🧟 We are experiencing platform decay

The Reddit blackout gives us one less channel of information

Hello! It’s June and it’s boiling and I’m sitting in front of a computer because I can’t HELP myself. Today, children, we’re going to look at:

• Reddit’s new API announcement will likely shut down third-party clients — subreddits have gone DARK to protest this decision

• If you think about it, Reddit is actually a whole channel of carefully maintained information about niche subjects and deep fandoms. And now it’s… gone?

• There’s a tech journalist out there who has resorted to buying a physical encyclopaedia because apparently that’s how untrustworthy the internet is now.

Scroll down to put flesh on the above bones.

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Sorry, but anyone who says ‘I don’t use Reddit, actually’ is a LIAR. I do not have a Reddit account, but the recent blackout has made me realise that I actually land on a subreddit several times a week just because I will google a random problem — e.g. how to get past a certain part of a computer game, or how to do a certain fancy thing with a Notion database — and it’s usually the relevant Reddit community that has the best answer. This makes sense because niche Reddit communities are built around being obsessed with knowing everything about that niche. In a way, Reddit is a fairly reliable knowledge base for very specific things that don’t really matter, which is most things I Google, tbh.

In case you missed it, many subreddits switched to private on Monday (and at the time of writing, many still are private) to protest the new API changes. Here’s what’s happened/is happening:

• Reddit are going to IPO soon; that means their website has to start ‘being profitable’ so that some crusty old men can get a ‘return on investment’ or whatever.

• The Reddit App is a piece of shit, so naturally committed Reddit enthusiasts have built popular third-party alternatives (such as Apollo)

• The CEO of Reddit has announced that their API fees will soon increase to some ridiculous amount, which means apps like Apollo will no longer be able afford to keep going. Protest time!

This week I have already landed on a couple of private subreddits, looking for an answer to a question I typed into Google. It’s hilarious how much worse Google is without Reddit — and that is a sentence I never thought I’d type. In a way, Reddit provides a good channel of information on the internet, and now it’s sort of gone.

This, to me, is a perfect example of platform decay. It’s happening to Twitter (most recently they’ve stopped paying their Google Cloud bills lol) and Facebook, and now it’s starting to happen in a lot of other online spaces. The main cause of platform decay seems to be bad top-down decision-making.

Despite Reddit’s users having the power to carve out beautiful online niches in a way that works for them, they are still ultimately part of a centralised platform. The CEO of Reddit has clocked that the Big Tech business model cannot sustain an environment that allows this much freedom and control. But what he refuses to understand is that the business model cannot sustain itself either. Until now, Reddit had maintained conditions which allowed online communities to thrive and fandoms to deepen. I’m not sure what response the Reddit leadership was expecting upon removing these conditions. This decision does a lot to demonstrate how out of touch they are with their own user base. People don’t visit Reddit everyday because they like Reddit — they just like talking to each other about their favourite things.

Their purported reasoning for making these API changes also shows that they think their users are dumb. They say that they want to protect them from having their content used to train LLMs and other AI models, but Redditors know it’s just a ploy to tear them away from third party clients, and onto Reddit’s official app, where they can serve ads, collect data, and therefore make more money. This is clear from the comments in a recent AMA, where users and devs called the CEO a coward and a liar.

Reddit’s imminent platform decay alongside Facebook’s crumbling newsfeed and Twitter’s rapid prolapse is emblematic of everyone’s general feeling that there are no good places left to hang out on the internet. You may think that TikTok counts as a platform but it doesn’t… it’s a format. I like it but it doesn’t feel like a ‘place’, it feels more like a fairground ride. You can’t really talk to anyone because you’re too busy screaming with laughter or recoiling in disgust.

Something else that’s come out of years of platform decay and the sudden need to pump everything full of generative AI is a renewed lack of trust in information. There are many critics and complainers out there who are lamenting over the loss of authenticity, and insist that our precious internet is no longer the chasm of reliable information it once was.

