Ouch. I certainly got that impression from reading Consciousness of Sheep though. Watkins is one of the few who doesn’t sugarcoat the UK’s condition. Unfortunately there are few journalists here in the USA of whom the same could be said. Progress ideology is nowhere stronger than here.
Probably belongs in the “local observations” thread but all of the employers in my area (Midwestern USA) are doing at least partial RTO – it started midway through 2022 and picked up momentum since. Obviously SWE can easily be done from home with digital meetings, and so it’s just a lot of time and energy wasted commuting. I could see 1x/2 weeks for a sprint meeting or something but the way they are doing this is just absurd. It’s all to shore up control and their CRE which will collapse anyway.
All of which goes to clarify the fact that, pay aside, corporations are really just not the place to be when it comes to innovation or forward thinking.
Splintering communities suffer from major attrition events that lower their value. We already have a model for where Twitter and Reddit are going – FB. Compared with 10 years ago it is a graveyard. If it weren’t for their ownership of IG, it would be far worse for them. It is now a site for older people and for an awful lot of fake accounts. Twitter and Reddit are headed this same direction, but it’s probably a 2-3 year timeline before it is really obvious. More generally, the model of centralized social media has already peaked. I am not disputing that they will still have large user bases but there will be a slow grinding down.
You ain’t kiddin’ man, I went there and I couldn’t believe the amount of chiseling you all have to put up with. And I’m American!
Thanks. Never heard of that one but it made my goddanged day!
FB is a desert compared with the old days, and Twitter will get there as well. Maybe the “AI revolution” can replace all the organic human content with fake people, but that’s about their only chance long term. If you can even call such a thing a “win”.
I’ll say. The kings of proprietary code grifting, but they sure want YOU to share all your code on GH, which they own (so that corporations can rip and run with it).
Yes. Truthfully for the last 2-3 years I have been dismayed with the direction social media in general were going, not only Reddit. Here were the 3 major issues I had: 1- lower quality of content & the volume of bad content drowning out the good, 2- the corruption of the companies themselves, and 3- the toxic social environment with nasty behavior becoming the norm. I think that fragmenting the web into smaller and more distributed communities, with a slower pace, will probably be a good thing at this point in time.
PS I’m happy to admit the web has always had a dark side, but it had gotten noticeably much worse in recent years.
Used to get about 200+ pages of search results. Now it’s about 30 actual results and half of them are fake / malicious / useless. Google as a company was once an innovator, but is now mostly a barrier to any kind of progress or improvement.