both companies notably ruined the internet in the 2010s by consolidating discourse then taking various steps to destroy the user experience and the feel of the communities for profit.
so, broadly, the web went from cozy, small hobby forums in the 90s and 00s, then with the 10s as a transitional period, the 20s being practically complete corporate control of online discourse.
it’s a bummer. but nothing lasts forever. where will we go next?
Take a look at the numbers - they aren’t exactly leaving so much as staying right there.
Reddit has become like YouTube (or Twitch, Tiktok, whatever) - it provides a never-ending stream of “content”, albeit most of it made from AI these days after they pushed a large fraction of the human content creators away. And the users seem to not care one bit if it is a repost made from a decade or year ago, even copying the comments section line-for-line. It’s not like anyone is really “listening” anyway, they are simply waiting for their opportunity to speak - “^This”, “I also choose this guy’s wife”, “and my axe”, etc. We might despite such, but they seem to enjoy it? (which is good for us, as it contains them over there:-P)
And Twitter, well, you can see for yourself. It could work itself up to offering full-on Nazi propaganda - oh wait, it already has!:-P - and those users won’t mind. “It’s where my audience is”, they cry - ignoring how that is becoming less & less true, but also… isn’t it? Why aren’t they moving their content to Mastodon? It seems to have too many systemic problems, hence is losing ground already before it has even really started. Some users might go to Bluesky though.
Perhaps we’ll see a situation like TV where every provider offers “exclusive content” - the Fediverse being one, the Twitterverse (or whatever) being another, Reddit still yet another (with zombie resurrected content that people deleted, but it managed to scrape before that could happen, now reposted as bot-content under a thin guise of “no I’m a totally really real human, trust me bro” - plus, can you prove it, since despite you recognizing your words 100%, did you keep a copy of it, plus anyway they can trot out their legal claim to it in any case, hence whether they win or not either way you lose).
When I joined Kbin.social, I used to hold out STRONG hopes for the Fediverse. But then the former started dying, I moved to Lemmy, made the mistake of making a comment in ChapoTrapHouse, and another somewhere in Lemmygrad.ml, the feedback from which caused me to almost quit social media entirely… and now I no longer think that Lemmy will end up being very popular, i.e. burst out to include a more mainstream audience (certainly not a single person that I have recommended it to irl has anything even neutral to say about it - even programmers - and instead every single one has expressed extreme distaste with the extremist propaganda that is allowed to be expressed here. every. single. one. I try to explain that you can block it all but… perhaps that’s not as fun for people, especially those not used to systems-level OS management tasks i.e. those who don’t use Arch btw:-D). I hope we are okay with that - definitely some people seem to prefer it that way even - but either way it is what it is. Though cross-platform aggregators like Mbin, Piefed, and Sublinks may hold some hope.
^This
^This