Personally, the word I’d use for it is ‘boring’.

Loved ME and did a playthrough with the Legendary re-release, but when I hit Andromeda, I got to the planet and went ‘You know, I don’t care about ANY of these people, what we’re doing, and I’m not going to drive around for 30 more hours of this’ and just kinda… stopped playing.

It’s not just the difficulty, it’s that the fediverse runs on reputation.

If you get a reputation for being an instance that has offensive/illegal content, you’ll get defederated and your users will get a materially worse experience than the rest of the instances that are federating with each other - and it really only takes one or two things to get that reputation.

sh.itjust.works is a prime example: it didn’t take an awful lot to get them down the defederation road, and I suspect most admins would want to maintain their reputation and an easy way to do it (until we get like… moderation tools) is to just gatekeep what communities show up on your instance.

As a counterpoint to that: any new community that gets created on an instance is now a possible liability the site admins have to own.

Makes a lot of sense that you wouldn’t want anyone to make anything on your site, since that’s how you end up with /r/jailbait, and /r/fatpeoplehate and so on.

Seems reasonable you’d want to make sure you understand who is creating what and why on a platform you’re ultimately responsible for.

IMO, exec salaries (and any equity grants) should be exclusively tied to company profitability but that’s one of those things that’d never happen in a million years.

There’s just no incentive to build sustainable businesses when you’re working with free money and I think a lot of tech firms (not just social media ones) are going to crash land over the next couple of years.

I’m annoyed because WoW wants to triple-dip.

You really should either charge for content (expansions), or a subscription or load it up with shitty MTX options.

These guys are doing all 3, and the content kinda sucks on top of it.

I don’t mind paying for the occasional cosmetic or battle pass or whatever in otherwise free games, but seriously, pick a lane, my dudes.

Part of the problem is, IMO, the corporate structure built around these companies.

I’ve always wondered why Twitch has 1200 employees, or Reddit has 2000, or Twitter had 5,000. What do they all do, and is the cost of carrying so many people justified?

I’m betting (and honestly, the Twitter shitshow kinda has shown) that you maybe don’t actually need 1,200 people to run a streaming site, and maybe you don’t need 2,000 to run a text-based link aggregation site and that this weird tech company obsession with growth and size is actively counterproductive, at least to some extent, when it means you can’t carry the costs of the company without having to absolutely trash the experience of your users to do it.

IANAL, but I did spend a few years handling DMCA/Trademark takedown requests for an IaaS provider.

The answer is ‘Yeah, probably, but’, in most cases. If your instance is actively sharing copyrighted media, say, a stolen photo, and you get a DMCA and you’re in a jurisdiction where the DMCA applies (which is, of course, a US law and not some global copyright cartel) you probably are going to have to comply and remove the content.

If it’s just a link to content, say an embedded youtube video, you likely don’t need to comply since embedded content isn’t hosted on your server and thus isn’t something you can ‘remove’, but that’s a situation where shit gets murkier.

TLDR; it’s complicated but if the URL for the claimed infringing material is hosted by you and you get a notice you probably have to take action to remove the content in the URL.

It’s just a bit more platform enshittification, honestly.

Every social-oriented company is realizing that the Free Money Tree has died, burned down, and is now a rotting stump in the middle of the High Interest Rates woods, and they’re in utter panic because not a single one of them is actually profitable, has ever been profitable, or reasonably has a path to profitability.

Reddit, Twitch, Discord, etc. are all living on borrowed money and time and the only way they’re going to survive is if they either squeeze money out of the users directly, squeeze it out of their partner/content creators, or find a new investment which isn’t something that’s happening anywhere.

I was a $20 Kickstarter backer of this complete disaster.

Though, at this point, it’s been a decade of absolutely hilarious drama, so I really do feel like I got my money’s worth out of it even though I literally have never installed nor played any of the “betas”.

As a really old person, I was thinking today the vibe was unlike anything I’ve felt since Fidonet ;)

Mastodon is good if you’re after following specific people, rather than just general topics.

I’ve bounced off Twitter and then Mastodon several times because my use for social media is more for link aggregation and discussion, and I don’t really necessarily care about who I’m having a discussion with, but rather that there’s a good discussion about an interesting topic going on.

I know hashtags are a thing and you can follow them, but I’ve kinda found them hard to deal with on Mastodon because everyone puts a giant pile of hashtags on everything so you end up following certain tags and like, maybe 1/3rd of the things that show up in the feed are actually really related to everything that was tagged.

I do run an instance and find it’s useful for certain things, but I very much prefer the Lemmy approach to content.

Good news! Twitch is currently shitting all over itself with T&C changes around mandating exclusive streaming on their platform from their partners.

The hilarity is that some of the streamers are moving over to Kick, which is a platform that may or may not have been built from the stolen Twitch source code, which is just the most amazing drama possible.

I’d like to add a comment here just to add some visibility:

If you have an uncapped/unlimited internet connection, you should seriously consider running the Archive Team Warrior

They’re heavily involved in scraping and archiving data from all over the internet (and, recently, most/all of Reddit) so that it’s preserved, regardless of what happens to the underlying platform.

I run it on my home server in docker, but they have a lot of options for doing so and it basically requires just running it, and then forgetting it exists.

Agreed. The community MUST own it’s own platform or else they’re just renters that can be evicted the minute someone thinks they can make money from them.

This also isn’t just an online issue (though my view is US-centric). There’s been a lot of talk about the decline of a ‘3rd place’ and its loss impacting social gatherings. You have your house, work, and then your social spaces, and there’s a very big lack of social places where gathering and relaxing are acceptable without also having to engage in buying permission to be there.

This carried over into a lot of people going online to find the same social gatherings, and then seeing the gathering places turned into profit centers for the owners without any discussion with the users of the space, and now they’re finding that they don’t have anywhere to go be social, and the online places that filled that gap are now vanishing as well.

Now I’m not a sociologist (just a simple country computer janitor), but it strongly feels like a lot of the hyper-tribalism and aggressiveness that people are exhibiting are a direct result of having all the social spaces torn away and turned into profit centers, with zero regards for the people who visited or contributed to them.

It just makes everyone more isolated and willing to hop on to whatever the next big ‘social trend’ that some algorithm drops in front of them, and I think at this point it’s pretty unarguable that what the algorithms are doing is not always benign. You gain a place to belong, even if what you’re belonging to is abhorrent and toxic.

Funny, I was just having that discussion with someone.

I think the problem is all these platforms think the platform is the value and not the content made by the users.

And of course, since they have the best platform, it’d be inconceivable that anyone would ever leave because they’re the best.

Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, and Twitch are all doing exactly the ‘value is the platform’ while taking a massive shit on the creators and users that made the platform have any value in the first place, then acting confused why people are angry about how they’re behaving.

No actual human gives a crap about the platform: nobody goes to these sites to go to the site, they go there for the content from someone they like.