I'd exchange Reddit and X. The rate at which X is going downhill right now just cannot be beaten by anything.
Twitter(/X - such a bullshit crappy name) is the Kmart of web 2.0 companies. Just a husk of what it was and in a massive free fall decline.
It's basically a matter of a branded domain name and Mastodon will take over.
Governments and entities like the New York MTA are going to want something they control, rather than something that falls to the whims of some billionaire.
The tech for Mastodon is there. You just needs orgs that care less about reach and who trust people to come to them (like the New York MTA).
Agreed. I mean I never expected Elon to be smart but good god is that dude an idiot. Everyone reading this could 100% do a better job in his shoes.
If I had bought Twitter back then, I would have just done absolutely nothing and raked in the cash.
Yeah it's pretty hard to screw up as badly as he did, it's actually kinda impressive. You need to be an unhinged egomaniac to pull off what Musk did.
That's assuming that his goal is to run a profitable social media company that people respect, enjoy, and that makes profit. However, he's loaded af and can easily pay for the best consultants in the world. Considering that, I think it's possible that he might be reaching his goals, they're just not what we assume they are.
I've seen varying levels of this general idea that Musk somehow is still playing some 4d chess and the downfall of twitter is the plan, but it's really not. Twitter was already a niche generally. I only know like 2 people IRL who were on twitter, compared to basically everyone on Facebook, for example, and you can check the stats, twitter commanded way more mindspace than it actually had.
And even if the master plan was to kill twitter - so what? This won't stop anything. There is an argument to be made that all of the journalists and what not coalesced over there, but that's just not going to stop happening. It's like if someone wanted to kill instant messaging. "HA HA ICQ, this time I've got you!" Except, it's not the platform that's important, and it's easily replaced.
Even if Elon's plan is "let's federate" it's still an inane way to do it, but this seems like a more likely outcome.
Hanlon again for the win, simplest answer is he's not nearly as smart as anyone pretends.
I feel like it's unfair to include TikTok as it had a clear headstart by being a dumpster fire since the very start.
Does this reflect how the platform is actually doing or do we just like the circlejerk of wishing they would fail? Because everything I've seen says Reddit has been completely unaffected by the changes made and they're still getting more user signups, engagements and interaction/posts than ever.
Tik Tok also seems to be growing strong.
Twitter is a genuine laughing stalk and is pulling major shit.....but everyone still seems to be using it regularly.
if you have been back to reddit, they might have growing numbers (probably due to shitty practices forcing you to use their app instead of mobile browser) etc. but the quality of discussions and the amount of bots just reposting the same comments skyrocketed.
I mean it's a huge site, it won't die, but if you look at it that way, Facebook is still alive, do you have a desire to spend time on that site though?
Pleased to say I haven't been back to Reddit (except to scrub my entire history there to nuke my account). Reddit quality going completely down the toilet is something seen long before these changes were made. It's really sad to see that companies aren't forced to make better products because people will put time and money into these shit platforms regardless.
yeah I already noticed the downhill trend before the API changes but after it really went into a nosedive, expectedly the power users posting good shit just left, so rage bait reposts are the trending things.
I have been back to reddit to check things out from time to time. The quality has definitely degraded, and their changes to not seeing NSFW stuff without logging in or using their app has me visiting less and less.
The comment section is still nice, but I just don't see the quality it once had.
We can take a look at the comment count on major subreddits over time. Using the top 5 most commented listed on Subreddit Stats, and then using Social Rise to see comments per day (go down to "Graph of" and click "comments").
All except Starfield show comments cratering at the beginning of July, and they're not coming back. Obviously, Starfield is a special case given the release of the game. AITAH was also just starting to pick up and then had its jugular cut out. Across the board, there looks to be a 3 or 4 times reduction in comment rates.
Now, perhaps the site is still OK among the more niche subreddits. That'd take a lot longer to analyze. But it's clear the big traffic drivers are not pulling people in anymore.
While I overall agree this seems to be the case at first glance, I do notice that august there’s a huge drop that correlates with school starting up again. Probably need to compare to previous summers.
Edit: looks like it's still pretty huge even accounting for that
Good to know, i was having trouble on mobile with it. Thanks!
I'm glad I left that site. They just view us all as little addicts and have lost any semblance of caring about what made reddit work in the first place.
Only a good 0.1% of reddit actually "creates content" with the rest having only engagement via comments. A good 99% of those also don't do anything but lurk.
The people that make the content are also the ones more likely to switch to alternatives.
It's an engagement loop so while the amount of signups and accounts is unchanged, there is simply less content to keep people around and to monetize.
the burden of proof lays in the eye of the beholder or whatever the quote is. i'm not a lawyer.
