Doc Edward Morbius ⭕So ... I've just logged in to Reddit for what appears to be the first time in five months, to set my small stable of subreddits dark.
(Few of those are in fact active, but hey...)
I guess I'll just have to remember to log back in in another five months to re-set them to public....
Some regrets / concerns with /r/Plexodus, which is specifically about moving to other platforms. I ... may revise that / add a pinned post regarding.
And I'll also note that amongst my reasons for not using Reddit much at all:
The tools suck. Mod, posting, discussion, all of it. I've written about this for years. And at some point even my dim brain has come to realise that sites / services which haven't changed glaring deficiencies in all likelihood never will. (Hello, Google+, Ello, Diaspora*, ...)
The most active sub, /r/dredmorbius (and yeah, that's what my avatar here represents, something ... I really should change) ... has itself been both all-but-inactive and highly Reddit-critical for 5+ years now.
The discussions ... just aren't useful. Some subs are good for generating suggestions / surfacing content, but I've generally got much better ways of doing that now. Mostly traditional research methods: reading books, tracking down bibliographies and citations, that sort of thing.
Uninformed / manipulative / abusive chatter ... #AintNobodyGotTimeForThat
(This from someone who's online presence dates to Usenet pre-Morris Worm.)
#Reddit #RedditBlackout #OnlineDiscussion #TheHuntForClue #Clue #SignalNoise
Dan York@dredmorbius I’ve been on Reddit for 14 years (and like you, have been online since before the “Internet” was a thing), and I do find value in some subreddits. For example:
- r/Starlink - as been a constant source of good info and experiences about what is going on with SpaceX’s Starlink service
- r/nissanfrontier - as a first time pickup truck owner, this has been HUGELY helpful to me!
In the midst of all the chaos there, I do still find some gems.
@danyork There's an inherent conflict between useful and large, where a further problem is that financially viable relies on large by way of advertising.
This leads to An Inevitable Spiral of Suck. Or #Enshittification as @pluralistic so eloquently puts it.
#EzraKlein has been looking at attention, media, and journalism this past year, with a notably segment this past February: "How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-tim-hwang.html
There's also A.G. Sulzberger interviewed by David Remnick at the New Yorker, with some powerfully-motivated argument:
I think there’s often sort of an imaginary person who wants to read these sources but is being boxed out of reading quality news because of the cost. I really don’t believe that is a real population in any significant number.
(In the audio version of the interview, Sulzberger compares this to the cost of a Starbucks coffee, though not, say, McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts.)
I'm increasingly convinced that rolling a basic news service including the local and national newspapers of record into basic Internet service, at rates indexed to local cost of living, is a preferable, viable, and necessary alternative to advertising-supported, subscription-based, or a'la carte media pricing. Actually, I'd like to see that extended to all published content. The per-household costs would be low, particularly against the $600/person annual cost advertising alone represents.
#Advertising #media #subscriptions #InformationIsAPublicGood #UniversalContentSyndication
@danyork Put another way: those subs are human shields for the rest of Reddit's WMD.