By opening up r/place again, they've stolen the magic from it.
The first time it happened, it was amazing and novel.
The second time was an incredible surprise each time the board opened up again. I was involved with the r/Beach House community to put up an homage to our favorite band.
But now... It's become repetitive. It feels like just an attention grab, like a ploy to artificially increase traffic to the site. This time, it looks no different from every other time r/place has taken... place. It's flags everywhere, there's so much anger surrounding it, and it's just not fun.
r/place was special because of its spontaneity. But now it's soulless, like every other corporate-owned internet phenomenon is.
Everything from these big corps have no soul. Because we know it's just about exploiting users for money.
I want the old internet back so bad. Hopefully federation can fuel many new actually fun services that are not built to make money but to actually entertain and amuse people, or simply be useful.
I personally feel pleasure from doing good things in the world. But it seems to be a group of people who doesn't feel it's worth doing something for others unless there is money to be made from it.
I feel bad for every user that hasn't experienced an internet before all of this. Golden years to me, was 1996 ~ 2008. To others, far earlier.
The only thing we had to deal with then, was just popups. Now, it's like every fucking thing imaginable has to be turned into some subscription or retooled to be shareholder friendly. Because that's exactly what everything is gearing towards to appease - these fucking shareholders with stakes. Shareholders, who constitute a band of people who have absolutely no knowledge or fucks given as to what made things as good as they were in past internet. It's all about data farming for money to then market people to shit.
Google had to go and acquire YouTube, things seemed okay in the beginning. Now look at it, fucking bombardment of ads if you aren't using an adblocker. Amazon had to go and acquire Twitch and things seemed okay in the beginning. Now look at it, you're meaning to tell me I have to sit through 8 ads, while you minimize a stream of a channel I'm watching?! AND You're going to make YOUR OWN SUBSCRIPTION WHEN AMAZON PRIME ISN'T ENOUGH?! ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?!
Reddit was great until 2016, it broke itself over politics. Then it broke itself even further by 2020 and now we are where we are with it. Social Media, is running in place. It's about statistics anymore. Has Facebook ever been useful and functional? I'm having a hard time now remembering when the last time it even had real people helping you, because now it's just in some stupid half-ass wiki that doesn't even have all of the answers in it's own ecosystem.
Everyone is too politicized now, almost can't go a damn few comments anymore without someone coming up to you with an emotionally charged reply, that's hiding in the background, the basis of their political stance.
I agree and this internet we have now has turned into crap, and it's the corporations who is responsible for it, because they want their profits.
Every big tech service is always nice at first and then the horrific ads and user tracking starts. People use an ad company to search the internet now and that's completely normal appearently. :)
I agree in general, but search feels like an odd example. That space has been dominated by ad companies since even before the internet (e.g., Yellow Pages).
"Hey, we're still cool. Remember this cool thing we did, look, we're doing it again, aren't we cool". Like that annoying kid in the class who had everybody laugh with one joke 2 years ago, and now he is repeating it time and again in order to get the same laughs.
Except in this case he's after any engagement so hateclicks are as good as loveclicks.
How far back do you think user engagement on r/place will stall reddit failing?
Do you think not using the canvas would cause more harm than their favorite event being covered in language shitting on the CEO and making the pretty canvas not marketable?
Personally, I strongly disagree if you do think so. Even if every Lemmy user drove 0 traffic to reddit, it would change very little of their day to day engagement.
It's important in the long term to move away from reddit and reduce engagement of the site, but the cost benefit ratio of fucking up the marketability of r/place strongly outweighs the effect users would have engaging the site.
I don't expect anything. I don't know how ad execs think and I don't think I want to know. Who the fuck can say if they value traffic or clean language more? What I know is that SEPARATE ENTIRELY, to quote a great thinker of our time, is the best route in terms of personal mental health. Whether reddit fails or continues, I'm doing my best to not give a shit. That includes not interacting with the site, regardless of the reason.
Bad enough that I still find myself with a reddit post being the only place I can find an answer to a problem every once in a while. I don't need to go there voluntarily.
I respect the mental health boundaries you need, but not all of us have that conflict* (trying to find a word that does not sound demeaning, I am not a wordist sorry).
For me, yes I'm upset that reddit is a burning shithole, but it weighs on my mind no more than leaving myspace, Icanhascheeseburgers, ragecomics, 4chan, Facebook, or any of the other numerous forums and social media sites I have split from.
So I respect your need to avoid it, but I do not believe this is the same for the majority of people who are interested in taking action.
I do think it would be best for most of us. Not least because it's more important to build our space here on Lemmy than to waste time on a site that we want/expect/hope to fail. The analogy with a nasty breakup isn't too farfetched - try to avoid running into your ex, at least for a while, it can only lead to more pain and won't help you move on. Especially when there's a real possibility that your ex actually benefits financially from the two of you meeting.
The breakup analogy falls short for numerous reasons, primarily because we are talking about communities rather than individuals.
More like a divorce with kids involved than a simple breakup. Some people are happy to divorce and run from their kids, abandoning them to their ex, but some people want to keep as much of their family healthy and intact as possible, forcing them to go to court or other forms of confrontational discourse in order to achieve their goals.
Many of us come from communities that have been split and the only way to rebuild and regroup is by engaging the missing community members where they are.
Do you think not using the canvas would cause more harm than their favorite event being covered in language shitting on the CEO and making the pretty canvas not marketable?
Not just that. The whole /r/place event has been covered by (tech) news sites every year. This year, it's a much better story than ever before.
Exactly, this is a huge marketing event for them. If the marketability of Reddit is shown to be "FUCK SPEZ FUCK SPEZ FUCK SPEZ", that is going to cost them in terms of that white glove corporate cleanliness they crave to provide and profit off of.
