Look at this shit (first paragraph of body of article):
“Automatic watches are admired for their intricate mechanics and timeless appeal, but even the finest timepieces can sometimes run fast or slow. If you’ve noticed your automatic watch gaining or losing time, you’re not.”
First search result on DDG. Thank you, automatic watch expert and real person Hnin Oo Thazin. We may need a whole ass new internet.
https://mtscwatch.com/blog/why-your-automatic-watch-runs-fast-or-slow-and-how-to-fix-it
Back in the day people posted sales notices, meeting information, etc. on cork boards or bulletin boards in high traffic areas in public places. The practice dates back to ancient Greece at a minimum. The availability of cheap paper was one of the first revolutions in the technology. When people were first able to use modems to connect personal computers to each-other, it’s no surprise that one of the first things created was a digital Bulletin Board System (BBS).
Reddit isn’t all that much different from a BBS. Along the way usenet news groups added some features, like organizing discussions into niche topic groups. Someone came up with the idea of adding upvotes and downvotes which (at least partially) makes good comments more visible and bad comments less visible. That’s been around since at least the Slashdot era. But, Reddit and Lemmy would be pretty familiar to someone using a BBS in the early 1990s. And the basic concept would be familiar to Aristotle.
There’s a reason the concept has been around so long. It’s a good one. Making the forums searchable will means years or even decades worth of useful information becomes available long after the conversation ended. The problem is that when the focus becomes “how do we make money from this”. That hurts multiple ways. First of all, it leads to spam comments, paid posts, and other inauthentic content. Someone sees the forum as a way to get their stuff in front of a lot of eyeballs, and that makes the site worse for everyone. Second of all, forum owners start thinking “all these eyeballs on my site, I should get paid for it” and either sells out to the first group, or restricts visibility of the information so that you have to go through them to see it (see Reddit’s deals with Google and OpenAI).
IMO, the system works best when there’s no one owner and most people running and moderating things are volunteers. That describes the early days of Usenet where volunteers were running Usenet nodes, often on computers owned by their schools. It also somewhat describes Reddit in the early era, when a corporation owned the site but it was basically run by volunteer mods. It also describes Lemmy and Mastodon now. The problem is that the more prominent something gets in the search results on a search engine, the bigger a target it is for scammers, spammers, propagandists, etc.
I like where the fediverse is now. It could be a bit more popular, but it’s a risk that the more popular it gets, the worse it gets in other ways.
I agree with most of what you are saying but I don’t think everyone has to be volunteers on the fediverse. Moderating and IT work are forms of labor, there is no reason people can’t be materially supported for doing that labor, the problem comes in when the structures and systems become profit driven for social media/BBS systems. One is not the other, we can and absolutely should prioritize materially supporting the people who make the fediverse run and we need to consciously divorce that concept from monetizing fediverse social networks themselves or else we will keep burning out and taking advantage of volunteer devs, admins and moderators.
I’m not saying that the moderators should be volunteers, it’s just that it tends to work best when that’s the case. It means that people care enough to volunteer their effort. They care about the community so they want to put in that effort.
By all means, if there’s a community you like or a fediverse server you like, try to find a way to pay them if you can. But, if it gets to a stage where moderators feel they deserve to be paid, it’s often a bad sign.