Something about it clicks for me

You must be a Cherry MX Blue fan

Ok now you’re just being a troll. Instead of contributing meaningfully to the discussion, you picked up on three words each from the parent and myself, ignored the entirety of our respective arguments, and derailed what could have been an intelligent discussion about Aaron’s actual contributions to early Reddit and turned it into a superficial joust about some words you unilaterally proclaimed to be verboten.

Be better. Be more charitable and thoughtful. Otherwise we’re just pushing people back to Reddit.

I for one don’t see the issue with that “to be fair” statement here. The parent used it merely to announce that they were going to take the counter-point to the most likely community view, i.e., they were going to defend Reddit’s action of not naming Swartz as co-founder. They then proceeded to do so by explaining that Swartz never really played a co-founder role. The comment implied “to be fair [to whoever at Reddit made that decision] and then went on to provide supporting argumentation.

It’s quite different from the lazy use of the phrase, e.g., “to be fair, both sides suck” that you may find in political discussions without supporting arguments, for example.

What an odd title. WorldCoin never masked its biometric collection effort as “public art”. There was never any mention of art anywhere in the white paper or anything. Art has literally nothing to do with any of what WorldCoin is doing.

The concerns about WorldCoin are absolutely genuine and worthy of public discussion, but this particular title is just clickbait from an art publication trying to draw traffic about a trendy but unrelated AI and crypto topic.

Al Gore was definitely prescient in naming his documentary inconvenient.

Climate change is as much a human problem as it is a geophysical one because that psychological defense mechanism that you anecdotally describe in the face of existential gloom is universal to our species, and the cause of so much ill-placed skepticism and hostility toward climate science and its communicators. Don’t Look Up also did a good job at portraying this unfortunate human bias.

We as a species are too smart for our own good; smart enough to geoengineer our world to the point of threatening its existence, but not smart enough to address our own resistance to change and take collective action where and when it’s urgently needed.

For those who study climate change and those who try to mitigate it, there is this double burden of not only losing sleep over the magnitude of the existential threat, but also facing the moral and psychological failings of those who refuse to see reality for what it is and argue against it. It’s tiring.

Interesting - do you have more details about that? I would expect the “top 1K” query to show the leftovers, which would have become the next most top/controversial/etc after the original top 1K got nuked.

I agree that investors requiring demonstrable returns has played a role in this cycle. Steve Huffman is desperate to show profits ahead of Reddit’s IPO, and Musk is desperate to recoup his $44B investment in the blue bird.

However, I believe that there’s also another consideration. Many of today’s platforms started out with a somewhat idealistic intent. Jack Dorsey wanted Twitter to be an open protocol, though never quite achieved his vision. Aaron Swartz contributed to the open design of early-days Reddit. Facebook was meant as a non-profit university community builder. Google had (and abandoned) a “do no evil” motto. Etc.

The original user-first approach of these platforms created organic growth and encouraged ambassadorship by motivated users who became frequent contributors, unpaid moderators, etc.

Over time, however, people moved on (Dorsey, or very sadly Swartz) or got greedy from success (Huffman, Zuckerberg). The focus shifted from user-first to advertiser-first. Platforms like Reddit still used a loss-leader approach of losing investor money on frills such as API because it helped sustain growth for a while longer.

But once critical mass was reached, there was no longer a need to coddle the most enthusiastic and long-time users. They had exhausted their usefulness. The platforms could finally embrace the advertiser-first model in which the user, not the content, becomes the product.

So here we are with the worst of both worlds. Reddit could have offered a reasonable paid API plan that would have allowed the thriving third-party ecosystem to retain the power users and contributors. Instead, it went all-in with a walled-garden approach buoyed only by advertising money, even if it means that the content quality dwindles. Twitter also went “private” in the sense that an account is now required to even view the content, and aggressively promotes its paid plan to users –who are still subject to interstitial ads and promoted content– even for basic hygiene features such as 2FA.

As for why Reddit, Twitter, and Discord shit the bed at almost the same time, part of it has to do with VC pressure (as mentioned by the parent), and part of it is they are the same generation (more or less) of social networks and are reaching an equivalent stage where buyout (Twitter) or IPO (Reddit) is the next logical step.

The writing is on the wall that a paradigm shift is in order. The pendulum has considerable momentum, though, and will allow the centralized, walled-garden web to thrive for a while longer, just like Facebook survives catering to mostly an audience of unsavvy boomers. But the swing back will gradually enable alternative models to grow that are based on open platforms and federated content. We’re just very, very early in this cycle.

Oh, and sorry for the long-ass essay, I got a bit carried away.

I’ve been online since circa 1993 and for the first decade or so, discoverability was a challenge due to the lack of efficient search engines like Altavista or (later) Google.

Webrings consisted in individual website owners (e.g., on Geocities) placing one or more banners at the bottom of their webpage linking to other like-minded sites, typically in quid-pro-quo manner (I link to you, you link back to me), or to a manually-curated directory of like-minded sites.

This was when “surfing the web” meant exactly that - you would surf from one site to another using hyperlinking within web communities. Bookmarking was then how you kept track of the most interesting sites you came across.

Now there is hardly a need for hyperlinking and bookmarking, since much of the content is centralized on a few platforms, and search engines take care of the discoverability of niche content.