cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37870004
reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).
the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.
another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.
size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.
we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.
Banned before they started is hyperbole.
I mean they should have been shut down at the first report of the illegal/pedo activity on the sub, they should have lasted weeks to months at the longest.
They should have never been around long enough for someone like, me, a vanilla layperson who does not go to reddit for porn, to hear about - which is they were around for years before I heard of them and for more years after.
On Fedi I also think communities like this should be banned, and typically they are, the admins of the largest instances are very protective of what they are hosting and linking to and I appreciate that. NSFW is also much more compartmentalized on Lemmy, so I very rarely if at all run in to anything more than people being politically questionable but not physically.
I mean, I don’t disagree but you realize the activity was not illegal? It was taken down to social pressure and it’s objectionability, but nothing about it was illegal. Posting pictures of clothed teenage girls is not illegal, if it was, the girls themselves could not post those pictures. Just like it’s not illegal to be racist in your personal life, it’s only illegal as a business practice.
But I get that if you are a vanilla layperson, you want to live in your bubble that terrible things don’t exist. Personally that was always kind of how I saw the whole jailbait thing, that they were allowed an easy way glimpse into those worlds that they want to remain ignorant about was the ‘travesty’. Sort of like how gooning on anime figurines is really bizarre, but nothing about it is really illegal, but easy to see how you want to remove that content because it is so highly objectionable to vanilla lay people and they react in horror to it.
I don’t know, my experience here NSFW is not at all compartmentalized, and I regularly get content in my feeds that I find objectionable. But I just block it. But I am not vanilla or a layperson in these things. I see a ton of violence and hate speech here as well, but the culture here rewards it as long as it’s politically leftwing and not rightwing.
Yes, you are correct, it was technically not illegal. The best kind of correct amiright?
No. I’m not trying to win an argument here man. I’m just talking.
People and organizations act in their own perceived self-interest first and foremost. And don’t change their behaviour until their self-interest changes, even if you find what they do to be objectionable.