Yo for real, what’s up with all these social media sites literally shooting themselves in the foot as we speak?.
Youtube planning to antagonize adblock users and limiting video watching, Reddit killing itself with
bureocracystyle and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.Yup, the timing is just… funny.
What a way to start July 2023, with centralised social media platforms destroying (or attempting to destroy) themselves.
It’s a good thing that everything has its alternatives.
YouTube: Odysee, though I dislike the fact that it is connected to blockchain.
Reddit: Fediverse
Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok: Literally anything else.
I find this more mildlyhumorous than infuriating. I’m looking forward to a new era where every news article no longer includes a string of embedded tweets. :) As a non-twitter user, this certainly doesn’t encourage me to bother making an account.
I get it’s funny if you like don’t really have a use for twitter, but it sucks in some ways because twitter is one of the few ‘global’ platforms. I can follow and keep up to date with artists over in Japan because a lot of them use twitter and that’s accessible to me. Remove twitter however and their main posting platform defaults to something like pixiv or niconico…which isn’t very open and receptive to anyone who isn’t a Japanese speaker. And I’m sure anyone from the west who has their head in more Chinese or Korean spheres is having the same issue…and vice versa. I know apparently sites like tumblr aren’t very popular over in Japan because of how it works and at least from what I’ve seen in the last few days, that’s becoming a lot of artist’s emergency second platform
I never understood why they embedded tweets into articles instead of using screenshots. I figured it was a terms and conditions thing from Twitter. But it leaves them prone to a tweet being deleted or, you know, what’s happening now.
it made sense when it was making it trustworthy, harder to fake a link to the original than a screenshot
It’s honestly extremely humorous. I made a Twitter account in 2015 because it was a requirement for a emergency management crisis communications class I was taking for work. After the course ended I didn’t log into it again until Musk bought Twitter. I knew it was going to be a hilarious dumpster fire and wanted to watch it melt down in real time. It hasn’t disappointed. But this most recent thing about the rate limits is so hilariously dumb I figured I’d seen enough. Deleted the app off my phone yesterday.
As you point out, Twitter’s death is going to mean a huge improvement to journalism. Someone on Lemmy mentioned yesterday how nice it is to not be on Reddit which had gotten to be like 80% Twitter screenshots. Twitter and Reddit diving like this at the same time is going to be a net positive.
Not sure how good it is that the only remaining Social Networks are owner by Meta (I don’t count YT as a Social Media as I never use it to engage in comments there).
Edit: Ig there is tiktok now, too. Still it makes Metas slice of the Social Media pie bigger.
But Meta doesn’t own social media. They have some social media platforms that are finding direct, open-source alternatives to their service…for FREE. The days of uncontested, corporate-controlled, AI-manipulated social media have come to an end.
Great for the fediverse! I suspect that these changes to twitter and reddit are mainly a response to the growing hunger of generative artificial intelligence companies who are hoovering up data, basically for free. Change is never easy, but i’m optimistic that this is the break open source and federated communities needed to start taking off. I hope people can see the value in decentralizing and help support these open source projects financially so that they can really start to scale. The reality is, scaling is expensive, and we all need to help where we can. These Ai companies will not hesitate to suck up federated data also. If we want to live in an ad free world its gonna cost us.
Question: Can’t AI companies just as easily Hoover up language content from the fediverse? Or is it something that we just kind of accept but don’t care about since it isn’t eating into fediverse finances?
yeah, fediverse platforms not only have no measures against scraping, they willingly send out content in a computer-readable way. kind of the whole point of federation. and we can’t really stop them, even if we clamp down on federation we’d only hurt ourselves.
besides, up until the latest change twitter was still easy to scrape (and now the problem is that even registered users can’t see that much of it), and reddit is trivial to scrape even without the api. yes, that includes new reddit too. there’s very little you can do against scraping in an open space, especially against someone wielding the full power of chatgpt, and even less so if you want to keep your site accessible to blind people.
