What made reddit great was the era after this, when many subs were then removed for promoting hate, users could also start avoiding subs so they won't show up, and everything else left up to user choice. This was the time when more people started to trust reddit more, and thanks to the likes of tumblr struggling, people felt comfortable enough to post more valuable and personal content.

Until of course they started messing with things again and then started allowing a lot of violence on the front page and filling feeds with recommendations.

Much in the same way you can find a variety of art but the majority that gets attention are hyper-realistic works. It's just easier to understand for the everyman.

Windows is especially bad at this due to so much legacy reliance, which is also kind of why people still bother with Windows. Not to claim that Linux or MacOS don't have similar problems (ahem, Catalyst) but it's not as overt.

A lot of the blame gets placed on easy to see things like an Electron app, but really the problem is so substantial that even native apps perform slower, use more resources, and aren't doing a whole lot more than they used to. Windows Terminal is a great example of this.

Combine this with the fact that most teams aren't given the space to actually maintain (because maintaining doesn't result in direct profits), and you've got a winning combination!

However, enterprise/commercial? The same group you're trying to sandwich between a 365 subscription and azure/github? These are the people in which when they do have evidence that they are being negatively affected, will cause a massive dent in Microsoft's bottom line.

What this essentially boils down to, is AI will then process everything easily accessible and "low quality" (your tech purchase recommendations for example), and everything more valuable will be locked behind communities that invest resources into creating barriers to entry.

This isn't new of course, Patreon is an example of this. Discord also has private channels too, to indicate this is a common pattern that will only increase. Reddit knows this as well, hence their rushed attempts at locking down access.

Basically, get used to having to put in work for information you want and can't find through chatbots!

With the community building aspect, forums were not great for it. Due to how fragmented it was, and how subforums were often dramatically different sections, this meant that unless you were genuinely deeply into [topic] and were spending numerous hours per day regularly you would not build a community at all there. This is why on most forums, it's only the trolls who became known, they had that cross-contamination aspect. Forums also had a lot of UX that discouraged caring about the user. Names were tucked away, profile images were tiny, people hid signatures due to how obnoxious they got. They became the equivalent of reading a mailing list you were randomly added into.

This doesn't really excuse Discord. By default it encourages too many indicators. Tutorials for new accounts, rule modules, every channel has an indicator on it, there's buttons left right and center making you afraid to click anything, then the whispers for joining servers, the list goes on. This is one aspect that I hope Discord spends severe amount of resources looking at in 2024. Which I think they absolutely are capable of doing, but I'm not sure if their investors care about the new user experience sadly.

That's really the big thing. I know everyone loves to believe they're masterclass programmers and falling for such traps is beneath them, but after seeing some of these masterclass programmer's react repos... it's very clear why the react docs is filled with many disclaimers and notes (which kudos to the react team for phenomenal docs).

[1] https://twitter.com/Legendary_NFT/status/1667106949840748545

It would be nice if we could come to a thorough solution that actually does cover all bases, rather than all these companies trying to create their own digital ID services that just encourage us to instead do silly things like photograph your ID front and back.

I mean hell it's taken like 20 years for privacy by design to become an ISO standard? That sort of timeline is not something we can really tolerate as more and more people continue relying on online services and in turn wind up trusting horribly outdated techniques/general malaise about data.

Unless you're talking about illegal niche, in which fair but I highly doubt stores are going to accept those. All generation helps with is content that will be free.