I desperately hope Reddits recent changes kill it. It's nothing personal towards reddit, but I can't think of anything else which will dissuade enshittification of other online places.
Enshittification is caused by greed, so unless you've fixed greed, it's going to continue. Every site that has deliberately made their site shitty probably has some "math with dollar signs" to back it up. We're lucky that HN is pretty much a side-show for YCombinator. If there was even a remote chance that it could make a significant amount of money (compared to YCombinator's actual business), I guarantee you we'll be reading "Announcing HN's Redesign" pinned to the top one day.
It'll continue iff it actually works to satisfy greed. If platform builders and funders see there's a limit to enshittification before a platform breaks, then they'll stop crossing that line out of self interest. I guess there will always be a few just trying to sell the platform to a sucker before it crashes, but you'd at least see the shit diminishing.
I would put a slight caveat on that: it's caused by bad behavior being _perceived_ to be profitable. That doesn't mean it necessarily is. Nor that the bad actor necessarily has the tools (or desire) to evaluate the effectiveness of their behavior in realizing their greed.
A small family-run coffee shop can be profitable. It might pay for your kids' college and a comfortable retirement one day. But everyone (or everyone's investor) wants to be the equivalent of the next Starbucks.
It seems to me that users should _want_ their community platform to be profitable in order to sustain, but not "too profitable" (=greed) or the sense of community vanishes.
If that is true, is it the responsibility of the online citizen to interact/transact on a platform with the "right" degree of profitability (not too small, or it'll close tomorrow, but also not to greedy, or enshittification occurs)?
PS: How profitable exactly is "right" - reminds me of the family game where the winner is the "most average" person - scoring points closest to the arithmetic mean instead of the person with the max. score.
The problem is less "profitability" and more "increasing profitability". The problem is a publicly traded company, or a VC-backed firm trying to target an IPO, doesn't care about how much money a company makes today. They care about their investment continually increasing in value, which demands the company be growing in profits.
Enshittification is a direct consequence of this mindset being applied to companies who reach something resembling market saturation. Once your user growth starts slowing down, you need to show that you'll continuously make more money per user than you did before. And that path can only lead to shit.
Yes, and? What I'm saying is that there's probably a limit to how profitable enshittification can be. Certainly it can't be the basis of a long-term sustainable business, so it's limited to the kind of zero-sum profits of a pump and dump. Even investors get tired of this eventually, when enough of them get stuck holding the bag.
There is of course the option that the "math with dollar signs" is wrong. The "math" is often based on old-world ideas of how to make money, which is basically "screw the user" is no longer valid in the internet age when a new behemoth can arise in months. The supply chains of the past are not the same as the always on internet with is extreme fluidity.
Maybe Ycomb has done some math, possibly a litte more up to date, and the people, culture and cred this site gives them is worth more than selling it?
Your main point remains valid of course, but we don't all suffer evenly - the internet is still a great place for many and a new home will be found or at least the next generation will find one.
I'm afraid Steve Huffman made the correct calculation that Reddit's network effect is large enough that the wound it'll sustain with the API lockout won't be enough to imperil the platform.
On the scale of other platform enshittification (Digg in particular), this one isn't directly user-hostile enough, and the aren't any good enough alternatives.
Enshittification is basically inevitable for (venture)capitalist-funded online platforms. My biggest disappointment is that Reddit went that venture-capitalist (or adjacent, whatever) route, I thought/hoped their "Reddit Gold" approach was good enough to be sustainable.
The strongest theory I've seen for this killing reddit is that moderation quality goes down enough that being on the site is no longer fun. Even if Reddit replaces all the moderators who quit (which, yes, won't be hard), Reddit itself doesn't provide tools with the same power as what mods were using, to say nothing of the new mods' lack of experience and questionable motives and judgment (if you're smart and have good motives, you at least think really hard before going into a position left empty by mass resignation).
But yes, long term it's on We The People to fund our own communities.
>moderation quality goes down enough that being on the site is no longer fun.
I'd say that Reddit (and really the internet as a whole) hit that years ago. Another user said this on a different thread, but Reddit has this deep depression inside it that isn't really noticeable until you leave. Like, you don't ever really see happy people on there anymore, just people with varying levels of misery. I don't think that's really unwanted by Spez and Co, either. If there's something that the internet has taught me, it's that it's easier to retain audiences by keeping them miserable and afraid than it is by keeping them happy.
> but Reddit has this deep depression inside it that isn't really noticeable until you leave. Like, you don't ever really see happy people on there anymore, just people with varying levels of misery
Well put, I've also noticed this. Be it games, movies or sports. Whenever I enjoy something, I just know that the moment I go on Reddit (or Twitter), there will be a shitstorm complaining and crying about mundane details. And without fails those threads gain thousands of upvotes, while the positive threads die with 12 upvotes in new. Outrage seems to be the best way to drive engagement and clicks.
Not sure if this is something that scales with the current number of users, but the moderation quality appeared to be better before some of these powerful tools.
For example, things like automatically banning based on activity in other subs is not necessary a power that improves the site.
I suspect many of the more disappointing echo chamber effects (that steer something like a local subreddit into a political one) are due to over-moderation.
People (for obvious reasons) like to compare Digg to whats going on at Reddit. It seems a lot closer to Facebook
Facebook has always lead the fight to monetize users to the max. If its sudden API changes or shutdowns, or suing 3rd party app developers. Yet they still generate Billions and people are fine using them, instagram, or Whatsapp, even though they fully understand the enshitification the timeline has gone through throughout the years, and how aggressively they monetize their user base
I also see Reddit as extremely similar to Facebook groups, which can also have millions of users, and are moderated for free by volunteers
I think it's a mistake to confuse the health of Meta, the company, with Facebook, the platform. I think as a company they made the right decision in the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp because they captured some of the platforms that were stealing their important demographics. I think if they hadn't made these acquisitions and were still just Facebook.com, we'd be looking at Facebook the company not as a FAANG giant but as a Yahoo or IBM or similar.
Unlike Reddit, most of Meta's apps are commonly used on mobile. Furthermore, all the apps you listed actually bring long term value in the form of real life social and business relationships. Emotionally and economically Reddit has not nearly as much of an impact.
