I used to work in a place where we constantly got looked at by security companies and consultants. The wisdom of that time? Companies don’t hire security firms and consultants to find nothing, so no matter how asinine or impractical it is, they’ll still file it because an empty report is bad for business.

Our security handling was pretty strict, and we had to constantly talk customers off the ledge and kindly inform them that their consultant was blowing crazy swamp gas up their asses. My favorite was a firm that listed all Easter eggs as a vulnerability. An open source package could raise the list of developers with a secret key combo, and so the customer saw this on their report and raised a stink. The customer had no idea what this all meant, but their consultant had scared the crap out of them, so we had to layer on a patch to disable the stupid thing.

I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that any argument that goes on for long enough is going to get uncivil. You’re also very unlikely to convince someone who feel threatened by your point.

So I’ve got a soft ‘respond once’ policy. if someone replies to one of my comments, I respond once to clarify my position and address anything important. If I have failed to make my point by then, then my writing ability will continue to be insufficient in n > 2 comments, and I am adult enough to let them have the last word.

It’s not surprising. A lot of these CEOs run around in cliques. They have forums, news letters, Chatrooms, and social events. When Silicon Valley Bank went down, the CEO of the company I work for was giving us news from other CEOs he was talking to from a shared Chatroom they set up, basically a discord for CEOs.

The other point is that many CEOs are slaves to trend and have a deep fear of missing out.

In a way, they’re organized, and combined with the above, that’s part of why when one big company hops everyone leaps behind them as if they’re moving as one (it’s all a dick-measuring Highschool clique contest though, which is why I don’t use the word conspiracy). I would not be surprised if Huffman and Musk both repeated their rhetoric to an adoring crowd of fellows before they took it to their feeds. It’s maybe why they speak so brazenly, because there is a little echo chamber of people who worship at the altar of Survivorship bias in the hope that heaven will send them more bigger-dick pills.

Something to keep in mind is that these companies aren’t concerned with total profit or revenue or anything like that - it’s all about the percentage. I suspect in the short term, these AI-articles will look very profitable. Networking effects, consumer habits, and SEO will carry the day for a time.

But what always screws these MBA types is the inability to recognize the specific natures of their business and the second order effects. Not all costs are representable on a spread-sheet.

Basically, the second order to me really boils down to this: AI generated content isn’t really a ‘brand’. Good writing shops tend to build a following with their writers and expectations with their editors. The writing, investigative, and editorial bent of a house is essentially what makes a shop. See The Economist and The New Yorker as examples. In other places, a lot of niche shops are selling personality as much as product with youtube, podcasts, and others.

this means there is no real ‘value add’ someone like an AI shop can provide. You are throwing yourselves down the hole of becoming a pure commodity, and as every business major knows, being a commodity sucks. Short term profitable, but literally no one cares about where a mass produced nail comes from and its a race to the bottom of price.

So, as time goes on, with the barrier for entry being incredibly low, every bill and joe who fancies themselves an SEO wizard has no reason to not jump in, so your competition rises and your ability to charge some value for (ads?) drops a lot. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. Many of the companies that would occupy this brandless, commodity-filling space are way better positioned to make a run at it than the GAMURS Groups of the world. Microsoft’s Bing chat and (probably soon to follow Bard) will whip your ass in the long-game. Why search Bing to get an AI article from the Escapist when Bing will do it for me? I really doubt anything churned out by an AI with some edits will be that much better per convenience.

This whole could easily collapse in on itself. Like a lot of people in the AI space, I’m interested to watch what happens when AI begins to consume and be built on its own content.

I don’t disagree that there are evident growing pains, but I think a lot of people leaving Reddit have their head screwed on ass backwards about what “leaving” implies and demands.

Many of the redditors trying the fediverse aren’t trying the fediverse. They’re looking for Reddit, and nothing is ever going to be more Reddit than Reddit. You have to accept that the technology, terms, and culture may be different.

Many people are leaving Rome expecting to arrive in Carthage. What we have instead is a camp. The fediverse is still very small, new, and under developed. The moderation tools and culture are not established. Reddit went through years of growing pains to get to where it is now.

So yeah, you left something people put a lot of time and energy into, of course it’s going to suck a bit for a while. But it comes back to why you left - was it because of the interface changes, or the implied constitutional changes?

If you left because of Interface changes alone, you will not last. You want to consume, and not build.

Otherwise, If you’re like me, you’re sorta tired of putting effort into communities that get dumped on by corporate interests, and who are only willing to work towards safety so long as it furthers the bottom line. The fediverse kinda sucks right now, but it offers the promise of building something that may actually serve its community rather than a VC.

Like fixing a house you own versus an apartment you rent. Reddit will always be limited by what its share price demands. The fediverse will not be. I think it’s worth fighting for here rather than Reddit or other mainstream platforms.

Reddit employees will be able to easily know that more than 1000 subs went dark. They’re also probably well aware about how ad revenue works on the platform.

This message wasn’t really aimed at the employees. It was aimed at the MBAs and bankers who are preparing the IPO. It was meant for investors to say “everything is fine and this is normal…”

In a way, I mourned for reddit a long time ago. I stumbled (literally, stumbleUpon’d) reddit way back before the great Digg migration, when it was still mostly a haven for techies. The site went through a great many changes. Some good, some bad, some just… different.

At some point it got a little much. I’ve known for a number of years that I was growing increasingly alienated from it. Part of it was the Nazis and Reddit’s inability or unwillingness to deal with any of the hate and bots. Part of it was the pervasive meme / low effort image culture. Those things were always there, but there was a time it’d get you the stink eye and an annoyed upvote.

Besides Hackernews (which has always been full of a certain Silicon Valley type), there wasn’t really too many places to go. I’ve just been kinda waiting in the funeral parlor, hoping a ride to something else would come while I mostly browse the niche subreddits.

It’s my hope that this incident starts the seeds of old forum culture as expressed through multiple lemmys. That’s a pretty ambitious hope, but still. It’s well past the time for the big social media networks to break up.