Reddit to lay off about 5% of workforce: Report
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Reddit is laying off 5% of its workforce and slowing hiring as part of company's restructuring efforts, the report said
  • BobQuasit@beehaw.org
    2·
    1 year ago

    All this has me wondering. Lemmy and other fediverse sites should be resistant to enshittification. But how could American corporations screw that up? Could they start their own servers and instances, and somehow make them dominant? Or would that not be worth it to them?

    It seems to me that capitalism has pretty much been trying to take over everything, with a lot of success. So I find myself wondering if it could happen here.

      • luna@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Apple’s iChat (precursor to Messages.app) used to do XMPP, too. I don’t think it federated, or if it did it was very short-lived, but all the big tech companies with chat services got their start with XMPP. It’s almost like it’s a great set of tools for communicating, which, sadly and ironically, open source tech seems to have moved on from. To be fair, I far prefer Matrix’s JSON to XMPP’s XML, but it’s a little disappointing that everyone forgets about XMPP.

    • luna@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      We’re kind of already seeing it with Mastodon. The official app strongly pushes people toward mastodon.social which is a radioactive dumpster fire. And this isn’t even corporate America, it’s just the folks who own the name.

        • luna@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Your points are valid and you’re not wrong, but it’s exacerbated by the poor / lack of moderation as I commented elsethread. You can have a large number of users and still have a tolerable, even useful and pleasant, experience–r/askhistorians is my favorite example of internet moderation.

        • luna@beehaw.org
          1·
          1 year ago

          The biggest issue is that they don’t really moderate, so hate speech and bigotry have a greater presence there. I specifically remember a situation where multiple people were reporting things and it took them days (maybe a week or more? I can’t remember, but certainly several days) to take it down. And this happens pretty regularly.

            • luna@beehaw.org
              3·
              1 year ago

              There are several good mastodon instances, just not mastodon.social. Moderating is hard and you have to actually do it and not be afraid it’s censorship. Oh, and not being a fascist helps. I’m beginning to wonder about the mastodon.social admins.

    • sw4nky@lemmy.one
      1·
      1 year ago

      Theoretically some large company could use the “embrace, extend, extinguish” model to take over “open” standards. Microsoft was famous back then for using this strategy. It would look something like this:

      1. Embrace: large company creates a really stable and well moderated instance that federates with almost everything to attract users

      2. Extend: large company adds custom features to the instance that are incompatible with other instances

      3. Extinguish: people stop using other instances as incompatibilities start impacting user experience. Big instance might also stop federating with other instances, so users are forced to use their instance to see content. After this, big company starts making the platform shittier to make more money.

      • C4Phoenix@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        Could go the same way as Gmail. A lot of people just use Gmail. Gmail has a lot of control in the email space because of that. Even though “Email” is an open standard/protocol Gmail has control through the spam filter. Its really hard to setup your own email server without getting a lot of spam so it isn’t that open anymore. These are some challenges for open standards as well.

    • nodester@partizle.com
      1·
      1 year ago

      Part of Cory Doctorow’s point is that this pattern emerges with all kinds of companies, especially ones where investors are demanding an outrageous return on a hasty speculation.

  • bazingabot@beehaw.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    Probably because I just deleted my account over there and deleted all posts and comments I ever made