It seems like the community business itself is dying. Not just Reddit, but other communities and forums are all in decline. I thought it was because of LLMs, but they were already dying before LLMs appeared. Though LLMs did accelerate the decline.
The business model where a company owns a public community and monetizes through ads and search traffic seems to have just been a failed model.
The value of a community comes from the conversations and knowledge that users accumulate for free. But when the content company lowers accessibility under the pretense of protecting that content, new members stop coming in.
Platforms try to protect their assets, but in doing so, they end up damaging the ecosystem that created those assets in the first place.
Cloudflare recently reported that the majority of internet traffic is bots now. It wouldn't surprise me if the vast majority of traffic and comments on Reddit is now bots. Those organic conversations you're having? Bots. Those arguments with annoying people? Bots. All those positive comments and stories about the latest product/movie/politician/party/company/country? Bots. The entire front page is most likely owned and controlled and paid for by the highest bidders.
I think people are becoming more cynical about "social" media. It's far less social now and mostly anti-social. Maybe the new term should be rage-media or consumption-media. Either way I don't need more outrage in my life. I say good riddance to social media.
Note that Cloudflare is the least reliable source for who's a bot.
says who?
I think it's not so much a problem with social media itself, but rather a phenomenon that occurs when consumption points converge. Anger is great for grabbing attention, and for newcomers trying to get noticed at a converged consumption point, generating anger or outrage is just the easiest way.
At first I thought it might be a problem with social media, but it seems more like a problem that arises when groups converge in one place. So these days, I just write my thoughts on my own homepage. That way I can write my own thoughts without getting angry at other people's posts.
What a lovely idea. Maybe I should try this.
Personally, if you need a moderate level of connection, there's something called the IndieWeb. Of course, sometimes you just need your own world without any connection at all.
Either way, I think creating your own digital garden is a valid approach. Thanks for agreeing with me, and have a good day :)
> The business model where a company owns a public community and monetizes through ads and search traffic seems to have just been a failed model.
A failure in what sense? That they can't pay the bills or that they can't see the VC-desired 10X ROI? Because my impression (as a layperson) is that the Reddit of yore could have stayed afloat from ad revenue + user donations, but it wasn't turning a huge profit. Anyone else remember the sidebar with the quota for Reddit gold for server costs? I don't remember it being short that often...
hmmmm, what I mean is this. There's been backlash about Reddit's ecosystem, but fundamentally they've transitioned into a business model that monetizes proprietary data for AI training. From that perspective, it's been successful. The problem, though, is that the quality of that data continues to decline. So it looks successful now, but I question whether that will hold in the future.
In other words, if openness and user experience are compromised, the real experts who provide deep, professional insights will disappear. Most experts have a desire for recognition. In Korea, we have a saying: 'Plankton and whales' meaning whales can only exist when there's enough plankton.
Anyway, I think Reddit itself is a successful exit. They sold their past data at a high price. But I question whether this is sustainable in the long run.
It's a difficult trade off: short term profit versus long term sustainability. Given the AI era, the timing seems right in terms of value. But separate from that, any new communities that emerge will likely suffer from long term value depreciation because of this precedent
Maybe I'm just caught up in the illusion of 'sustainability.'
It seems you're viewing this from the perspective of Reddit-the-company, and if your interests are to maximize profits then I don't really disagree with what you have to say.
I miss Reddit-the-communities, personally, whose interests as you observe seem to conflict with those of Reddit-the-company.
Good. The community business needs to die, and we need to return to actual communities. Since those are dead due to the previous transition to community businesses, it may take some time to recover.
Who will pay for these “actual communities”?
presumably people that pay for coffee in coffee shops, or rent league lanes in bowling alleys, or whoever brings a bottle of wine to a meetup at a friend's place, etc.