So much of the DeviantArt story reads like Tumblr. Two platforms appealing to amateur and small artists grow to great relevance among a patchwork of subcultures. Then, they start trying to turn a profit and end up alienating the entire userbase that carried them to that point. DeviantArt is much further down that road than Tumblr is, though. It's sad to see. Both platforms were key to the WWW of my childhood.
I wish the artists well in their AI copyright legal pursuits.
I think it's just not possible for a centralized social media service to avoid enshittification long-term, at least not if it has to make money directly. It remains to be seen whether decentralized options can provide a long-term alternative at scale.
But why does a social network have to make money directly?
Why not start a centralized social-network service as a non-profit / benefit corporation, paid for by donation?
For the same reason FOSS projects aren't funded in proportion to their criticality, and why taxes aren't voluntarily - given the option to use the service for free, most people will do so and choose not to donate. Any such project, to stay afloat, will likely end up depending upon a small number of donors who can then exercise political control over the platform.
A social network has to make money somehow because it has bills to pay. Hosts aren't free. Servers aren't free. The cloud isn't free. Staff isn't free. Moderators are usually free but shouldn't be.
Sure, but probably a FOSS social network would need far fewer of these than a paid one, because 99% of the server costs of something like Facebook or Twitter, go toward the backends, analytical DBs, and graphical / ML models used to power "features" that no user wants, but which make Facebook themselves money.
And a FOSS social network would just... not build those kinds of features.
Instead of, say, a feed constantly rebuilt to drive engagement and rage-bait, you'd just get a simple chronological feed of what everyone you're following is posting; with maybe the ability to dial down the number of posts you see from any given person you're following ("show me the only the most-liked Nth percentile of posts from this user") without unfollowing. But even that kind of filtering — in fact, even the merging of followed users' feeds! — could all be done client-side. The whole "feeds" part could be as simple as a post-triggered static-site-generator pushing JSON into an object-storage bucket hiding behind an edge cache.
This is incorrect. From direct personal experience, I strongly believe the backend infrastructure and staff required just to operate the core product functionality of a successful large-scale social network massively exceeds what could be provided by donations.
Just in terms of core product OLTP data, Tumblr hit 100 billion distinct rows on MySQL masters back in Oct 2012. At the time, after accounting for HA/replication, that required over 200 expensive beefy database servers. This db server number grew by ~10 servers per month, because Tumblr was getting 60-75 million posts/day at this time.
Then add in a couple hundred cache and async queue servers, and over a thousand web servers. And employees to operate all this, although we kept it quite lean compared to other social networks.
Again, this was all just the core product, not analytics or ML or anything like that. These numbers also don't include image/media storage or serving, which was a substantial additional cost.
Although Tumblr had some mainstream success at that time, it was still more niche than some of the larger social networks. At that time, Facebook was more than 2 orders of magnitude larger than Tumblr.
Because these social networks are designed for analytics. It's in their blood. It permeates everything they do, and causes immense overhead.
Check out mailing lists or usenet.
No, nothing about this is related to analytics. I was strictly describing storage, caching, and compute for core product functionality in my previous comment, which is written from direct first-hand experience working on infrastructure for social networks for a decade, including the two social networks I referenced in my previous comment.
Social networks store a lot of OLTP data just to function. Every user, post, comment, follow/friendship relation, like/favorite/interaction, media metadata -- that all gets stored in sharded relational databases and retrieved in order for the product to operate at all. For successful social networks, it adds up to trillions of rows of data (on the smaller end, for something like Tumblr) and that requires a lot of expensive infrastructure to operate. Again, none of this has any relation to analytics.
As for usenet, what? It's basically dead, after becoming an unmanageable cesspool of spam (or worse) more than two decades ago. It was great in the 90s, but the internet population was substantially smaller then.
Yeah, because no one is interested in promoting it because it doesn't have analytics baked in so you can't make money from doing so. Of course it deteriorated over the years. It's also cheap to run and can handle a massive amount of users.
Right, so they can run analytics. You could reduce your tracking data to aggregates, but then you can't go back and run analytics on your users. You don't need to keep that data forever.
Especially with modern social media where content older than a day is effectively dead and ignored.
This was a lot of data a decade ago. Nowadays a single postgres instance will handle billions of rows without breaking a sweat, and social media content is exceptionally shardable.
