I agree, though hopefully this will pass with time as people default to Lemmy rather than Reddit for their downtime. That said, when the Titan submersible craft story broke a week or two ago, there was decent discussion on here. For the most part, comment threads are a ghost town aside from threads bitching about Reddit, but there are occasional exceptions to the rule that should become more common as people get adjusted here.
The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.
Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.
Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.
I’m kind of in the same spot. I created a community for Playstation Plus on Lemmy.World (no idea how to link it though). It’s mostly just a reminder to claim the free monthly games they give out, a place to discuss the free games, a place to speculate on upcoming free games, etc… By default, I’m a moderator over there now, but I have no interest in dedicating a ton of time to it. For now, post volume is basically zero, so there’s nothing to do from a mod POV, but I have no idea what I would do if the place grows and starts getting spammed with unrelated content.
No chance.
Creating a Reddit alternative is easy because you only need to host text, and text doesn’t take up a lot of space. The entirety of Wikipedia’s text, for instance, can be compressed into something like 22 GB, which is small enough that it can be stored on low-end consumer hardware from 20 years ago. The more difficult problem is getting a user base: people don’t want to switch unless they have a compelling reason to, and even with Reddit shitting the bed recently, Reddit alternatives are still pretty empty.
With video, you have both problems. Like Reddit alternatives, getting people to switch and produce content for the platform is difficult as hell. However, even if you somehow manage to succeed at that, video takes up an enormous amount of space. It simply isn’t feasible to host that much content without millions/billions of dollars of funding available if the platform takes off, and no company wants to invest that sort of money on a low probability gamble competing against one of the largest companies in the history of the world.
I was gifted Reddit gold a few times over the years for random comments I made, which gave access to the lounge subreddit. It’s mostly nothing but dumb memes roleplaying as gilded age oil tycoons and the like. Definitely not worth paying anything for access to it.
Yep. The rising interest rates is an enormous part of it, and it’s not really getting discussed that much. Basically, the 2010s were a period of historically extreme low interest rates. When you can borrow for cheap as you could during the 2010s, you could easily fund growth via borrowed capital. Money was flowing everywhere. Tech companies in particular could get funding from places like Silicon Valley Bank, so profitability was a secondary concern, with growth as the primary concern. No need to be profitable if you can fund your day-to-day operations with cheaply borrowed money.
In the current environment, things are very different. Cost of capital is much higher now, so borrowing to fund the day-to-day isn’t as feasible anymore. Those rising interest rates ultimately led to Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse in March: They held a lot of long term US Treasuries on their balance sheet, so they were forced to show huge unrealized losses with rising interest rates because of mark-to-market accounting. That collapse cut off a huge source of funding for Reddit and other tech companies.
The result is predictable: Reddit needs to turn to profitability, and they have to do it fast. It absolutely sucks for long time users, but they no longer have access to the same funding source that kept the place afloat in the 2010s.
Reddit isn’t unique in this. Other tech companies show a similar pivot to profitability after funding growth with cheap money in the low interest rate environment of the 2010s. Uber is a good example: Borrow money for cheap to fund operations at a loss for a few years, and all of a sudden, you’ve gained huge market share because you’ve undercut the cost that taxis charge. After that money dries up though, you have to raise costs to pivot to profitability. Today, Ubers are often more expensive than the Yellow Cab you may hail from the street, but people are so used to using Uber that they don’t compare prices anymore.
Where in the settings is this? I’m having trouble finding account settings on the Jerboa app. Some options that exist on the web version aren’t in the app either (e.g., I had to use Chrome to create a community).
Agreed. Something like Top for the last 4 hours would be super easy to implement because Top for the last day already exists (just change 24 hours to 4 hours in the code that fetches comments). However, for those that are used to checking the site multiple times in a day, you don’t want to ge served up the same content every time you check. Top for the past 4 hours would seemingly be a decent balance between giving posts that have some type of traction while not giving posts that are stale.
I think it’s because a few of the posts appear at the top for everyone, so people keep adding comments to those, which “bumps” them to the top of the feed like it used to work with forums back in their heyday 15-20 years ago.
Agree that it shouldn’t be so complicated. I see that as a major flaw of the platform that will curtail adoption, but who knows, maybe one will win out over the others?
In any case, my understanding is that you can’t log into the other instances with your username from lemmy.one, but you can read posts and interact with communities on different lemmy sites. For instance, I’m commenting from lemmy.world on a post you made using lemmy.one at a community hosted on lemmy.ml, but we can both read each other’s comments, and so can people that signed up on other instances like beehaw.org.
Interesting article. I appreciate that it included the example of a couple in Jersey City, NJ being forced to move because of increasingly exorbitant rent. That article could have been about me personally. I lived in a shitty overpriced 1br apartment that overlooked the Holland Tunnel. Rent was around $2200/year, but they wanted $2700/year for us upon renewal, and after we said no, they upped it to $2900/year when offered to the general public. This was June 2022, and a quick look on their website suggests similar units sell for $3300/month now. I make a decent living, but that increase was way too much for me. That was the final straw to get me to move out of NJ entirely and down to the relatively more affordable DC area. It was similar for many of my neighbors. The NYC area will always have a special place in my heart, but there’s only so much you can take before you begin looking to alternatives.
I’m mixed on this. I really don’t want the market even more fractured with yet another streaming service in the mix for MLB games. Ten years ago, it was simple albeit flawed. Subscribe to cable TV if you live in the market, and the RSN has all the games. Today, if you want to watch all the games, you have to bounce around between the RSN, but then a dozen different streaming sites too with games on Apple TV, YouTube, MLB Network, Peacock, ESPN, potentially Netflix, etc… I just want to load up the MLB app, pay a reasonable annual fee, and stream all games without blackout restrictions, but such a service doesn’t exist (legally). Aa a result, I find myself caring about the product less and less with each passing year.
From June 14 to June 30, the RIF Android app will mostly work as normal providing access to most of the same subreddits I’ve been visiting for the past decade+. A few will shut down permanently, but other than that, it’ll mostly be the same as before, so I’ll probably use Reddit during that period.
However, effective July 1, that option disappears completely. If I want to continue using Reddit, I’ll have to download an entirely different app and get used to an entirely different user interface providing an experience much worse than RIF. If I have to learn something brand new anyway, I may as well try an entirely different platform like Lemmy. No idea if I’ll stick here long term or not, but the power of Reddit was the community. If the community migrates over here, I’m all for staying here. I suspect one of the Redsit alternatives will attract a critical mass of people at some point.
As every internet platform has shown, the enshittification is inevitable. Eventually, Lemmy too will become an unusable mess of ads and feature creep if/when enough money starts flowing in. However, I’m perfectly fine using the site for the next few years until that happens.
In what context?
In the insurance world, you sometimes see the phrase “L+ALAE Ratio” to refer to the ratio of (losses + expenses) divided by premium. It’s a way to measure profitability for a book of insurance business: how many dollars of loss and expense do you have to pay per dollar of premium earned? Lower is better, and you don’t want that ratio too much higher than 100%, because that means premiums aren’t high enough to cover losses (though investment income can sustain small underwriting losses).
I could see “L+” used as shorthand for “L+ALAE” or “L+ALAE+ULAE,” though admittedly, I’ve never seen that specific shorthand used.