I’m hopeful Lemmy can avoid the hate/outrage/fear cycle. At the moment it feels very peaceful.

I often wondered if a need to sell advertising space and user data led to reddit pushing content that catered to anger, outrage and fear, as it drives engagement.

In my view there’s nothing they could do.

Reddit is, in a sense, a parasocial company. It relies on the good will of its users and moderators to generate and moderate content for the site. Users then develop a sense of community and an identity around the site. The fiction of a social relationship then continues.

By adopting a policy that makes it difficult for third party applications to persist and by their behaviour in the intervening weeks, they’ve highlighted the economic nature of users/moderators relationships with the site.

People generally don’t like when a social relationship is treated as economic by one party, typically the other party is offended. It’s almost like if a friend came to your house for dinner and at the very end said thanks and slapped $10 on the table then left. Unless there was a clear discussion beforehand about chipping in for ingredients etc, it kind of cheapens the interaction.

So effectively, if my relationship with Reddit is now less social and more economic, then why would I contribute to them without compensation? This is especially true for moderators who collectively are estimated to provide $30 million per year in free labour for reddit.

I am, of course, aware that the relationship always was economic at its heart, and the site wouldn’t function if people had to be compensated for their interaction. But the illusion has been shattered and in my view can’t be repaired.