Stop gaslighting me, it's not OK! I'm describing first-hand experience of things that were not related to analytics IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM.
Try running OLAP queries on a massively sharded MySQL 5.1 deployment, or any aggregation at all on a Memcached cluster. These technologies were designed for OLTP data, and were woefully incapable of useful analytics over massive data sets.
I was Tumblr's fourth full-time software engineering hire. When I joined (nearly 4 years after the company was founded) the only thing remotely related to analytics was a tiny Hadoop cluster, where logs were dumped and largely ignored. Nothing about analytics is "in their blood". All you needed to sign up for Tumblr was an email address. WTF do you even think they are "analyzing"? Your comments are completely fabricated BS.
Once again, I'm not describing "tracking data"! I'm talking about things like content that users have posted, comments they have written, content they have favorited, users they are following. These are core data models of a social network. It has nothing to do with tracking or analytics.
The OLTP product data I'm describing does need to be kept forever. Users don't like it when content they have written on their blog suddenly disappears.
Yes, but running a massive cluster of hundreds or thousands of sharded database servers is still very expensive.
I think that what they're getting at is that in the Usenet days half of what you've mentioned would be local data.
There is no central concept of "content that have favourited" or "users they are following", that's all handled locally in that model.
Not by volume. Posts and comments make up the vast majority of the storage requirements, and none of that can be purely client-side.
I'm aware, I used Usenet quite a bit in the 90s, as well as dial-up BBSs.
Usenet is a distributed forum / discussion board, which is related but not equivalent to the core functionality of social media applications being discussed here.
With Usenet's model, there's no concept of a profile aggregating content from a single user. This means you simply cannot replicate the primary experience of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, DeviantArt, MySpace, Friendster, or any other social media site/app with Usenet's approach. Nor can it reproduce the experience of even modern forums like HN or Reddit.
Usenet also didn't actually scale massively. Every estimate I've seen of the peak Usenet userbase puts it at a tiny fraction of modern social media.
In any case, Usenet essentially failed. We already have empirical evidence about how these ideas play out! Why are we even seriously discussing this?
These aren't really good "social media" examples. Both mailing lists and Usenet have limited retention, with mailing lists there may be almost no retention beyond the amount required to deliver a message.
While low retention might be a desirable feature and something you might actually want in a FOSS social network, it means old content will disappear from the central server. If it's not archived by clients it can easily disappear or end up locked away only in private backups. Google's buyout of Deja News should be a cautionary tale of retention and the locking up of public data behind a private gate.
Usenet history today is largely only available because someone at Google hasn't noticed Google Groups still exists and terminated it yet. If that happens tomorrow there's not any good complete archive of historical Usenet content. There's no guarantee Google won't kill those Usenet archives in the next year let alone the next five years.
That's basically Mastodon, which isn't free. Plenty of small instances that try the donation model or that are just funded out of pocket go under.
And I may be wrong but I don't think the recommendation algorithms and other such features take up as much of the cost as you're claiming. I think a lot of the cost of something like Facebook is probably taken up by infrastructure and storage. Recommendation algorithms probably aren't that expensive.
Do keep in mind that Mastodon is build on a tech stack that's mainly known for not being very efficient since it solved the scaling question with the answer "throw more computer at it". (In other words, it's a Rails app.) It's not very suitable for a free social media network since it's designed in a way to encourage large silos since that's the only way Rails scales from a financial perspective; you need more from a smaller core of users as opposed to having every user pay a tiny amount.
There's other AP implementations that aren't a constant server hog like Mastodon is and can run on much weaker hardware (some of it can run on a raspberry pi). You don't need a full rails stack if your user count never exceeds 100 (which y'know, is the ideal state of AP - small communities who can remotely interact with each other).
Someone ought to rewrite it in something less embarrassing given you only need to be protocol compatible.
The second system will always be playing catchup to Mastodon features or they will fork in features, meaning clients will have to support both or take sides.
Multiple people have written multiple compatible alternatives that are lighter weight. Pleroma and its forks (Akkoma looked good last I checked) are popular for single-user servers.
The algorithms themselves aren’t expensive, no.
Having extra entire complete copies of the relationship-plus-posts graph, denormalized in various ways (incl. in ways that inherently prevent use of easily map-reducible algorithms, and so require heavy vertical scaling) such that you can run the algorithms, is what’s expensive.
