“Protest and dissent is important,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the AP. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything.”
“Protest and dissent is important,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the AP. “The problem with this one is it’s not going to change anything.”
It was like this for a few months on Mastodon when Twitter did the same. At least spez doesn’t have any kind of celebrity status: I was able to go out with some friends last night and not a single person raised this topic. (A couple of them know what Reddit is, but none of them really use it much. And I’m sure no one in the group other than me knows who its CEO is.)
I just hope we have a good network of people here after this story fizzles out of the news. I’d be happy with kbin never becoming as popular as Reddit, so long as there’s a healthy bunch of curious people sharing and discussing interesting links.
I think reddit is more replaceable than Twitter. It seems the stickiness of Twitter has to do with the specific individuals on there. People don’t want to leave not because they get news about famous people, but because the actual famous people are on there. And the famous people don’t get the same status recognition on other platforms, so they want to stay their too. I can get my news from anywhere, and reddit was just the best tool to facilitate that. Lots of communities used Reddit, but you can build that community other places too, reddit was just a really suitable place to do so.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head a bit, Reddit users were for all intents and purposes anonymous - you’d find usernames you recognise but it’s among a sea of thousands of others, and the posts would all blur themselves into one. By and large, you go into a thread on a topic, not because Person X posted it, but because it’s a topic you want to read about, and you upvote a comment because you liked it rather than because Person Y posted it.
Twitter is all about who you follow and you curate a follow list that matches what you want to see, and by return you engage with the people who engage with you. If the people who you’d want to follow on a replacement for Twitter aren’t there, or nobody can or will engage with you, it’s a shitty replacement for Twitter for your purposes. This is especially true with Mastodon, whose model is that you only see posts from the follow lists of people already on your instances, so if it starts off sucky then absent some external force, it stays that way.
Let’s be real, fedi’s favourite subject of discussion is itself, and its second favourite subject of discussion is how bad all the sites fedi is supposed to be a replacement for are.
I’m hoping that dies down soon, one of the signs a site is doing well for users is that it stops with the navel-gazing shit.