the problem.
Before the IPO happens, they have to rid themselves of third-party clients so that the app store numbers can’t be extrapolated to verify site-wide user activity.
they have to rid themselves of third-party clients so that the app store numbers can’t be extrapolated to verify site-wide user activity.
I must be having a pre-morning-coffee dumb, but how would this extrapolation realistically work, in your opinion? Those install numbers aren’t exactly… exact, from what I understand.
This is what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”, and it’s part of the reason I’m on Mastodon and Lemmy now.
Discord is a tough one, since those communities aren’t open to search indexer and archiver crawls, losing that would extinguish a lot more of our collective knowledge.
Hopefully dedicated server teams branch to matrix or another more open platform.
@Rentlar when information is not open to indexing and search, I don’t think it qualifies as knowledge. I hate that aspect of discord
Discord is like the worst source for knowledge anyones has ever used as such.
I regularly find myself searching for stuff where there is only a small community and when they use discord and you want to look something up, you can straight up look into the sourcecode because it helps just as much. It is really devastating to be in this situation and I would really like for people to just get rid of discord and use a real wiki or forum for this kind of stuff.
lol dude this is flat out wrong. Being able to ask active communitites things is useful to a lot of people. Have you ever even heard of IRC???
What do you think happened before google had everything indexed?
It’s useful to chat it out with people sometimes especially when you are all collectively centered around a single topic.
I’ve learned mass amounts of things through IRC and often times they don’t just give you the answer they give you clues to help you figure it out.
Discord will be similar for many people. It’s not necessary to archive every last bit of information. It’s OK to talk to real people who enjoy talking about said topic and letting them guide you real time.
Oh yeah, it’s always cool to ask randos if a mod also runs on Linux only to be told by 3 people that they don’t know and then to have someone change the topic.
Wouldn’t want that in an indexable thread in some forum where you might find it by it’s title and also see answers directly and not wade through 5 weeks of 17 topic only to find out that no one got it to work.
And yes, there was a time before search engines, but you cannot possibly suggest it was better than now. Now we have better tools and should use them.
I’m not saying it’s better my point is there is shit loads of that going on since forever. It’s not hurt anything and some people prefer to chat it out because searching can also get you a load of nonsense. Guarantee you got your answer. It’s mostly super niche communities. If properly run they have searchable forums of a FAQ.
For me, the problem is not discords real time chat functionality (e.g. like IRC).It’s that communities are using it as their only source of information and getting rid of wiki pages and support forums.
There are many open source projects and communities whose documentation lives entirely in Discord. This makes finding information much harder as search engines don’t have the information indexed so you resort to asking on chat and hoping someone replies or using Discord’s horrible search functionality (it’s very basic and has a poor UI)
The thing with IRC is that noone ever used it as a reference. It’s the equivalent of a water cooler, no meeting minutes are made and people treat it as such.
Before google there was usenet and mailing lists and their archives and also forums. And web rings. There were index pages (how yahoo made its money) and, *shocker*, web search, in particular altavista. It might not have all been searchable but it was discoverable and you didn’t need an account much less an invitation to read a howto.
And frankly speaknig finding stuff on altavista back then was often easier than now on google, with all that SEO-infested garbage floating about and google ignoring advanced search syntax more often than it respects it.
Lol dude no. There was practically nothing online back then. I was around back then learning linux and programming. IRC was a great place to go otherwise you had to actually read books and RTFM. The wealth of information that we have today wasn’t even close back when alta vista was something you used. I had a job where I specifically had to search things and input data about it and there were like 5 different search engines offering all manner of different results. It was horrible.
IRC had massive amount of people and chatting with them was helpful. Discord offers that. Your beef is just that it’s not searchable and takes way more engagement for you to try and figure it out.
That’s just one place, but it’s very useful for a lot of people. IRC is still around and decent amounts still use it and have all along. Those communities that decide to be discord are probably so freakin niche that even if you just log in day 1 ask your question it probably gets answered in detail in 2 seconds.
I’m wondering if a Co-op model would work for some of these alternatives. Then they would be less reliant on a single owner/developer system, there would be additional support for some of the businessy components, and there would be a built-in groups structure for resolution of issues.
I’ve been watching the formation of a co-op Etsy alternative, and I’m very interested to see how that goes. I think it’s fine to complain about corporatization, but I think it’s also crucial to build and support other models at the same time.
I am not a member of this Artisan’s Coop, but am considering it.
@mem_somerville_kbin @hedge My insurance company, Amica, is a mutual company; I get a substantial rebate every year.
Liberty Mutual is also a mutual company, but I hear they never issue any rebates, that management thinks it is more fun to spend any extra money on themselves.
Cooperates and mutuals are not a magic alternative to rapacious capitalism.
