Comment by xwowsersx
1 year ago
I'm with you that this is disappointing, but folks who use these sorts of tools tend to be a bit naive about the impact of them going away. It's a little silly, to be honest. Best numbers I could come by is X does something like 100B impressions/day and x.com saw 1.2B visits in the month of December. Will some people stop seeing X posts on Nitter? Sure, maybe. Will it matter to X? I doubt it.
It's created a reverse eternal September. The masses stay confined to one place. Other places can flourish with the old school smaller community kind of feel and quality. Let twitter live in its current state if it means other places won't be taken over by influencers and other bullshit.
This is nice in theory. I haven't used any twitter alternatives but others seem to report that their content is more or less the same as twitter's.
We're all sharing the same links, articles, jokes, memes, ideas, cat pictures. What differentiates a place is its sense of community, not its content. It's easy to forget that because Twitter long ago stopped being a community.
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Speaking for the fediverse only, the experience is what you make of it. Stay on the largest, averagest instance and your experience will be bland; get on an instance with people who share your values, an instance that connects with other instances OK with you, follow accounts posting content you want to see and the experience will be much better.
Mastodon reminds me of 2007 Twitter, and it would be great if it stayed that way.
Will the other places resist to VC money or other shenanigans though? That's the question...
There's too many other places. VC can't find every tiny community out there, or even any noteworthy portion of them. Places small enough to still have a coherent sense of community are beneath the notice of VC.
Exactly. Even the reddit blackouts etc did nothing really - sure a few people left in a huff and all that jazz, but Reddit is still trucking along happily. The only time I've seen the "eff it, we're leaving!" thing actually work was with Digg v4.
I have seen a considerable degrading of quality on reddit since the blackouts. I use reddit for quality subject discussion in topics ranging from pressure cooking to circuit design but I also use it for general crappy banter and time wasting, and the people who would contribute useful content in the former have decreased in number while the latter have increased making the signal to noise much worse.
It doesn't help that they have started placing content from more obscure subreddits onto people's front pages seemingly randomly, so people wander into places and have no idea what the culture is they are contributing to and add content which is wildly out of place.
To get subject matter discussion which is reasonable I have been wandering back to bespoke forums, which isn't necessarily bad, but they still have a lot of issues. A lot of other content has moved to discord, but I won't get into how I feel about that.
Nah, the blackouts definitely hurt Reddit. Deleted posts are the norm now. This was not the case before the API changes.
Fair point, I have myself noticed a lot more deleted posts. I doubt their bottom line has hurt much though.
Deleted and overwritten posts were a thing for long before the api change.
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Although, I'm surprised how often I'm seeing the key comments I was searching for deleted. I haven't been keeping stats, but maybe around half the time.
Some Reddit metrics might've hardly noticed the blips, but if they had metrics for early-Reddit qualities, such as for smart (or clever) comments, helpful information, humor, or goodwill... I suspect those would be bad. Where they're not bad might be non-frontpage subs that are still cruising along with their earlier communities. But those communities started in earlier Reddit, and I suspect that today would not have started there.
> metrics for early-Reddit qualities
Those had already tanked before any API changes.
Tumblr with their NSFW removal change as well.