I used to live in a house that looks almost identical to the Baltimore one.

But if we just included the blockchain think of the shareholder value we could be generating. We could be decentralizing the blockchain with crypto NFTs in the cloud or whatever.

Can we get it to nuke your Facebook account too?

This has always been true of course but we used to have much faster turnover in social media sites. The current players have been around so long they seem like they can’t fail. But it’s not a coincidence that we’ve been riding a wave of cheap capital since about the time the current players started to dominate. Now that the free money tap is shut off, everyone’s scrambling to be profitable. The grow as fast as possible and never care about making money paradigm is over.

We’re basically in the ??? phase of “steal underpants, ???, profit” underpants gnome economic model.

I think we’re also seeing the ad model start to break down. It was always a Ponzi scheme. Everyone hates ads and goes out of their way to avoid them. If less and less people engage with ads, no one is going to pay as much because it’s not worth it. This forces companies to be more and more invasive in their data collection and ad targeting which erodes trust in the companies and degraded the user experience.

We’re seeing both these things converge and it’s shaking up the entire internet order.

Oh yeah, teenagers getting smart phones is a big piece of it. We used to joke about summer Reddit when all the kids were off school and everything got dumb and horny. And then that became the normal.

On yeah, teenagers getting smart phones is a big piece of it. We used to joke about summer Reddit being terrible with the influx of teenagers and then summer Reddit just became the normal

Outside of those issues, which does make it worse, the massive amount of users and karma system creates perverse incentives that make any real discussion impossible. Anyone trying to actually engage in discussion is drowned out and the top comments are just people trying to input the right combination of words to make the internet points come out. And if you dare go slightly against the hive mind, your dog piled with people trying to virtue signal harder than everyone else to collect the points. I generally agree with the hive mind and I still find it completely insufferable and uninteresting.

It’s not even just a political thing, go to the guitar subreddit and try to suggest wood makes a difference in tone and see how indignantly you get attacked.

Sure you can find niche communities that are better if you really dig but in my experience, they tend to just fizzle out or get big and succumb to the site wide problems.

Reddit was way better 10 years ago and this place is already starting to kinda feel like that. I would be very happy if we could stay that way.

Reddit is stupid but do we really want to be as big as Reddit? The quality has tanked in the past several years in large part because of how big it is. I think we’re on a good trajectory. Looking at it as a zero sum game where Reddit has to fail for this to be successful will only leave you disappointed. Reddit doesn’t need to fail for Lemmy to be good.

I would imagine, like most startups, a large chunk of their compensation is stocks and their valuation has gone up quite a bit. So what would normally be ~$400k total compensation has shot up but a large portion of it is theoretical.

The fun thing is that even if you’re not there, they have a shadow profile to track you