(and now the problem is that even registered users can’t see that much of it)
People actually already found a way around the rate limit. Opera GX even implemented a fix in their desktop browser.
lmao, you know you fucked up when a browser pushes an update specifically to circumvent your rate limits
but yeah, if opera can do it, i highly doubt that openai can’t easily do it either. the ai concerns are posturing (and probably a personal grudge, given that elon was a founding member of openai until he got kicked out), the real issue is somewhere between incompetence and attempted monetization.
For Reddit API calls are near infinitely less load on the servers than scraping.
i’m actually kinda interested how that could work. a regular user using “near infinitely less” resources than a scraping engine sounds like some absolutely stupid design, either on reddit’s or the scraping engine’s side
When using the API you just request what you’re looking for. With scraping you load everything repeatedly.
I would assume it’s even worse for the fediverse considering the limited resources we have to run the servers. I wonder how the devs/server owners will handle this.
I don’t think (completely wild guess here) AI content crawlers should have any more impact than the dozens and dozens of search spiders that make up must of my own site’s traffic.
The impact was magnified for Twitter because it generates so much new content every second. That wasn’t an issue when Twitter had a nice, properly cached API and it shouldn’t be an issue for fediverse instances going forward because we have RSS and caching and we’re not so stupid as to turn those off. Like, what kind of moron would do that?
I don’t think (completely wild guess here) AI content crawlers should have any more impact than the dozens and dozens of spiders that make up must of my own site’s traffic.
The impact was magnified for Twitter because it generates so much new content every second. That wasn’t an issue when Twitter had a nice, properly cached API and it shouldn’t be an issue for fediverse instances either because we have RSS and caching and we’re not so stupid as to turn those off. Like, what kind of moron would do that?
to be fair, that argument operates under the assumption that elon wasn’t just lying to cover up that he didn’t pay his google cloud bill. the amount of users who view and create that content still create a much higher load on the servers than AI scrapers that want to read it once and save it somewhere for training
The issue comes when those AI bots start commenting and posting here. From what I understand, bots are a large reason why Beehaw keeps defederating from instances with open registration: bots are difficult to moderate without good moderation tools.
My pet theory… Though I don’t believe it.
Musk and u/spez are playing 4-dimensional chess. The end goal is to increase freedom and user choice. By slowly destroying their respective platforms, people are driven to the fediverse, the idea of centralised platforms is tainted, power is shifted back to the user and long term everyone is better off.
It is a nice thought experiment…
This but I don’t think they are on the side of the people. For both of them it could be personal or part of some secret deal, though if it’s the latter at all, it’s probably both. Both got a lot of disrespect through those platforms, and the freedom of movement of information on both platforms were making things more difficult for entities that were previously dominating the information game.
I just wonder what their next play is if I’m right. I suspect Reddit will walk back their changes to try to kill off these decentralized mass social media sites to bring the discussion back to the centralized ones where they can at least influence the discussions with admin access to the platform.
This, but they’re doing it to destabilize social media.
Because it’s breeding too many pesky socialists?
I’ve thought this too and I wish it was true. Tank social media to promote federation and decentralization.
That has been his goal since he got forced to actually buy it rather than just boosting the stock so he could make a profit, which like most of his antics was really the only goal (publicity and money)
what’s the end game tho
Honestly with him it’s probably just “because I can and have made some money in the process”
Is there any evidence that he has? All I’ve seen points to a ridiculous amount of interest.
It’s possible he’s still trying to make money, yeah. I’m just saying in general he does things because it’s maybe another chunk of change for him.
Not having to break the contract with his investors who are some very powerful people. Better to say “the libs killed it because they don’t like me.” And then get bankruptcy protection.
Owning the libs.
Also the Saudi Investors would be happy for Twitter to end.
Actually they love twitter. MBS uses it to track his people.
The Future
Come on Cohagen, you got what you want! Give these people air!
That quote sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I’m embarrassed.
Since I googled it up, I may as well put the link… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANa9Oku-JM
Musk will be dead by then, so which one of his 200 kids will be running the empire?
