To expand on that theme:

I’m a software engineer myself, and have been for over a decade and a half. At this point, whenever anything, anywhere appears to be in the beginning stages of collapsing and failing, I find myself sliding into the postmortem/RCA mindset, and trying to consider and nail down particular choices, changes, processes, and/or structural attributes that may have contributed to said collapse beginning, and theoretically, continuing. Yes, I know in vivo RCA-as-the-failure-is-actively-occurring isn’t really how failure analysis processes are supposed to be done… but nonetheless, it’s led me to some interesting and insightful observations and conclusions over the years.

Or, if I try to distill that down to the essence of finding useful answers in the observation of platform collapses: it’s about continuing to drill down past what seems like a surface-level reasonable answer. There’s almost ALWAYS more going on.

Twitter, for instance, is a fascinating case-study on this, and the author of this blogpost appears to have similar thoughts.

Reddit is also a fascinating case study. A couple of hilights:

• it’s historically been much closer to a text-based tiktok with a highly interactive userbase - I.e. it’s somewhat less of a social graph, and instead much closer to an interest graph.
• spez et al decided to capriciously change how the graph works (how users discover and interact with content; how communities are managed and moderated).
• Then they decided to try to force a return to normalcy under drastically changed conditions, in the interest of driving profitability/ad revenue/etc for their VCs.

Obviously there’s a LOT more nuance and many more points to explore there. I’d be very interested to learn more about the internal analysis and due diligence that Reddit leadership did before this whole shitshow really kicked off. I’d be interested to know how much and to what degree of nuance decision makers at Reddit are familiar with social and group theory, and whether (and how) that may or may not have affected this whole thing. Id be interested to know the degree of internal pushback against (what I think everyone agrees are) capricious, ill-advised structural changes, if any. I’d be interested to know more about the financial position of Reddit, Reddit’s investors, the VC subset targeting social network companies, and the VC industry in general. And the list goes on.

Again, there’s a lot to investigate here. There’s a lot of lessons to learn, and a lot of anti-patterns that can be discerned and avoided in the future. I hope that will eventually lead to a more sustainable, healthy, more community-centric and long-lived social platform - maybe it’s lemmy, maybe it’s something else that comes later; for now though, imo, it’s lemmy.