The burden of proof lies in the eyes of the Christian god! And as a fellow Muslim, I can say nothing about it, but He might speak through me and say that Reddit became a place without much new content.
I don't save sources in case of future need for references. I haven't written a thesis on the matter. It came up in a few articles in my tech news RSS feeds. You're welcome to not believe me and I would readily consider contrary information anyone else offers it.
Reddit is driven by search traffic and the results got a lot worse since a lot of good posters quit. They lost the content but not the users yet, I think it's just going to take a long time before they truly see the damage in their traffic statistics!
The google-Reddit search got really screwed up when the private subs numbered 7-8000. I’m curious if there have been any lingering effects.
Yeah Reddit just became more like Facebook which is disappointing, but not a dumpster fire.
Twitter is a radioactive dumpster fire that's spawning mutant fire rats. There's really no comparison.
I just have a hard time believing this when the_donald started on reddit. The site has been an incubator for right wing actors for years. Even the infamous Stormfront recognized the opportunities for recruitment there years ago.
No, but we are on lemmy so we obviously don't care how well billion dollar companies are doing profit wise.
I mean, TikTok was already bad to begin with but what did they do to deserve a spot next to Twitter? Did I miss something? Surely they can't do worse than trying to make their paid only, right?
Yeah TikTok is bad but it also works as expected.
Yeah it's the worst algorithm ever, basically spyware, bans LGBT+ people, etc. But that's quite frankly how it always worked.
Bans LGBT+ people
My fyp is full of bipoc LGBTQ+ people? Twitter on the other hand tries to feed me right wing news sources and disinformation all the time. There's a spectrum here and TikTok is far on the other side.
Also to be frank the algorithm is by far the best out of any company with a "for you" algorithm. It blows pretty much anything else out of the water entirely.
Go watch a few truck or bbq tik toks and watch it backslide. Anything that is vaguely a “manly hobby.” You’ll be surprised how quickly Ben Shapiro winds up in front of you.
I watch more tiktok than I'm proud of, and YouTube is actually way worse for this. Youtube I've actually started using some private browsing for things that I think might turn to Joe Rogan or whatever because on that platform you're like 7 videos from "i'd like to check out some camping videos" to "here's how to protect yourself from the woke mob in the apocalypse which will happen next Tuesday courtesy of Ben Shapiro."
The thing that worries me about tiktok is they're too good at this. It would honestly be extremely easy for them to tip the scales.
I have a friend who actively uses youtube for only audio books on literal marxism and they still give him ads for fucking prager U and shit
People rightfully call out TikTok as a spyware because of their ties with CCP, but how exactly are other social media giants and big tech any different as they too have ties with the CIA, FBI etc
Basically, most social media reads out everything that is openly accessible, like cookies, address books and contacts, etc.
TikTok goes deeper, it has been watched going into protected files, trying to break encryptions (sometimes being successful).
You need to source things instead of just spewing bullshit you hear on the grapevine.
Damn, didn't know about this, but, what if Big Tech has also been doing this, but with more perfection, without getting caught?
TikTok is big tech.
But your question is highly speculative and kind of comes across as bad faith.
how is it speculative that big tech steals your data. Google, Amazon, microsoft, every single big internet conglomerate sell your data. Its a fact, and is widely reported.
Don't we have a different tiktok than the Chinese one? There are specifically US folks in charge of the non China Tiktok. Wasn't one of the security heads a former US state security agent?
Why do you think it's more spyware than any other big tech mobile app or social media?
And based on my experience getting hooked so fast into while I didn't want to touch it, it seems it has the best algorithm. I'm off it now, like all other social media expect for fediverse, but I can testify on this
just because they haven't rolled out the jackboots doesnt mean they haven't deployed some.
Idk, I find it's algorithm very easy to control compared to every other social media, its much easy to manipulate. My fyp is full of gay people so idk what you mean by the second statement.
Unity is hors-concours, they've already won this race. None of these social networks have managed to fuck up so badly as to fully destroy their reputations like Unity did.
I don't know. Twitter running rampant as a nazi platform and safe harbor under Elon's tenure/stewardship has been something else. That platform was always a mess/ bad but not to the degree Elon has cranked it up to. It's full blown mania/ hysteria on that platform.
Edit: I miss the days of Twitter when I could've used it as my own personal news ticker/ use it to follow sports and my favorite sports reporters. It's shocking but there are actual uses and use cases for Twitter. It used to not be social media trash.
An I the only one who thinks this is exactly what he wanted? Hated seeing the western social media trying to block disinformation, so he buys it and let's the right wing extremists have free rein
I don’t think that’s what he wanted initially.
