Like many people I’m here because of reddit going to shit. Twitter has increasingly been shit. gycat is shutting down in September. To me it seems like lots of bastions of social media are crumpling, but as a previous active reddit user, I’ve been personally effected. Is this just a frequency illusion or has something changed in the world that has changed the business case of these sites?
Most sites that rely on user generated content are a huge black hole of investor cash (Meta and YouTube are the only ones I can think of that aren’t) and have a natural lifespan where increasingly desperate attempts to extract value from it eventually kill the site. It seems like everything is going downhill at once because the web stopped innovating sometime around 2010 and the unprofitable experiments became pillars of the online experience. It’s why I’m excited about the fediverse - a return to community-led projects at last.