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I mean, did they steal it? Or did people largely willingly give it away? People willingly left the older decentralized platforms in favor of centralized corporate platforms because, for one reason or another, they felt it was a better use of their time. The old-school forums weren't killed; people stopped using them and left for Reddit and Facebook and Instagram etc.
If we want to reverse this, we need to understand why this happened, what those service provided that lured people, and how we can build better alternatives, and I think there's more to this than just "corporation bad".
Edit: Downvote if you like, but I'd much prefer an actual response, because I think there is an interesting conversation to be had about this.
You can't really blame this on the people. The centralized platforms offered something that for most people worked a lot better than what was already existing. In the beginning, those corporate platforms were actually quite good so it's only natural that people flocked to it.
It's only after those companies achieved a monopoly in their market, that they started pulling a bait-and-switch and began to enshittify their sites. Network effect makes it so that mass migration to something that's technically better is unlikely. This bait-and-switch is where they stole it from the people.
I'm not really blaming the people here, and I kind of question how useful an exercise blame even really is in this kind of the thing. Being angry at companies for trying to make money isn't a particularly productive exercise, since that is their entire point, and I'd much rather funnel that energy into building alternatives that are insulated from those pressures. The fact of the matter is that the corporations built something that people wanted, they began using it, and now the monetization is dialing up and sharply degrading the user experience. This was always going to be possible, and they are perfectly within their rights to do what they want with their own platforms, even if it's shitty. I wouldn't really characterize this as 'theft', though I suppose that's really a question of semantics. Exploitation of human psychology, perhaps yes.
But as that experience continues degrading, it does create a big opening for platforms like the Fediverse that aren't bound to those same monetization incentives. Network effects definitely make transitions difficult, but that's not insurmountable, and also is much less powerful in anonymous platforms like discussion boards and forums. I think kbin and Lemmy are in a pretty promising position, though there will of course be some growing pains, and it'll take time for a critical mass of users to arrive and participate in a wide variety of topics.
Hell yeah you can blame the people. They chose to use those platforms, and they choose to stay with them as they grow ever shittier. They're the ones enabling platforms like reddit.
While I think you are right and there are surely factors worth investigating, I cannot shake the feeling that 'money for ads' is a really big one.
To the point: I cannot htelp but notice that the bigger services place emphasis on you presenting, ourself, while small decentralized ones place more import on anonimity. I think there's a part in all or most people that wants to present themselves and be lauded among peers. This is to me why platforms with photo capability like fb and insta took off. Also reddit was trying to gravitate more and more towards this with following profiles and bla
That's definitely a pretty important distinction, and I'm definitely interested to see if there'll ever be a federate platform that does emphasize real identities. Growing that would be very hard given the network effects, but TikTok etc show that it is possible, at least.
I think PixelFed is going in this direction if I’m not mistaken. Also to your points and which I keep bringing up… you can have both anonymous and Real identities interacting directly with each other here. Of course other social media sites can do this somewhat but they all encourage you to give them as much info as possible.
Of course there's more to this than "corpo bad", it's the economic system that drives these businesses to focus on profit over the quality of the user experience--but I think that's the core to all the "corpo bad" arguments when you really boil them down. These websites and services have become so ubiquitous for two reasons:
The first reason, is that people tend towards simplification, if you can give them a centralized location where they can have all their needs met, they prefer it to the effort it takes to use multiple locations/services. A great example is the popularity and convenience of stores like Walmart or Costco where you can do all of your shopping in one quick go. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and even YouTube to a lesser degree all offer these one-stop-shop kind-of models by allowing you to connect with a vast amount of people, discuss a large number of topics, and view multiple forms of media. So, unless they have a good reason to remain diversified, people tend towards simplification.
The second reason is also psychological in nature. These companies, (whom we will refer to as FaRT), have designed and redesigned their entire systems to drive up refresh rates, click-through rates, and otherwise increase advertising visibility. In addition to hacking the addiction mechanisms, and the desire for people to feel important, they take it even further using deception and "dark UI". Even when you utilize many of the adblocking systems, for example, FaRT inject advertising content directly into the same stream of other user content(the best example is direct corpo sponsorship of big name YouTube content creators, but at-least that money goes directly to the creators). Plus, advertisers are getting much, much better at disguising this content so that you are less likely to skip it before seeing it.
So it's a two-sided coin, a major part of the problem is that "corpo bad", and now that they're taking it to a degree of harming the public experience for profits (which is why cable television died), it's our responsibility to step out of our comfort zones and show them that we are willing to inconvenience ourselves a little for a better UX.
There comes a breaking point where people and organizations who are dependent on Facebook ads will actually move from the jaws of this giant corporations for more freedom and control. We are certainly seeing it now by example. I'm someone who just left Reddit and actually am here to invest in this platform and you can't say well I'm the exception.
There were us knowledgeable early adopters who were ridiculed endlessly by ... pretty much everybody ... who actually worked to build the thing. Then the companies came.... and brought with them the ignorant, unthinking majority of the lowest common denominator who believe everything they're told to believe. I call it stolen. The consumer class that followed the corporations didn't build this place, nor did they represent what we had built.
I get what you're saying, having just nuked my nearly 12 year old Reddit account yesterday. Things changed a lot, and I'd definitely say most of it was for the worse.
However, I don't know if this, for lack of a better term, superiority complex, is particularly helpful The fact is that early adopters and enthusiasts made Reddit a cool and useful platform, and so more and more normal began using it. The only way to prevent that from happening is to make a platform actively unappealing, and I wouldn't say that's exactly a good idea. The best thing, IMO, is to stay isolated from monetization incentives and ensure that communities of like-minded people can be formed and interact with each other in a healthy way, both normie and enthusiast.
I mean, if Reddit today magically became a non-profit, reduced the API fees to cover only costs, and eliminated active monetization schemes, that wouldn't suddenly revert the user base back to the way it was a decade ago. The presence of the "ignorant unthinking majority of the lowest common denominator who believe everything they're told" is not dependent on the pursuit of profit.
Honestly as an early user of Facebook, Reddit, etc., we shouldn't forget that when people first came to these services, they were the smaller, cleaner, more text-based alternatives to bigger corporate bullshit. Myspace was busy, bloated, Malware prone, Facebook was light and organized. Digg became super corporatized overnight, Reddit was clean and simple. Once early users are on that shit when it's good, their friends follow, and eventually communities form and it's very, very difficult if you care about a community to abandon it for an alternative. Websites aren't just "websites," they're people, and just like tech companies eventually always put profits over people, people put people over software. They'll put up with a lot of shit to stay on touch woth the people they loved.
Most of the old internet platforms which failed were bought by corporations - sometimes to do just that, to shut it off.
Livejournal was bought by Russia to stop any dissent. Similarly twitter was bought to kill activism which for ultra rich was becoming an issue as it was undoing their lobbying. (forget all the drama over it, thats a smoke screen to hide real issue)
In the end, only when we leave gluttony and greed behind, and understand the full game - can we have a fair internet. Otherwise there are powerful people with power and money behind them who would like to keep controlling you for their benefit.
we (humans) let this happen to us.
I upvoted you, but I think some people just downvote and move on not because they 100% disagree with you, but because they don't quite have the time to post a detailed reply, and they're probably hoping someone else does on their behalf, which they will upvote if it's close to what they're trying to say.
Not enough hours in a day to type out a detailed response to a downvote (or even upvotes) when you have so many other things on your plate. I'm guessing they were trying to say something like, "I didn't choose to leave decentrazlied platforms, I'm still on them. Everyone else did, I had to follow them if I wanted to keep in touch with my family and friends."
But that's just a stab in the dark, honestly.