Twitter and Reddit both dying at the same time was not what I expected in 2023
who had two social media companies dying on their bingo board?
They have never properly turned a profit - and relied solely on VC money. It was kind of “obvious” from the beginning - this house of cards of completely free services is increasingly unstable.
Both could have been profitable overnight if they wanted to. Reddit doesn’t need 2000+ employees. It’s a simple forum, led by volunteers. It is definitely possible to run it profitably on ads and volunteer premium services.
Spez is simply a moron. Reddit doesn’t need multiple chat/messaging features. It doesn’t need NFTs. It doesn’t need to be tik tok.
Oh yeah, I completely agree with that. However, don’t forget that setting up the IT infrastructure for such large sites to be performant and scalable takes a ridiculous amount of resources. And people expect snappy, quick websites with the perfect algorithm for constant dopamine shots.
That’s the reason why I think the Fediverse is the future of social media - but it’s still very young and will take a lot more work to be friendly for the masses.
It is very noticable the snappiness/responsiveness coming to Lemmy.world. My smaller mastodon instance is generally fine but images and stuff are noticably slower.
depends on the hosting setup. my lemmy instance was slow too until i set it up with a cache, now it’s hella snappy
the biggest thing to me, in terms of server load, is that reddit does not need to host videos/images. It’s a link aggregate.
I’m only a layman in this particular field, but I imagine it’s a lot lighter on resources to direct people to sites streaming video than to host and serve it all yourself.
Text and database entries are, indeed, Vastly lighter on resources (compute and bandwidth). Bandwidth cost for text is practically free. Managing voting is surely not easy though; every single vote is an additional database entry which means that they cost money to store. Then the vote sorting algorithm has to run pretty frequently. Comments themselves are probably nothing compared to the votes.
But managing voting and sorting is a one-time-cost. Reddit doesn’t let you vote on old things which means that they can completely discard the votes and keep the totals and never resort ever again. They have no real ongoing costs there.
They could have even made a profit from third party apps if the pricing wasn’t 100x a reasonable rate.
I’m betting on the Trifecta.
We’re still not quite halfway through the year. I just need Zuck to require a VR hat to access facebook and I’ll get a big payout!
Come on Zuck, Metaverse is the future, man! Don’t listen to the naysayers, everyone wants to live in a legless world, you just gotta give them that final push!
I just need Zuck to require a VR hat to access facebook
Didn’t he already require facebook to access VR “hats”? Oh yeah, he did it for occulus headsets.
Anyone who did should go buy a lotto ticket ASAP
Definitely not me. Crazy I hear talks of MySpace making a come back. That’s one social media site I enjoyed and would love to visit again.
Brilliant move to help sell more ads on the platform: limit how many people will even be able to see those ads
I think the real money now is selling data for AI training. At least that’s the vibe I’m getting now from all these social media sites limiting API shit. We live in weird times.
It’s not so much that there’s money in it.
Just that some of those AI companies are making a lot of money, and social media wants that money.
But those AI companies are going to try and find a new free way rather than giving up millions of dollars they didn’t have to before.
It’s weird. Social media seems to have gone from selling users’ eyeballs as ad revenue to selling users’ voices for automated content creation.
They should’ve tried selling ads to the AI.
Chat gpt, how do I exit a for loop early?
- take a sip from your delicious and refreshing Diet Coke ™
- order some hot fresh quick take out via Uber Eats™
- break;
Between this and reddit going “down” yesterday, the internet just sucks right now.
Internet is what you make of it. Plenty of good stuff to find out here. Just leave when you encounter greed.
True. Reddit was just kinda “the place” for a lot of online communities, imo. Hopefully Lemmy can grow into something great.
Two years ago I was hoping the same thing for Mastodon and, to be honest, that’s kind of panning out. I’ve really found some awesome stuff and people that I’m genuinely interested in interacting with.
No, the internet is healing. This is a dream come true.
