• HolidayGreed@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s all going to plan. A wealthy investor has paid a lot of money to shut down popular platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Knowledge is power and they can afford to, and have the incentive to keep us in the dark. Can’t have us poors rising up against inequality if we have no soapbox to stand on.

      • Maturin@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        But seriously, why aren’t we talking about this more? We’ve seen some fairly significant mass movements gain real traction on Twitter and Reddit in the past few years and, simultaneously and nearly instantly they are both quickly scrambled and made completely useless for that purpose.

      • ferne@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Not to divert too much from your point, but Reddit was a progressive and intelligent community? Thanks for the laugh haha

        • Seasoned_Greetings@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Reddit is 1000’s of communities. It’s just as wrong to say that it isn’t progressive and intelligent as it is to insinuate it’s all one big community in the first place.

          However, it’s really not a secret that reddit’s majority (at least used to) lean left harder than any other social media. Intelligent is maybe subjective and not accurate, but they were at least more progressive than most other social media sites.

        • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I mean, Twitter? Dude (may as well have) lost 45 billion dollars and is still a hundred -billionaire now with a circle jerk site of “supporters” rather than people talking about how much his cars suck and how unethical his business practices are.

      • cynar@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It fits with existing patterns depressingly well. The issue is, it’s generally very subtle.

        E.g. Murdoch once even admitted on camera what he does. He “suggests” what he thinks should happen to politicians. Those that either agree, or follow his “advice” start getting negative stories about them dropped from his papers etc. Conversely, those that disagree get their positive stories dropped more. Once a few politicians have had their careers ended by it, most of the rest fall into line, it’s only minor favours. Until it’s not; and all the previous favours suddenly risk looking very bad in the press…

        No laws broken, no overt threats given, but the more it happens the stronger it becomes. It eventually helped cripple BBC news, in the UK, among many other problems.

        Reddits behaviour fits this pattern too well. Something has been offered in the background. Initially, it was for small favours, but it’s now reached a tipping point. I suspect they are hoping that they can fire sale the whole user driven system (everything must go [at once]). People fatigue on the constant news, and there’s nowhere new to flow and reorganize.

      • AnonymousLlama@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Hard to prove that type of stuff. It could just be incompetent leadership but it’s starting to feel like it’s something more given how many back to back missteps they’ve had recently.

      • sorenant@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Everything is a Machiavellian drama nowadays and some people are determined to be the rebel heroes.

    • DragonAce@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve played with this idea in my head on several occasions. It does seem rather insane how all social media sites are self destructing and making business decisions that are questionable at best. Given all the uprisings across the globe in recent years, it would not surprise me if there were various investors and governments who would pay good money to destroy those platforms. Also the sudden and complete self destruction of both Reddit and Twitter right as we’re about to head into the 2024 US presidential elections, seems rather suspect as well.

      The other idea I’ve been considering is that both Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists who are throwing a massive childish tantrum and burning it all down simply because the users on their sites made fun of them.

    • wwaxwork@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m leaning into the theory it’s someone in power in Saudi Arabia. A member of their royal family is heavily invested in Twitter, owns shares and fronted Elon a big chunk of money for Twitter and they would surely like to crack down on social media in pretty much every middle eastern country, what with those pesky women protesting by not wearing their hijabs and protests and riots happening over there in the past decade. The first thing they do when there is trouble is shut down twitter, shutting it down permanently makes things easier for them.

    • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I don’t know how you could more organically commit corporate suicide than the way they’re going about running Reddit recently.

    • Lightor@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This.

      People keep laughing at how dumb execs are. Like they are dumber than the average person. They aren’t. They pay lots of money to very smart people who tell them what will happen. It’s just much easier for them if people think they’re dumb instead of malicious. Because again, they have smart people telling them how to play this.