this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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You know the fediverse isn't perfect but it seems more sustainable than these big social media companies that are not profitable. Reddit and Twitter make no real money but want to host everything on their website and I'm not entirely sure why. Image boards like 4chan purge all their data and the fediverse is spread out to a bunch of different servers. What's the point of keeping everything forever on one server? Do they really think that all that junk data is valuable?
Also why did reddit go from just hosting text to hosting images and videos? It used to be a link aggregation site now it's a never leave our borders site I don't understand how that's going to be profitable with how much hosting that data is going to cost.
Years ago I used to hit like 15 websites a day just for video game news and discussion then it became all reddit.
As Cory Doctorow termed it, it's the enshittification of the Internet - all for the sake of "shareholder value" It's a proper "can't see the wood for the trees" business
Miss the good ole days of porn on gfycat
Miss the good ole days of imgur, YouTube, and porn on gfycat
The idea is to keep the users on Reddit instead of directing them to third-party sites, so they can show them ads instead of the third-party sites getting all the ad revenue. They just haven't figured out how to monetize it.
It's costing them a lot of money to do that. Old reddit must have been a lot cheaper. I don't get the walled garden approach for a link aggregation site. It's obvious spez is going to sell it for a shit ton of money then bounce because it's a money pit. So was Twitter they lucked out with Elon being dumb enough to buy it for that insane price tag.
Set up the garden's walls so you can profit off the users when "eventually" figure out how to monetize them? Sending people to third party sites means you can't show them ads even in principle, but the cost of hosting seems like it would quickly outstrip whatever extra revenue you could get. Corporations are legally required to increase in value forever, so it's literally illegal to make "enough money" when there's a chance for "all the money", even if pursuing that chance actually hurts long-term viability (which stockholders don't care about because they can always cash out).