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,
Right, it’s the systemic pressures of capitalism that tend to select for a certain type of behavior. It’s what Cory Doctorow terms enshittification. The key part to keep in mind is that selection pressures guide general behavior within the system, it’s perfectly possible for outliers to exist. However, it doesn’t mean they will continue to be good actors. For example, telegram has already been adding ads in channels, and there will probably be more dark patterns going forward if it manages to secure a big enough chunk of the market. It’s also hard to say what will happen with Valve once Gabe steps away from it.