Reddit kills awards and coins

https://lemmy.world/post/1442053

Reddit kills awards and coins - Lemmy.world

I just said this yesterday or two days ago when they announced they were going to start paying people for content, but it truly is amazing how Reddit can find another significant thing that will hurt them as a business and move forward with it.

It seems like they’d run out of things that could significantly hurt their business, they just keep finding something else.

Soon they’re going to be down to basic features, And they’ll be like hey look so hyperlinks don’t work anymore. And then that’ll be the end of the press release.

Their “business decisions” are insane right now.

It’s very difficult to see this procession of self-mutilation technologically in another light other than deliberate corporate suicide. Like is someone going to benefit if Reddit goes bankrupt? Is that what’s happening?

It’s all going to plan. A wealthy investor has paid a lot of money to shut down popular platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Knowledge is power and they can afford to, and have the incentive to keep us in the dark. Can’t have us poors rising up against inequality if we have no soapbox to stand on.

This has been my thought for a while, since before Musk even finalized the purchase of Twitter. They mentioned wealthy foreign investors backing him near the end of the deliberations, and it immediately clued me in. The working class, or the populous at large, have been using social media to unite and protest for years. Look at Iran and the anti-hijab movement. Look at BLM and how it exploded a few years ago. The ruling class are dumbing down education across the board, and limiting what we can even read from libraries. Disrupting our ability to communicate, share and coordinate is just another step. Why is Musk shooting himself in the foot? What business decision makes sense to gut every aspect of Twitter and then prevent outside viewers from seeing tweets? He’s killing it. And Reddit’s doing the same.

What was Twitter? An extremely popular and multicultural, border breaking venue for communication? What was Reddit but a (by and large) progressive and intellectual community sharing ideas that mattered? (On top of feel good stories or something to get your rocks off to.) Then look at Threads, where they explicitly stated they’re going to avoid politics and news? Not letting those topics be part of the discourse. It’s obvious.

Places like this are shrinking and are absolutely under attack.

But seriously, why aren’t we talking about this more? We’ve seen some fairly significant mass movements gain real traction on Twitter and Reddit in the past few years and, simultaneously and nearly instantly they are both quickly scrambled and made completely useless for that purpose.

Take a look at the Hong Kong protests. Twitter was a huge way to show the world what was going on. But also full of shills and bots sewing discord

Honestly at this point I can’t tell if I’m happy or sad about things like Twitter going away. It was full of horrible discourse and bots and misinformation, but also helped a lot of people. Back in the day it was insanely helpful for directing large areas affected by disasters.

I just don’t see the good uses of these platforms ever coming back from all these primadonna CEOs

Not to divert too much from your point, but Reddit was a progressive and intelligent community? Thanks for the laugh haha

Reddit is 1000’s of communities. It’s just as wrong to say that it isn’t progressive and intelligent as it is to insinuate it’s all one big community in the first place.

However, it’s really not a secret that reddit’s majority (at least used to) lean left harder than any other social media. Intelligent is maybe subjective and not accurate, but they were at least more progressive than most other social media sites.

That’s interesting, but there’s one problem: are they really that coordinated?
You’re talking about organizations that can put down $20bn to fund Musk’s takeover of Twitter. People with that kind of money absolutely have the resources and know-how to manipulate entire markets. It would be naive to believe otherwise.