The decline wasn't immediately obvious at first, but it happened and it capped the growth trajectory of both. Twitter never grew as fast as it did during the third-party client and applications era.
Reddit isn't adding meaningful, human-written content as fast as it was in that era. There's a lot more activity now, but based purely on an eye-count, it's over-run by bots (partly because the best moderation tools are gone!) and the human contributions are declining.
All successful startups begin to drift away from the ground truth of their product. It's a drift away from users. And a drift towards internal politics.
A lot like Rasmussen's drift towards danger, https://risk-engineering.org/concept/Rasmussen-practical-dri...
My theory is that as startups grow beyond a critical threshold, they start to attract a certain type of person who is more interested in mercenarily growing within the company / setting themselves up for future corporate rise than building a product.
These people play to the company's internal court and create deeply bitter environments that leads to more mission-driven individuals leaving the company. Eventually leading to the cultivation of institutional arrogance.
Externally, you can watch signs of this process unfolding. Companies start engaging in the startup / corporate equivalent of ignoring gravity. Which they can! For a while.
When you're high, you have a ton of air time. You can't tell / feel the pull of gravity in free-fall. And it takes time, a very long time, but just like there ain't no such thing as free lunch; there ain't no such thing as "too big to care." It's merely, too big to care for now.
The bill always comes due.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
I’ve been in companies that have grown fast and then realised that their margins are very slim. It’s a very grim position to be in.
Great turnover - where’s the profit?
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
(Although I'm not completely sure this maps onto Anthropic, which was never primarily targeting consumers.)
(Although I'm not completely sure this maps onto Anthropic, which was never primarily targeting consumers.)
The consumers here are developers -- who are--> potential founders OR future purchase decision makers.
It's a TERRIBLE idea to piss them off just because they're small.
They're "small" right now. But quite a few of them will have long careers and they will remember.
It's why so many trad corp companies give stuff away to students for free / treat the people on the come up as first tier customers. Because those are future decision makers. And the turn table turntables.
A cautionary case study is Google. How many times does a founder who is considering which cloud service to use gets cautioned to never use Google Cloud?
Google Cloud was a has been before it ever got out of the gate because of just how much goodwill Google blew up over the years. There's nothing, literally nothing, they can spend money on to make that go away in the short-term. And they're not willing to commit to the long-term.
This is more SV modus operandi
They're a lot heavier on the censorship and sidewide ban. Subs are being astroturfed as much or worse than usual.
On top of that they're trying to stop anonymous browsing by paywalling on a timer.
The company has turned evil sadly.
Is it a gradual shutdown? [0] works just fine for me, and I don't and have never had a Reddit account so I'm always logged out. I've visited a few of the comment threads on that page and they all display just fine.
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Somehow Reddit thinks I care enough about their content to set up an account and log in just to read it. They are mistaken.
I'm using Firefox on a full-sized computer (that is, not a phone or tablet). Do you get different results with Firefox on a full-sized computer, or is that your primary web browser?
> Somehow Reddit thinks I care enough about their content to set up an account and log in just to read it. They are mistaken.
Same here.
For what it’s worth, I’ve received this on my iPhone running safari. I almost never use Reddit, and when I do it’s usually because I’m casually browsing and someone linked to it, and for that type of usage I’m almost always on my phone. I can’t remember the last time I attempted to access Reddit on an actual computer. But I’m clearly not their target user, I simply don’t care about them enough to be willing to jump through any hoops.
That's fuckin lame.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
New reddit: Doesn't require a login Redlib: Doesn't require a login
I honestly did not enjoy it anymore, almost all subs feel political these days (and the worst kind of politics, American politics ;)), the hive mind downvotes everything that it disagrees with (irrespective of the merit or quality of the message) and you get bans for seemingly everything if the mods disagree with you (/r/UnitedKingdom for criticizing the government motability scheme, /r/Europe for "rape belittlement" for a message in which I mentioned _war crimes_ such as rape. I guess calling it a war crime isn't serious enough...).
Glad to have ditched it! It's a shame there isn't a similar community like old Reddit but I guess we'll get one at some point!
But >90%? Can you provide something that supports something in this ballpark?
When you go the places which are clearly at the target of bots such as commercial products, geopolitical issues, and politics - the ratio becomes bad.
This is also true in hacker news, but the moderation team here is good enough in burying these topics away from the front page for the most part.
I believe Claude code has been using that file since before the agents.md standard, so it’s not really a business decision to be different. There are some potential rough edges with changing over now, and the best proposed solution in the GitHub issue could be a bit complicated and error-prone from a technical or security point of view.
I’m not saying I agree with the decision, I would certainly prefer if they standardized on agents.md, but I don’t really believe their lack of doing so is deliberate enshittification.
I wonder if you could use this to make the harness recognize AGENTS.md.
prefer open companies to closed ones
So this instead becomes a nonsense product decision and a reason to switch off Claude Code.
If somebody switches because of this, then they lie.
I'm having flashbacks to the fact that GNU make reads GNUmakefile before Makefile, so it's possible to write one makefile using GNU extensions and another that works on BSD or (back in the day) commercial unix.
It's not pretty, but it works, and it has become my standard practice, so that I get consistent behavior between claude cursor codex etc.
But yeah, I think the ultimate goal of Anthropic is just to have a CLAUDE.md in every repository for marketing.