And constantly feeding the data into those denormalized models, using specially-tuned realtime ETL technologies that themselves do distributed scaling to ensure no infinite queue backlogging from activity bursts, is also expensive.
In general i would argue that it is bloat that makes it not feasible to fund as a nonprofit, although people may have different ideas about where / what that bloat is. Recommendation algorithms, or unnecessary product changes, etc.
I don’t think it’s true that it’s intrinsically impossible for a public service to be self funding, and I think that not everything has to grow / change forever to remain relevant.
We need to figure this kind of stuff out, I mean Wikipedia is nice and all but it’s really bad that humanity in general has to rely on megacorp for things as basic as maps while we say we’re living in the Information Age
Modern Usenet :-)
Ah Usenet, that bastion of civil, intellectual discourse where the most brilliant minds of the day mingled in the rarefied air of their own fart clouds.
I think this reflects very much the Silicon Valley way of thinking about internet governance, in which there seem to exist only two imaginable forms of it: Either anarchy, in which there are no rules at all and the only limits are technological, with full-on tragedy of the commons unfolding - or oligarchy/corpocracy in which whoever is the most powerful private actor gets to make the rules and then of course gets to make them in their own interest, not the common interest.
Didn't we have some more forms of government available for discussion?
E.g., after the xz backdoor, I read a call of OSS maintainers that critical OSS projects should be state-funded as they literally comprise critical infrastructure. Why couldn't we do the same with social networks?
If the goal is to avoid "enshittification" I don't think the solution is to have governments control social media and then have those platforms be subject to bureaucracy, decency and profanity laws, surveillance and propaganda (more so than currently) and the fickle wrath of the taxpaying voter. Realize how little critical infrastructure actually gets funded, and then add the psychotic dog-water paranoia of half the US thinking that infrastructure is a psyop by communists and "groomers" to turn their kids gay, and making that an issue in the polls.
PBS is probably the closest analogue to government run social media I can think of. Half the government and their constituents consider it "liberal propaganda" and want to defund it entirely, and it has constantly has to go begging hat in hand just to stay afloat, and then pursue commercialism to make up for the deficit.
You think social media is bad now? Imagine if you're required by law to sign up with proof of citizenship and your SSN is your password. And every platform is constantly putting Wikipedia style donation popups. And it's a misdemeanor to post swear words or material deemed "inappropriate."
Which is why expect to see a government run social media platform in the next few years.
Functionally, the “public good” part of social media networks is almost certainly better served by a single organization.
However, the “freedom of speech and ideas” part, runs in horror at this idea. (rightfully so).
The best middle ground concept I’ve heard is to contrast the current state of the web with libraries.
NB: Enshittification is going to become a term like “Fake news”, completely divorced from its original roots.
I would expect government run social media to be especially enshittified, honestly
Just for different reasons
Yup :D.
There are countries which CAN make it work, but man, a central nervous system co-opted by oligarchs, tyrants or other worst case scenarios, would be the outcome for most of the world.
Another perspective of resources are tackling adversary bots. It's difficult to strike a balance between enough good features to have your platform likeable and useful for users while maintaining security from bad actors who'll find clever ways to exploit vulnerabilities.
Depends on how you want to define social network, but Signal has a stories feature and is paid for thusly.
the problem isn't making money, the problem is chasing continuous growth and ever increasing profits
I don't think decentralisation is the solution because the problem is as much the lack of central authority as the presence of it. Enshittification happens fastest on platforms that are run by committees, who know they need revenue so take the path of least resistance, without a single clear owner who can resist it. Look at Google's decline since its founders left, compare to Facebook which - say what you like about it - is much the same user experience that it always was. (Hell, look at MySpace for an even more dramatic turndown than Google)
Social media sites that are still founder-owned or have strong individual leaders can continue fine (consider e.g. Dreamwidth). Though I guess whether you can sustain that past one person's lifetime is another question.
This comment discusses only centralized services. Decentralized services run on protocols such that no one service provider or software project can dictate the experience for all users.
ActivityPub, used by Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, and Pixelfed among others is an example of such a protocol. BlueSky's ATProto is another, though it's in an earlier stage without mature third-party implementations and service providers. Email, too is decentralized, though it may serve as a cautionary tale; spam, attempts to block spam, and feature stagnation have all degraded the user experience considerably.
