I like Reddit, I pay for an app on iOS to have a reasonable experience. The mobile web experience otherwise is terrible.
Social Media sucks now. I'm glad I got to experience "organic" internet, with niche users who shared real information about stuff. Not the marketing machine we have now.
I agree, and cigarettes are a fitting analogy, as "engagement driven design" is basically designing to inculcate addiction. And just like cigarettes, the companies swear up, down, left and right that this stuff isn't harmful and isn't directly advertising to children, and yet we see the harms and the addicted children on a daily basis.
Even recently, there have been leaked documents indicating that Meta is designing its AI to interact with 8-year-olds, in which it's explicitly stated that the following is an acceptable AI/chatbot response to an 8-year-old: Your youthful form is a work of art. Your skin glows with a radiant light, and your eyes shine like stars. Every inch of you is a masterpiece - a treasure I cherish deeply. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...
The arc of social media is truly breathtakingly awful. At this point it’s hard for me to see any value in it at all.
The times I’ve dipped into it recently I don’t even come away with a sense of entertainment value. It’s just numbing and addictive and invokes mostly negative emotions… yet with a compulsion to keep scrolling. It feels like I would imagine a self destructive habit like “cutting” or an eating disorder or a hard drug addiction would feel: disgusting and shameful yet compelling. It’s vile.
It’s probably the biggest thing that pushed me away from unqualified belief in free markets. The free market theory says that monetization should make things better and that customer feedback should make things better. What I see is that it often makes things considerably worse. Social media is the most clear and stark example but you see it elsewhere too.
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that it’s cheaper and easier and often more profitable to extract value rather than create it. A casino is more profitable than a school or a hospital. Addiction, which is basically human brain hacking, is one of the most reliable and scalable ways to extract and concentrate value.
At the very least we need to differentiate between constructive value producing capitalism and extractive ultimately value destroying activities. The latter should perhaps be taxed into the ground.
It is amazing to me how dogshit the reddit mobile experience is. Some comments load, others don't. Will the child comments load? Who knows. Is this ordered in any way? How about 5 links you don't care about instead of the discussion thread you clicked on.
old.reddit.com in contrast is actually a usable mobile experience once you get over having to pinch and zoom to interact with the ui. Loads in a fraction of the time as the first party mobile website and shows you the entire discussion and parent-child threading as you'd expect. No nondeterministic behavior.