this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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Asklemmy

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What makes a social network “work”?

Typically, we say that a social networking service works when it achieves some of these:

  • Community – gives users the ability to create communities they can feel a sense of belonging to.
  • Freedom of expression – expands people's ability to speak their mind in a .. umm... meaningful way ? (looking at 4chan's /pol/).
  • Rich expression – actually offers tools to express yourself (presence of features like markup, formatting, embeds).
  • Constructive culture – becomes an environment where people learn and participate in constructive and fun activities — like university clubs. (Sorry for the example, but Reddit’s r/anime comes to mind.)
  • Privacy & safety – respects users’ privacy and safety.
  • Developer support – provides good developer tools.
    • Example: In Numbers: The Best Anime of the Decade from MyAnimeList — a huge data-driven article made possible by open tools and APIs. (also a huge web page, might take forever to load all figures)

Feel free to add more points, or challenge the ones I’ve listed.

It seems like a general consensus here on Lemmy that — no matter how many times you try — Reddit will always slip from Aaron Swartz to u/spez.
Why do you think that is?

Disclaimer: I wrote the post by myself, but used AI to refine my bad English and markdown,

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[–] pierre_delecto@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 2 months ago

Everyone has mentioned the drive for profit, I just want to give another example that's more explicit:

  • Revenue comes from advertising
  • More ad views/engagement means more revenue
  • This drives the company to create algorithms to increase engagement. For instance promoting rage bait so you stay on the site longer. This leads to other scummy things like racist or sexual content as well
  • This drives the original community to fall apart as people are driven away (see enshittification)