I wouldn’t now but I 100% would have when I was in college. Although I would try to get away with making fake email accounts.

Anyone else struggle to not read defederate as defenestrate?

But if we just included the blockchain think of the shareholder value we could be generating. We could be decentralizing the blockchain with crypto NFTs in the cloud or whatever.

That’s a good point although with smart phones, I wonder how much of the teenager traffic is baked in year round now. Summer Reddit was terrible but then it just became Reddit.

How many people are less engaged in the internet at the beginning of summer because they’re on vacation or partying? I would think drops like this as the weather improves are pretty normal.

I don’t think it’s inevitable Threads will have a better user experience than non-corporate apps. Meta has different goals and will optimize the user experience to drive profits. Look at how they continuously make Facebook and Instagram worse to drive engagement.

Also, see Reddit. Apollo was one dude’s project that blows the official app out of the water. And all the other apps scrambling to support Lemmy benefit from apps like Apollo and Reddit is Fun lessons in UX. It’s early days but we’re already seeing Lemmy apps with a lot of potential.

Linux is another example. Technical issues for new users aside, there’s a lot of beautiful, easy to use desktops that blow windows 10/11 out of the water. And other less new user friendly options for power users are available as well.

The community driven approach has been demonstrated to work because it’s only goal is to give the community a good experience.

Can we get it to nuke your Facebook account too?

This has always been true of course but we used to have much faster turnover in social media sites. The current players have been around so long they seem like they can’t fail. But it’s not a coincidence that we’ve been riding a wave of cheap capital since about the time the current players started to dominate. Now that the free money tap is shut off, everyone’s scrambling to be profitable. The grow as fast as possible and never care about making money paradigm is over.

We’re basically in the ??? phase of “steal underpants, ???, profit” underpants gnome economic model.

I think we’re also seeing the ad model start to break down. It was always a Ponzi scheme. Everyone hates ads and goes out of their way to avoid them. If less and less people engage with ads, no one is going to pay as much because it’s not worth it. This forces companies to be more and more invasive in their data collection and ad targeting which erodes trust in the companies and degraded the user experience.

We’re seeing both these things converge and it’s shaking up the entire internet order.

I would imagine, like most startups, a large chunk of their compensation is stocks and their valuation has gone up quite a bit. So what would normally be ~$400k total compensation has shot up but a large portion of it is theoretical.

The fun thing is that even if you’re not there, they have a shadow profile to track you