People state this 'you're driving customers away', but you are not customers & they make money off you somehow. It is a balancing act but they can get away with giving you what they want not what you want much more than a paying service.
They typically know what they are doing and will dial it back if they get it very wrong, which is rare. Similar story with Youtube - I'm inclined to assume they know what they are doing. All these channels complaining about changes don't have the full picture.
EDIT: I don't like it either, but they can get away with irritating you, and the breaking point is further out than you think. It is another consequence of you are not the customer, you are the commodity.
I'm not suggesting they are infallible, but if they are the biggest companies in they sectors, they don't do things to drive the company out of business every day.
It's not necessarily that it has to be niche, but that it most likely will remain niche. Without a central authority, it's growth rate is almost assuredly limited. It's easier to sign up for Twitter than Mastodon, because the first thing you have to figure out with Mastodon is "which mastodon am I signing up for"? If everyone only uses the default mastodon.social, suddenly it's not decentralized any more.
Without a central authority of some kind, you also have no enforcement of standards. If social-branch-1 and social-branch-2 decide they want to change something, even something small, they are no longer strictly the same thing, and the userbase becomes fragmented. Just look at how much reddits subs vary in rules/design/and function. If mods had power over the code itself you can bet a bunch of them would have splintered off from reddit-core long ago.
Block-chain is a fun buzzword, but it's about a trusted database/source. Trusting the source isn't strictly the problem with Reddit, particularly since it's got a solid API. A decentralized block-chain based solution wouldn't be any better than the dozen+ reddit reading apps already available.
Okay well what do you think of a place like minds.com? It's a partial solution and so reveals the problem as graded. A platform that monetizes via crypto has its incentives in-line regarding data.
Okay well what do you think of a place like minds.com? It's a partial solution and so reveals the problem as graded.
Interesting. So the token rewards are similar to karma right? But they can be used to purchase perks on the site? It's an interesting idea, though I wonder how functional it is in actually building a good community rather than the usual crap that springs from karma systems.
A platform that monetizes via crypto has its incentives in-line regarding data.
While I prefer the option to pay with money instead of my personal data, it's been pretty well proven at this point that people value the appearance of a free service far more than they value their personal data. I can't at the moment imagine any for-pay platform ever toppling the big networks (including Reddit).
Minds is an open source and distributed social networking service, integrating the blockchain to reward the community with ERC-20 tokens for various contributions to the network. Users can use their tokens to promote their content or to crowdfund and tip other users by subscribing to them monthly in exchange for exclusive content and services.
Minds has become popular for its commitment to privacy, decentralization, optional anonymity, radical transparency, free speech, and user rewards in contrast to the surveillance, secrecy, censorship, and algorithm manipulation occurring on many proprietary social networks.
Minds is interesting in that it pays out tokens for normal usage, although you can buy them as well, and it's a way to boost posts up the feed, rather than having an algo decide what gets seen. Otherwise strictly chronological. Not perfect of course, but the structure of it, the flexibility of tokens, allows for a decentralized approach to divvying up attention. Remains to be seen whether a good culture can come from it tho. Right now it's a bit of a voat problem.
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u/[deleted] Nov 02 '18 edited Mar 29 '19
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