You can either have a healthy social network that is a positive experience for its members or you can make a significant profit off of a social network.
I would say “pick one” but there is no choice there for corporations and ultimately this is the reason every single corporate social network is buckling under its own bullshit right now.
It isn’t possible to maintain a healthy community on a social network unless there are lots of human moderators who actually care about their communities, and it isn’t profitable to have a bunch of human moderators.
THIS IS the hard problem of running a social network, the software is just a detail… it’s the moderation and community maintenance that are the actually hard parts and large tech companies have zero interest in addressing that (besides, handwaving with “AI will magically solve it!”). Reddit is a weird case because instead of farming out content moderation to low paid, traumatized workers in countries where tech companies can get away with paying dumpster wages, moderation was largely taken up by a network of volunteers… and the only way that model remains sustainable is if the company profiting off of all that free labor doesn’t push too far in its drive to monetize… and that line has been irrevocably crossed with upsizing the company and pushing for an IPO.
There is just no way reddit doesn’t atrophy as a place to find interesting, niche expert conversations at this point. It is fundamentally unsustainable and impossible if you step back and examine the macro-scale conditions that are at play. The only variance possible here is how quickly reddit collapses into just low effort memes and bots and in what spectacularly foolish fashion it does so.
You can either have a healthy social network that is a positive experience for its members or you can make a significant profit off of a social network.
I would say “pick one” but there is no choice there for corporations and ultimately this is the reason every single corporate social network is buckling under its own bullshit right now.
It isn’t possible to maintain a healthy community on a social network unless there are lots of human moderators who actually care about their communities, and it isn’t profitable to have a bunch of human moderators.
THIS IS the hard problem of running a social network, the software is just a detail… it’s the moderation and community maintenance that are the actually hard parts and large tech companies have zero interest in addressing that (besides, handwaving with “AI will magically solve it!”). Reddit is a weird case because instead of farming out content moderation to low paid, traumatized workers in countries where tech companies can get away with paying dumpster wages, moderation was largely taken up by a network of volunteers… and the only way that model remains sustainable is if the company profiting off of all that free labor doesn’t push too far in its drive to monetize… and that line has been irrevocably crossed with upsizing the company and pushing for an IPO.
There is just no way reddit doesn’t atrophy as a place to find interesting, niche expert conversations at this point. It is fundamentally unsustainable and impossible if you step back and examine the macro-scale conditions that are at play. The only variance possible here is how quickly reddit collapses into just low effort memes and bots and in what spectacularly foolish fashion it does so.