And? I guess that somewhat hinders enshittification just by making it hard for the platform to ever evolve at all. But the cure is worse than the disease, you can't ever build something new that way nor can you really improve something that has any level of traction. Look at how IRC users revolt when you try to fix even the most glaring problems.
Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, Pixelfed are all very different, with different feature sets, supporting the same basic protocols, and evidence you can build something new on distributed protocols.
ActivityPub dictates how to meditate relationships between activities on collections of objects, and a few default objects types. It's specifically designed to let you "subclass" (not really inheritance, and more composition as you give a list of types with no enforced hierarchy) objects so you can create new object types nobody else understands but still give them another type that allows them to carry out basic operations on it.
It's not perfect but it's far from as dire as you make out.
So far the situation with ActivityPub is that the protocol is flexible enough to allow very different feature sets and user experiences. The most popular so far are twitter-like and reddit-like, with multiple implementations of each. I don't think ActivityPub was designed with the reddit-like use case in mind, yet it works well for that. There's no user revolt because the creation of new software with new experiences doesn't have much impact on users of existing software.
Enshittification is hindered not because nobody could create a Mastodon fork (or green-field project speaking the same protocol) that's riddled with ads, but because people can select a different service provider and still access the same network.
decentralization just multiplies the problem. instead of a gargantuan overlord, a million fiefdoms.
it's no wonder that the fediverse is most active on the fringes, especially outside of tech bubbles who use it because they like the idea
I think this is part of what ATProto is trying to solve by decoupling identity provider, data provider, and labeling.
That's not to say a million fiefdoms is necessarily a bad approach. A small server where all the members know each other is much more likely to be run in a way that's satisfactory to all its members than a big one. Furthermore, users have the option to maintain multiple accounts.
In theory, certainly.
In practice, one instance dominates and all the other instances have to censor accordingly or die.
Compare to Craigslist, or for a period of five or ten years after its inception, Google Search.
Enshittification is not a necessary consequence for a sustainable business. But I think social media platforms are susceptible to forces that pull beyond that.
define sustainable - I mean, do non-growing businesses seem allowed to exist these days?
Yes, they are. Not all forms of incorporation are like publicly traded joint-stock corporation.
Just a regular story of capitalism and platform enshittification.
Whenever a platform is owned by shareholders who then need to extract rents from the ecosystem, this will happen. Whether it’s couchsurfing or twitter.
Expect it to happen to Reddit etc.
There is a direct line from the profit motive to platforms becoming enshittified, promoting the most outrageous content and making people emotional and angry.
The AI is just another level of appropriating human work. Whether it’s google’s disruption of publishers through AI-generated answers, or OpenAI training on artists’ work.
Is "profit motive" that different than "survival motive"?
These platforms need money to survive. Automattic, the latest owner of Tumblr wrote a great post on all the things they've tried and how Tumblr is still losing $20MM a year IIRC.
That’s only in the capitalist system.
Wordpress by that same Automattic doesn’t need money to survive, in the sense of money going to one large corporation. Anyone can self-host their own copy of wordpress, buy plugins etc.
If you want to know more about how to monetize digital content without a trusted central actor, we are working on a Web2 version of that ecosystem btw: https://qbix.com/ecosystem
Also, science and wikipedia and openstreetmap are examples of open gift economies.
I persevered with your website because I am very interested in the ideas, but I have to say it was very hard going. Thousands of words about abstract concepts could easily be reduced to a few hundred or spread across multiple pages. The only comprehensive list of services actually on offer is a PDF? The videos describing the merits of these decentralised services are accessed through image links to YouTube! There's lots of low hanging fruit to improve usability for those less patient than me in my humble opinion.
That is one page on the website, the rest of it is a lot more friendly (https://qbix.com/communities or https://qbix.com/invest for instance).
Sorry the experimental stuff is not slick enough for you yet, we don’t have the resources of Facebook or even Automattic. We worked very hard for 12 years on the foundations at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform but I am sure you can find many faults there. (I’d like to hear about them btw.)
On the other hand, many other projects like the E programming language, Capn’proto, Linux etc. are also very complex and did not have fantastic and slick documentation, first adopters also had to read some words in order to get it.
This is an open source project. You are welcome to reduce the words and make a summary. Perhaps when we start marketing to a broad audience, we’ll reduce it to 10 word slides and sound bites, or jingles.
