What makes a social network “work”?
Typically, we say that a social networking service works when it achieves some of these:
- Community – gives users the ability to create communities they can feel a sense of belonging to.
- Freedom of expression – expands people's ability to speak their mind in a .. umm... meaningful way ? (looking at 4chan's /pol/).
- Rich expression – actually offers tools to express yourself (presence of features like markup, formatting, embeds).
- Constructive culture – becomes an environment where people learn and participate in constructive and fun activities — like university clubs. (Sorry for the example, but Reddit’s r/anime comes to mind.)
- Privacy & safety – respects users’ privacy and safety.
- Developer support – provides good developer tools.
- Example: In Numbers: The Best Anime of the Decade from MyAnimeList — a huge data-driven article made possible by open tools and APIs. (also a huge web page, might take forever to load all figures)
Feel free to add more points, or challenge the ones I’ve listed.
It seems like a general consensus here on Lemmy that — no matter how many times you try — Reddit will always slip from Aaron Swartz to u/spez.
Why do you think that is?
Disclaimer: I wrote the post by myself, but used AI to refine my bad English and markdown,
10 Comments
deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de · 27 pts · 345d
Corporate social media requires making a profit to keep running. No matter how good it looks at the start, the main goal of a corporate social media is never to provide the best possible service to end users. The things you get to see and how you interact are not driven by interests and real friends, but by what gets the platform the most profit.
Obligatory "AI bad". You should post what you spent effort writing, instead of letting a large language model subtly change its meaning.
zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 0 pts · 345d
I edited the AI's edit though ~~.
owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca · 9 pts · 345d
As the other commenter mentioned, it will always go that way for profit.
With social media, the users aren't the customers--the advertisers (and whoever is buying the data) are. Social media platforms often start out with a focus on the users, because they can't be profitable without a large user base. But once that point is reached, everything is subject to the will of the customers. At that point, your experience doesn't matter anymore. And it will always go this way.
There are a handful of ways to avoid this trend. One way is to ensure there is always a breadth of competition--that way, providers have to focus on a good user experience, otherwise their users will switch to a competitor. But this is nearly impossible with social media, because it's non-trivial to "move" to another service.
Another way is to remove the profit motive. But the challenge then is finding some way to fund and build something like a social media platform. The Fediverse does this by distributing the cost and work among thousands of volunteers. In theory, a non-profit organization could do something similar, if they could secure funding, but even those are subject to shittifying themselves (see recent developments with Mozilla).
The distributed model has its challenges--one of the big ones is resisting those who would try to take the space and exploit it for those profits (for example, read about XMPP and Google Chat, and the "embrace, expand, extinguish" strategy). But it seems to have a very good chance to avoid those pitfalls--largely because running your own instance of these services is relatively accessible to many.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 345d
Capitalism and profit and the need to make more money is like rot, a fungus, a bacterial infection or a viral infection.
Any service product or idea you tie to capitalism will inevitably become infected to the point where you infection of wanting to make money will over ride everything. In the end, it has nothing to do with ideas, development, evolution or making things ... it always devolves down to just wanting to make as much money as possible.
That is what destroys and devolves any and all social media today. It has nothing to do with social media ... it has everything to do with making money and maximizing profits.
fakir@piefed.social · 2 pts · 345d
Enshittification is a result of a company trying to squeeze more out from their customers this quarter than they did last quarter. That is because the line must always go up, so any wall St or investor first company becomes a profit first company. This is the westernized flavor of capitalism. Not all capitalism is profit first.
zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 345d
First time I read this here, wanna elaborate? Like who's theory of capitalism is different? (some author or state or party)
fakir@piefed.social · 4 pts · 345d
Market socialism, aka worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, credit unions, open source, fediverse etc are still part of capitalism, but are not profit first. All enterprise exists to create value for, and serve the community, profit doesn't have to be the driver. When refugees move to a new city / country, they setup ways to share food, clothes and other goods in order to serve the community, it's not profit first. In essence, when community is more important than commerce, then the enterprise won't be profit first.
rigatti@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 345d
zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 344d
somehow, I feel like this counts as concise
captainlezbian@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 343d
Because of what a corporation is. I believe that individually run businesses and cooperatives can work really well, and I think they could function for social media, but in both those business models the quality of the product is the stakeholders experience connection to the product and aren't accountable to a higher yet disconnected power.
A corporation isn't like that. A corporation exhibits the ideology of a cancer cell because it disconnects the ownership from the labor and product then distributes it as a financial instrument. It is the abstraction of a living business into many minuscule pieces of capital. Decisions are therefore abstracted away into more and more faster
This means two things: the corporation's goals will always be to find the maximum point of money extracted from each customer * number of customers, this encourages simple, bland, and extractive products, and that due to the need to keep growing the corporation is incapable of seeing when it has hit that point and will continue attempting to find more users, reduce costs, and increase prices.