I would like to avoid going on a rant, so I’ll just say this - capitalism does not work. The phenomena you are describing (… now people have too low standards) is called “tyranny of the majority” and capitalism does not have an answer for this. Hence why we really need to figure something out.
As a side note, I do not think communism nor socialism are the answer either! Despite what many are led to believe, we live in primitive times and have not figured out a sustainable economic model.
People moved from Facebook to Reddit in the past because it was seen as the more community-centric platform.
This has taken a wild shift over the last 5 years; no one who moved over was hoping for Reddit becoming an ad-centric platform.
Decentralization is not a silver bullet. If lemmy.world hits 1 million users, and then a large corporation buys it, lemmy will be set back 10 years. This is an incentive problem, and no amount of workarounds is going to fix it.
We agree here, but this will not necessarily stop the rot. Companies will just approach these communities and offer the leaders massive buyouts, and then flood it with ads (see Twitch).
Communities themselves need mechanisms to punish or vandalize advertisements.
Until the community supported platform becomes an advertiser supported one. Remember they said this same exact thing when moving from Facebook to Reddit.
Running is not going to save the online community. People have been running for the last 30 years, and it led us to some of the darkest times we’ve seen in 100 years. Instead we need to fight back and strategically retreat. Change the incentive structure - make advertisers absolutely miserable, and those who leech from advertisers should be similarly flogged.
Well said.
The unfortunate reality is that part of economic model is combating bad actors. A society that where the people truly believe in this can be built in a lifetime, and it will torn down by the worst among us in a decade. That is simply not a good investment.
Even in Europe, there are significant strides in tearing down what makes the people there happy and succeed (see the AfD in Germany).
This is an incentives problem through-and-through. These types of people should not, and cannot, exist in a functioning society - yet they do. The problem is that we have not figured out a good incentive-model to stop these people from gaining a foothold, so we must individually punish them for attempting to destroy the community.
This is the same exact problem with advertisers. And in the same way, we have not figured out a good way to stop them.