There’s even a guy who has resorted to buying the only physical encyclopaedia that is still in print, and kept up to date. The company who make this encyclopaedia also offer a digital version with a subscription, but no, this guy wanted twenty-two thick hardback books shipped to his house. He calls this is his ”antidote to the information apocalypse”, and he has tested the accuracy of the information in this encyclopaedia by reading pages on subjects he is already knowledgeable about. This man is in desperate need of a day off.

There are too many people out there with weekly columns who have no idea that misinformation was not invented on the internet. The internet is simply a series of channels through which misinformation (and… actual information) is delivered. Before that, people used television, radio, newspapers, phones, uh… notice boards in community centres — so many things! People STILL use those things. The encyclopaedia guy and those similar to him view digitisation as some kind of unstoppable disease, and think the only way to stay safe is by sequestering themselves inside the immutable pages of printed materials. This man thinks he has ‘won’ at ‘information-getting’ because he has closed down all but one channel of information. But surely it’s better to have multiple channels so you can draw better conclusions? Another option is also just caring less about knowing things, but whatever.

Information, whether online or offline — pre-internet or post-internet — has always been unreliable, for many reasons. One is that the way in which we use data to make decisions or design systems (such as computer vision) is built on a legacy of knowledge acquisition that is all about power. Exploring the world and making discoveries was a colonialist practice; so much of scientific discovery is/was as much about having glory and control over resources as it is/was about trying to understand new things. This means that newly acquired knowledge is very likely to have people’s values and motives imprinted all over it. In thinking about all this, I came across the paper ‘Do Datasets Have Politics?’ where the authors describe how, without even knowing, newly built datasets are infused with people’s values:

“In failing to articulate the values that shape dataset development, dataset authors aid in rendering the value-laden components of the dataset invisible, whether intentionally or not. Moreover, when values inherent in dataset development — through task formulation, collection of data instances, structuring of data via annotation processes, and more — are left unaccounted for, dataset creators signal that the myriad of decisions were not important, or even consciously made. Consequently, the resulting dataset is more likely to be viewed as a natural reflection of the world, rather than a constructed and situated reflection of a particular worldview.”

Because of this, surely any information we have access to cannot be infallible; there’s always going to be something tarnishing it, whether it’s bad AI or bad actors who are misinforming you on purpose. Any entity that tries to flatten every aspect of the world into something ‘understandable’ is engaging in a practice that will never give them what they want — you cannot get everyone to understand everything in the same way. Language, cultures, and viewpoints literally do not allow for this.

This all reminds me again of ‘the one best way’ of doing things, which is an idea explored by Jaques Ellul that I briefly had a look at in a post a few weeks ago, when discussing how AI search results attempt to collapse complex queries into very simple and potentially inaccurate answers. Striving for ‘the one best way’ to get information pushes us to meld knowledge into one single source of truth; if you look at Google’s mission for Search, this is exactly what they’re trying to do. They want to control information not so that we see the world for what it really is, but so that we see the world in a way that makes sense to them.

What’s funny about this is that Google and the encyclopaedia guy are kind of doing the same thing at different scales. They are both concerned with information that is accurate and accessible, except they will only provide that information in one way. Google provides a list of results and soon with Bard, just a couple of paragraphs of prose. None of this is necessarily accurate, and it certainly isn’t accessible if you don’t have the internet, can’t type, can’t read, etc etc. And don’t get me started on physical encyclopaedia guy: this man has the money to buy them, the space to store them, and the time to thumb through them every time a general knowledge question pops into his head — I wonder what he does when major real-world events happen and he cannot use his static, unchanging library of information books to tell him what’s going on.

Anyway, I’m not saying that the potentially indefinite Reddit blackout is going to ruin the internet. I’m saying that having channels of information/entertainment removed from our lives because of corporate interests is a real shame. I’m not even saying that platform decay is a bad thing; I think what we’re seeing here is a necessary shift away from big centralised social media, catalysed by the backward way these platforms are governed. It’s not the platforms themselves that should persist, but the communities that form on them. There is no ‘one best channel’ on which to talk to each other or learn things, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with utilising multiple channels at once.