- alternative culture is born or aglomerate around internet hub
- hub tries to monetize its audience, rightly so for sustainability of the platform. Server costs, management, moderation etc etc.
- it takes just a few years for hub to become a corporation full of clueless corpos who have no idea about the initial culture and core audience.
- hub is bleached beyond recognition because corpos are scared of anything that is slightly controversial - including the original culture hub was about.
- "That's not family friendly! We also need those ESG and DEI labels to attract investors! The advertisers won't approve their brand associated with this!”
The current term for this is "enshitification" right?
- hub dies, culture might disperse, corpos get their golden parachute and latches into the next big project.
It seems to be a very common story. Reddit, DA, you can think go a lot of examples. It WILL happen with big Mastodon and BlueSky instances.
If you think about it you gotta give credit for 4chan keeping a big chunk of its soul, rather you like the site contents and its users or not.
I'm not sure it's happened to Reddit so far? They've managed to avoid the desexualization that has destroyed other platforms, and now their size might mean they can ride it out.
In the same way that Playboy can get away with posting sneaky things and Meta can only shadowban them and doesn't dare terminate them: https://www.instagram.com/p/C3-nnn9RM82/ (NSFW)
1) ESG/DEI stuff wasn't even a whisper on the wind when this stuff went down. It was still very much DADT, Jack Thompson lawsuits, elected-Bush-twice America. In other words, the complaints were mostly coming from the center/right (and Joe Leiberman, if you still considered him a liberal).
2) 4chan was in the "advantageous" position of never being able to attract major advertisers in the first place. And while a good bit of the old culture is still extant, the post-Trayvon-murder/GG/Trump-meme-magic era did a number on its userbase's ability to focus on the lulz instead of descending into conservative (if not just straight-up Nazi) rhetoric (and not for laughs).
But, yeah, the rest of this tracks. It's basically inevitable unless the site admins get to a point where they're happy with the userbase size/culture/whatever and decide there's no need for any more changes. Examples: Craigslist, SA (to a degree), FA (despite controversies and the recent UI change, which users can mercifully opt out of). In fact, I would say that unnecessary or large-scale UI changes are good heuristic for determining when things are about to go downhill.
- hub tries to monetize its audience, rightly so for sustainability of the platform. Server costs, management, moderation etc etc.
- it takes just a few years for hub to become a corporation full of clueless corpos who have no idea about the initial culture and core audience.
- hub is bleached beyond recognition because corpos are scared of anything that is slightly controversial - including the original culture hub was about.
- "That's not family friendly! We also need those ESG and DEI labels to attract investors! The advertisers won't approve their brand associated with this!”
The current term for this is "enshitification" right?
- hub dies, culture might disperse, corpos get their golden parachute and latches into the next big project.
It seems to be a very common story. Reddit, DA, you can think go a lot of examples. It WILL happen with big Mastodon and BlueSky instances.
If you think about it you gotta give credit for 4chan keeping a big chunk of its soul, rather you like the site contents and its users or not.