I couldn’t agree more. These platforms have become toxic wastelands. Let them die and let the people create new and better communities
It partially sucks because so much of it is walled into like a dozen sites. It’s convenient for a lot of reasons but we’re starting to see that having our own blog/forum/business site might be for the best even if it takes more effort
Same for where I work. We’ve dramatically redused what we post on social media, and have beefed up our web presence and is starting to build up e-mail lists. The traffic is much more valuable
That’s why Gutenberg invented books
Thats not what he did lol, he invented the printing press.
I’m aware of that but I didn’t want to say “That’s why God invented books” because I’m an atheist
Eh, could just say “they” but I get it.
I suppose I should have thought it through but I’ve been hearing that cliché said a certain way for over 50 years and it kind of sticks with you.
At the risk of sounding tin-foily…
Twitter’s financials for server costs have never made sense - the amount of money required to serve the sheer volume of engagement can’t possibly have been resolved by ads that Elon is somehow refusing to keep tapping into.
I’d wager that some other interested party engaged in some type of private-public partnership was floating costs for (let’s call it “privileged”) access to the backend of Twitter – granting a bottomless pit of funding to keep the platform running no matter the cost.
Once Twitter left the hands of someone deemed trustworthy, that life support doesn’t stick around – leaving Twitter facing complete insolvency by October of this year unless Musk literally does whatever he can to reduce engagement to save on costs.
Twitter loses more money when it has more engagement. If you have 100k users and add a new one, every interaction that additional user makes with tweets viewed by those 100k existing users requires 100k updates pushed to those 100k users’ pages. Every like sends an update of +1 like on the tweet to every one of the 100k users. It becomes significantly more expensive per user engagement.
The ads being seen by additional users don’t cover that constantly-compounding cost to keep engagements up to date across the platform. Musk isn’t being honest about the reasoning (web scraping issues my ass) and is scrambling to buy desperately-needed to keep the platform up past October.
I think this goes to show just how impossible a business model like Twitter’s was from the jump and shines a light on the absurdity of it being self-sustaining without a massive source of reliable external funding.
Edit: fixed typo
They were previously publicly traded were they not? How do you figure that backend funding worked if it wasn’t shown on the balance sheet?
Simple. Jews owned all the funding sources, regulatory agencies that were supposed to watch for this, industry-insiders that could have blown a whistle and the media companies that could have investigated. Anyone who could possibly threaten this structure is blasted by the space lasers.
Obviously.
I am fairly certain that “obviously” is your sarcasm tag, but I work with people this stupid/racist which makes me a little sad.
Not to mention it lined up perfectly with the start of the new fiscal year on July 1st. Hard to believe that is just a coincidence.
The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.
Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.
Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.
Additionally, even YouTube is trying to enforce ads more strongly and gyfcat is closing down.
People are looking for conspiracies, I like them too, but this was just a bubble waiting to burst.
It will be interesting to see what will come after.
every interaction that additional user makes with tweets viewed by those 100k existing users requires 100k updates pushed to those 100k users’ pages. Every like sends an update of +1 like on the tweet to every one of the 100k users. It becomes significantly more expensive per user engagement.
This is not how a reasonable API works and is probably not how Twitter “pages” work. A “+1” just changes a number in a database from, say, 629644 to 629645. The latter is no more expensive to send over the wire to a client when it requests data.
I see that a lot of people complain about reddit, twitter, and whatever mainstream website completely fuck the consumer, but fail to realize one crucial thing. The only time change happens in mob settings is when the pain of no change is greater than the pain of change. I applaud Elon, spez, and who ever else wishes to put there services behind their paywall whether it’s an API or just simply viewing tweets. Anyone in the know knows that it’s a crock of shit and anyone who isn’t is annoyed to the point where change is preferable. The sooner people figure out posting information, entertainment, and other forms of media/knowledge to the benefit of a company is horrendous the better. Now we have the opportunity to get rid of the corporate greed and basically open-source peoples knowledge from around the globe. Although like with reddit, mob mentality poses a real threat to communities like this one, I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother (as corny as that sounds). I much prefer it over giving more information to companies who use it to profit off of my content, while I receive nothing.