Until then you can try it yourself, the documentation is at https://community.qbix.com and technical documentation is at https://qbix.com/platform/guide
I see a lot of information about how to distribute content and revenues, but I don't see how you ensure that enough revenue comes in.
Wordpress' Tumblr problem is that costs exceed revenue, not distribution.
Note that "decentralized" doesn't reduce total costs - it just spreads them out. Server costs do not go down with the number of owners.
Tumblr: bought for $1.1B in 2013, sold for $3M in 2019. Now losing $30M a year.
Even if they make money, the next quarter must always be better than the previous one.
At a certain point, people seem to start looking at self destructive options to make that happen.
It is called inflation. If the next quarter isn't looking better then you are doing worse.
Inflation is one thing. Rent extraction from the ecosystem isnt done only because of inflation, but because investors want profits from capital appreciation. That’s one of the failure modes of capitalism. Sure it works well in early stages (providing capital to promising startups) but there are diminishing returns and ultimately huge negative externalities to this model of stock ownership forever. Whether by pension funds or the public, the incentives are just toxic.
Automattic is not publicly traded.
A lot of social media platforms lose money because they decide they want to grow above and beyond, even after being well established. Same thing for other software products that are perfectly fine, even loved.
Apple mandated the changes to Tumblr that pissed everyone off. I'd almost call this a forced error, but Apple's rationale for bringing the hammer down on Tumblr was App Review finding CSAM on the front page. Which is itself a failure of their moderation team.
In contrast, DeviantArt saw dollar signs from AI art and rugpulled themselves. Their business model relies on art remaining scarce enough to not exhaust the demand for art. A machine that lets you create unlimited art for the cost of some GPU time completely destroys the economic underpinnings of most artistic endeavor. While not all artists are solely economically motivated, the ones that are economically successful are the ones paying for dA subscriptions - the things that keep the site alive.
Apple will find the sexual content and push for its removal. Not just the stuff on the front page, but anything that gets surfaced within a reasonable browsing session (that includes popular items, keywords etc.)
And it's not just Apple, payment processors also have strong opinions.
In general, sexual/erotic stuff has become a really hard thing to keep allowing in mainstream platforms.
Then how is there a Reddit iOS app?
It's harder to accidentally reach porn on Reddit than it was on Tumblr ca. 2018. You could follow tags like #cute and #fox because you liked a cute fox picture and the next day get somebody's Sonic and Tails furry futa fanart on your dash because they used those tags.
Wait, they don’t have an nsfw search flag like Reddit??
Tumblr does have a self-reporting NSFW feature now, IIRC.
I don't have the app anymore, but I'd assume you don't end up in r/GoneWild with 3 random clicks from opening the app as a new user, nor that porn is prominently in the default subreddits.
That's not true - Tumblr already had their "no adult content" plans in place well before the CSAM problem caused Apple to temporarily suspend them from the app store. That suspension just brought the plans forward by 6 months in a panic rush.
To my understanding, what happened with Tumblr was moreso a compounding situation; the Apple app store reviewer managed to just find NSFW content in general, forcing Tumblr to change the app to remove it.
Before, under Yahoo, they'd just put some new hoop in the app to prevent users from accessing adult content, but by the time this particular Apple review rolled around, the sale of Tumblr to Verizon had already been finalized. Which created a situation where an outgoing management pretty much ordered to not bother fixing it and just banning it all, hoping that Verizon's "family friendly" policies meant that it wouldn't jeopardize the sale (which it turns out, the sale wasn't jeopardized).
You can still kinda see it in how broken the actual removal was; they just excised the NSFW from the frontend by marking the posts as sensitive on the API and then preventing the frontend from viewing anything sensitive. For years (and maybe even today) you could just scrape the API to find NSFW posts, although that's on the decline since most NSFW Tumblr accounts have been deleted entirely by the actual people behind them.
Part of Tumblr's downfall also comes from their change of stance on NSFW contents.
Quite an understatement.
Tumblr's change in policy on NSFW content was bad enough, but what made it a complete disaster was outsourcing the enforcement of that policy to a crude image classifier. A lot of non-pornographic content got removed when that happened, and a lot of users never bothered contesting those removals (either because it was too much effort, or because they were no longer maintaining their account). So a lot of content on older Tumblr accounts is just gone.
It's possible that artists posting their art aren't a large enough demographic to produce enough economic value that can be harvested to feed a cadre of SWEs and PMs and SREs and executives and moderators and, and...