Chinese authority doesn’t like twitter. Tesla was incentivised by the Chinese gouvernement to come to china and grow the EV market there. Tesla had a lot of very nice and attractive loans and business opportunities. China alone is now 32% of sales for Tesla. Muskrat buying twitter and driving it to the ground serve the Chinese interest, and I would not be surprised to hear there was an agreement to something along the lines of “you buy this, you do shit with it, we close our eyes on our loans” from the Chinese.
For the nazis, it’s all about the Tesla factory in Texas. Texas is quite red, when COVID happened and California was closing down Tesla factory in Fremont, Shit-face was opening his new factory in Texas. Democrats were all in for the Covid measures. Going strong with anti-vaxxers and republicans gained him favors in Texas, to be able to use his slaves, sorry employees despite the pandemic.
Down the line, I think this psychopath is only doing what all billionaire does: using his money to make more, more, more, completely ignoring the consequences. The only thing that drives him is making more money. Not with Twitter, but with using twitter to get what he wants…
It's remarkable the similarities between William Randolph Hearst and Elon. Hollywood can finally make its citizen Kane remake/ sequel.
They tried to apply a per install fee and make it retroactive for all games using the Unity Runtime. Meaning games made with Unity even a few years ago who didn't agree to this would be charged each time someone uninstalls and reinstalls the game.
This is the second time they have tried to make retroactive changes, by the way, and they even deleted the part of the TOS that prevented retroactive changes.
It's really just one of many things they have done in the last few years
To list out a lot of the many things: They've done forced RTO which is pretty internally disliked, fired a ton of people lately, a bit ago the CEO publicly said anyone who doesn't prioritize monetization are "the biggest fucking idiots", they bought an ad company known for making malware, and they keep getting in bed with military contracts including Lockheed. Oh and they cancelled their example project game Gigaya which I'm still bitter over
Just a minor correction, they actually merged with Iron Source, they didn't just buy them. That means there was a good bit of board carry over, which means Iron Source management is now making decisions at Unity.
Crazy how TikTok don't even seem so bad anymore thanks to the other two completely fucking imploding.
I think Twitter will be the largest fall.
Like, they went from publicly traded household name, used by news sites everywhere... to... well...
I know lemmy hates Reddit but X is easily taking the cake here. Do you think Elon is respecting ANY of the policies around old user data? If you were EVER on Twitter, Musk is all up in your business.
I hesitate to speak for everyone... Okay, now I will. As ex-Redditors, we absolutely hate Reddit because we knew it in the past, and we also know it now. So authoritatively, fuck Reddit and fuck Spez.
(I know not everyone here came from/cares about Reddit)
I don't hate Reddit. I love what Reddit can be.
I just can't support support its current trajectory. If they backpedaled settle of the recent decisions I'd return tomorrow, because after spending 3 months here I've found zero communities with enough activity to justify leaving the "everything" feed.
I hate reddit, but I always hated reddit, it was always a cesspool. back in the day before the recent admin drama it was really horribly bigoted, and when lots of people jumpped ship recently, the community got real racist real fast
I feel like unity is the most likely to die. Their users are way more likely to switch to an alternative than people using reddit
Unity alternatives are also way more known than reddit or twitter alternatives
But the alternatives aren't as developed. Godot still isn't great for 3D projects and Unreal is Epic and also has royalty fees like Unity tried to add.
Unreal only has a 5% fee on games that made over 1 million USD
Unity wanted to add a 0.20 USD tax for every download after you made 200K USD 200K users(which changes depending on how many downloads your game has and which plan you are using)
Units pricing method could have been easily exploited, game developers would have to pay for people pirating their games, if a free to play game reached those requirments, it could cost them more than the game made, giveaways would cost game developers money and all unity games would have to collect data
No, I'm well aware that Unity's model is fucked up.
I'm just saying that I don't consider Unreal a valid alternative, especially as it's owned by Epic who have shown themselves to be far worse than anything Unity has done already, and there are no other 3D engines as good as Unity. I called out Unreal also just because people are saying that Unity shouldn't charge any fees as they think fees are unfair, but then happily recommend Unreal.
Not saying necessarily to keep using it, I'm just saying it's not as simple of a solution as just switching for a lot of devs.
Well, Tiktok demotes china critical accounts and promotes china friendly ones, people who tried it came to the conclusion that's it's roughly by the factor 10 so they aren't even hiding it!
The enshittification of TikTok: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Very relevant to all of them
What did TikTok do recently? Reddit and TwittX I know about. Could have added Unity to the mix, even if they’re not social media.
Everything fucked up western social media dose but time two and with a grain of chinese propaganda!
YouTube is already far ahead on that front.
I remember when any ad over 15 seconds was skippable after 5. Now, if I turn adblock off, I may receive dual minute-long unskippable ads, even less than 5 minutes apart on an hour long video.
It's actually more egregious than cable TV