*Edit: Thank you kind stranger for the reddit gold! Glad you spent real hard cash so I can have reddit premium and reddit coins! The lovely people at reddit will be spending your money sitting on a yacht eating grapes in one hand and lobster in the other. I’m sure they are real thankful too! :) *
Damn, what an articulated bastard
I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother
First day as a human being? 🤣
I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother
Not me!
I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother
Not me!
Username checks out.
All official local, national, global government and information/news services should immediately set up Mastodon/Lemmy instances, or at least accounts on established federated instances. It’s the only way to insure stability. Musk and his Saudi/RW anti-democratic partners acquired twitter to kill it.
Imagine a government agency decided to shut down twitter. Musk drops a fraction of his wealth to pay for it and crash it and people just laugh at all these “silly mistakes” he’s making.
It is pretty aggravating not being able to access’s my local Metros updates to see what’s happening to the system
They all have websites. We need to ditch our dependence on greedy anti-democracy billionaires and learn to be human again.
“To address extreme levels of failing to pay our bills & firing every competent person at Twitter, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:”
Why are so many people suddenly against Twatter burning? I thought we all wanted that?
I am against it, because it means 1 less datasource for data scientist like myself.
I quit like 6 months before Elon musk ever even mentioned buying Twitter. This is all pretty hilarious for me. Although I did occasionally poke my head in using a front end open source alternative like fritter or nitter or you don’t need to log in.
But those haven’t been working either because of the latest s***
This is what I’m saying, I think people are just really addicted to Twitter and refuse to let it die combined with a lot of people online being far left and hating anything right of Antifa
Welcome to centrism my friend. Grill is that way, beer fridge is that way, and there is a shooting range behind the house. The left hates us, the right hates us, life is goooood
You don’t need to simultaneously say something stupid and loudly announce you’re a right-winger - only one of those things is needed to get the message.
I have beliefs that would be considered left leaning and ones that would be considered right leaning.
You know, like a normal person aware of complexity and nuance
i.e. you’re a fence sitter that supports corporate profits over human life and environmental awareness, a.k.a. a right-winger
Fence sitter implies I’m neutral and not decided about issues. No, I’m decided in my beliefs, I just don’t fit into either side. For example, I’m pro unrestricted civilian gun ownership but I’m also pro abortion. I’m anti illegal immigration but also anti religion.
What does that make me again? Undecided?
Yes, it does mean you’re undecided, but worse yet, your wording tells me you haven’t even been made aware of what you should decide about in the first place. The issues you’ve raised have been contrasted as if dichotomies, when that’s not even close to true. It’s good that you agree abortions are the choice of the mother, as that’s the bare minimum we should expect of a rational human being who’s not evil. Then you immediately contrast it by asserting you haven’t even thought about your own morality yet – what does “unrestricted civilian gun ownership” even mean? Could I roll up to your front yard in a Panzer? Maybe you’d invite me in for some coffee as I hold a glock made of pure Uranium? Besides that, “anti illegal immigration” is a largely meaningless statement – everyone is, even “illegal immigrants”. They’d rather have the stupid law allow them to visit legally.
Point is, the divide doesn’t lie between political parties, but between choosing to be evil and support a capitalist dystopia where money is worth more than lives, or be good.
between choosing to be evil and support a capitalist dystopia where money is worth more than lives
So you are a communist. What makes you think that you have the right of saying what should be decided or not? If I had to pick between hypercapitalism and communism, I would pick capitalism. Why? Because my country was raped by communists for over 40 years. Are you American? You sound American.
It’s good that you agree abortions are the choice of the mother,
No, I think it should be a decision for both parties, because by nature you need a father and a mother.
what does “unrestricted civilian gun ownership” even mean? Could I roll up to your front yard in a Panzer?
