Web 2.0 was the world of social media. Its real heyday was in the 2000’s when all the social media platforms cared about was getting an audience. Since the IPO of Facebook in 2012, all the social media platforms care about is making a profit, and these two things are incompatible with each other.

Facebook/Instagram: more fake engagement = more noise

Facebook/Instagram is the biggest example. In their efforts to optimize “Engagement” with the platform, they are taking away user customization, resulting in more than half of the content in my Facebook/Instagram feeds being stuff I don’t want. I make an effort to kill as much as I can but the shit just keeps on coming. Facebook favors posts with high “Engagement”, which usually means memes designed to generate fear, anger, or hate. I remember a time when “funny” was the primary “Engagement” criteria, but funny may generate likes, but “dark side” posts generate comments, which is more “Engagement” than laugh reacts.

The worst thing by far on Facebook is “suggested content” and posting anything on Facebook will generate new suggestions. I post that I like the latest season of Star Trek Picard, and now I am getting inundated with hundreds of suggestions for Star Trek related groups to join, and advertisements for Paramount Plus which I already subscribe to.

Suggested content is getting in the way of friends posts, and group posts that I actually want to see. I actually surveyed the first 100 things that appeared on my Facebook feed, not including ads: 54 of the first 100 were stuff I didn’t ask for including suggested groups, suggested follows, suggested friends (friends of friends I don’t know) and suggested videos. Facebook is a great example of money driven “Engagement” damaging the user experience, but it is not one of the worst:

Tumblr: Censorship is bad for LGBTQ users

Tumblr is a site that was really big among counter culture enthusiasts in the late 00’s and early 10’s. Its lax rules regarding censorship made it the primary hangout for the LGBTQ community. Tumblr was sold to Yahoo! in 2013 which was in turn was purchased by Verizon is where things went bad. They banned NSFW content in 2018, and that killed about half of the LGBTQ content.

Tumblr’s biggest user base, shrunk considerably since 2018, and the recent repeal of the ban on nudity (but not sex) has not helped much at all. Tumblr was bought by Automattic in 2019 for $3 million, a huge loss from the original billion dollar price tag. (Automattic owns wordpress which hosts arianeb.com)

Deviant Art: Artists don’t want uniformity, or Artificial Impersonation content

Deviant Art is a case of the people that manage the site completely misunderstanding its users. For most of the 2010’s Deviant Art users could customize their art showcase home pages any way they wanted and this is how artists could display their art.

Deviant Art was bought by Wix in 2018, then in 2019, they released “Eclipse”, a mobile friendly platform that overrode the user customization. That was when Deviant Art became uncool. Deviant Art wanted to be more user friendly on mobile, and it drove away its artist instead. Then it decided to jump on the AI art train early, again completely misunderstanding its main audience. More artists are leaving because of it, and the site gets so little traffic, I stopped updating my Deviant Art page over a month ago, and literally nobody noticed.

Arianeb.com is driving traffic to Deviant Art, but there is no traffic going the other way. I cancelled my Core membership and might just shut down my Deviant Art page as soon as the current yearly subscription expires.

Twitter: Elon Musk turns Twitter into the new 4chan

I’m not sure I need to talk much about Twitter. It’s a website that used to represent a “town square” where people could civilly discuss things that mattered to them, media companies could announce news stories and get immediate feedback, and haters would get kicked off the platform. People liked it, advertisers liked it, but investors were not thrilled that it was bleeding money.

Then Elon Musk came along and on a whim decided to put an offer for the entire company that the current owners couldn’t refuse. The current owners said yes, then Musk discovered the company was not worth what he was paying for it, so he yanked the offer, the owners sued Musk, Musk was forced to overpay, and now he owns a dying platform currently valued at 20% of what he paid for it.

He got rid of the “town square”, let all the haters in, forced users to see every post he posts, and started charging for basic site security that should be free. It’s a safe bet engagement is way down, but Musk refuses to release numbers.

It is now teetering on bankruptcy, and Musk is not paying all the bills.

I never use Twitter anymore, barely used it before Musk. Capturing the header image above was my first visit in months.

Reddit: Charging for API access will drain the site of its biggest users

Let me get to the BIG story. Reddit, the social media site that somehow made it through the decade unscathed by scandal is about to scathe itself.

Probably the biggest reason Reddit is the lone wolf in all this is because Reddit is still privately owned, but they want to go public so bad it is cringeworthy. They tried to jump on the web 3.0 bandwagon with crypto and NFT based unique avatars and got nothing. They are getting by on advertising from sources that would get voted down into oblivion if users had the ability.

Reddit’s big draw is decent content. So decent, that a very popular trick to use on Google searches is to add the word “reddit” to the end of your search. Chances are it will be easier to find what you are looking for with fewer ad based search results. The problem is that Reddit makes no money from this, and to go public, they need to make a lot more money than they are making now.

So they have decided to start charging for their API access. This means search engines will have to pay to scan Reddit for specific content. This will affect AI based searches too, as they regularly scan Reddit to improve their language model content. It is hard to say of Google and Bing will be willing to pay for API access or get by with “scraping” (copying all the text and images from a site on a page-by-page basis). Reddit is betting big that they are.

It is a big gamble, because the other big user of API is third party apps. Years ago, Reddit did not have an official app for their site, and numerous third party ones came into being to fill the void. This increased the number of Reddit users. Reddit redesigned their website to make it more advertiser friendly, but the original version is still available (personally I like the new design because it is easier to read). When Reddit finally released an official app, they based it on the new design. Third party apps kept the popular old design, and added a bunch of tools not available on the official app. On top of charging for API access, Reddit is banning third party apps from adding their own advertising, or accessing NSFW content.

In other words, third party apps are dead on June 30th. Power users that rely on these apps are quitting the platform, many even deleting all their content too. The add “reddit” trick to a search is likely going to be less and less effective as a search trick.

The BIG concern here is moderation. The thing that makes Reddit so good is the “volunteer” moderators who keep the forums civil. Yes, you sometimes get a bad one who is either too stringent, or the opposite, doesn’t do anything, but I’ve been on the internet to know weak moderation is better than none.

What Reddit is doing here is telling its users it doesn’t give a crap. Third party apps had the best mod tools, and unpaid mods are learning the lesson that Reddit will not support them. The age of well moderated Reddit forums is effectively dead.

I am willing to bet the old design version of the site is next to be lost, followed by NSFW content. What this will do to their IPO chances is anybody’s guess, but communities are the driving force of social media, and capitalism is killing social media based communities.