If it’s road legal and insured, why not? Actually in many European countries you can own a tank legally, just without the weaponry
Maybe you’d invite me in for some coffee as I hold a glock made of pure Uranium?
Uranium no, that would kill both of us, but polymer why not? There is a shooting range 3 blocks away, lets blast some targets!
– what does “unrestricted civilian gun ownership” even mean?
That you should be able to legally own really any form of firearm (nuclear weaponry to be considered at some other time). Want a fully automatic AR15 or a Kalach? Go for it. What I don’t mean by unrestricted is licenses. Guns owners should be licensed, weapons registered. Hmmm, almost like we already have this system all over the planet with motor vehicles, so just copy that system.
They’d rather have the stupid law allow them to visit legally.
It’s called a visa. And what gives them a “right” to any particular country? If I cross to work in Germany, I can do so legally because I’m a European citizen. However, if I wanted to work in the US or Canada, I would need a work visa. That is the legal way. Nobody is entitled to anything. Not me, not you, not economic migrants. The only people who deserve our help are actual war refugees. You know, like in Ukraine. They don’t run to Germany for cash, they ran to the nearest safe country (Slovakia, Poland) for actual safety, ie no rocket in their home.
the divide doesn’t lie between political parties
Given you think anything left is good, anything center or right is bad, the divide is between US political parties for you.
But feel free to give me any more questions that you think I’m “undecided” about. I’m very well decided on pretty much anything. Or you can just do “too long don’t read”, I don’t really mind either way.
Have a nice 4th of July!
You’re an insane person
I more so believe it’s insane to go with policies that either harm or impair people, but I’m aware there are other opinions on the matter.
I personally use it for manga and following japanese artists who seem to post art and have discussions there
I made a Twitter account in like 2009, in order to follow breaking hockey trades and free agent signings.
Then I realized that these are all posted to hockey forums at ludicrous speed, so I just stayed on the hockey forums.
There must be people refreshing Twitter just to be first to repost stuff to other social media sites for clout. It’s part of what makes Twitter so gross.
Also, what Twitter has done to ‘journalism’ where 99/100 ‘journalistic articles’ are just writing about what the author read on Twitter that day. It’s all just so gross to me.
Sorry, I rambled. I meant to just agree that I also signed up for Twitter for a niche interest. Although I quickly dropped it again, way before all the activism took over the platform and people started losing their jobs over tweets they liked or made.
Your point about articles that are just reposts of what the journalist read that day hits home so hard.
At what point did it become generally acceptable to throw some incredibly bland commentary along with embedded tweets or reddit posts and call it an article?
Oh I’m all for it. Let it crash and burn. Any time a billionaire gets embarrassed is okay with me, because it’s the only thing that will hurt them.
Embarrassment and submarine implosions
…as for me, I’m kinda getting a kick out of all this chaos
If YouTube dumpsters it the fediverse might gain a competitive foothold.
The problem is, unlike text (like on here and Mastodon), video files can become extremely large, so you’d have to have a pretty big amount of storage to replace YouTube, federated or not.
True, that’s mostly what their cost is. Servers and storage.
I wonder how much YouTube depends on cloud storage right now.
100%? Do you think that there’s some box sitting under someone’s desk hosting Youtube? Hint: They’re owned by Google.
I work in IT, I know how storage works. I just don’t know if they’re on prem hosting or primarily using a private cloud service.
I mean they have the money, might as well offload to specialists where you can, right? I wouldn’t be building new infrastructure day and night when I could just have a B to B contract with AWS or something.
I’m not honestly sure if you’re trolling, but I’ll bite anyway. Youtube is owned by Google, who is one of the world’s largest cloud providers. Note that there really is no such thing as ‘off-prem’ for Google, as they have data centers all over the planet at this point. They will actually have multiple copies of the video floating at different levels of storage and different nodes around the world, all automated to tier the data as demand rises and falls.
Right, it’s oddly calm and peaceful here. It’s nice watching it burn from the other side of the river.
