I’m sharing this here mostly due to the “official” labels. Excerpt from the text:
“Starting today, we’re beginning early testing of placing a visual indicator on certain profiles to provide proof of authenticity, reduce impersonation, and increase transparency across the platform,” a Reddit admin (employee) wrote in a post. “This is currently only available to a *very* small (double-digit) number of profiles belonging to organizations with whom we already have existing relationships, and who are interested in engaging with redditors and communities on our platform.”
At least for me this looks like a really poor attempt to attract content creators into the platform, while shifting its focus from the content created and shared by the users to the users themselves, as in more typical social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok). It’s bound to fail - what made Reddit desirable for the users was the content that they shared among themselves, unlike in Twitter where a few personalities can “anchor” the rest of the userbase.
One step along the path to their final endgame: where each subreddit is basically owned and controlled by relevant brands.
I wouldn’t even see a problem with doing so, as long as it’s transparent. The users could still operate alternate, brand-independent versions of these subreddits.
This raised an interesting question in my head. How would the community respond to a brand/corporation hosting their own Lemmy community?
There are a few businesses I truly would not mind having an official place for community discussion and feedback. But like, not the GAP or Hobby Lobby. Those guys can fuck right off. But I personally have to realize some people want those communities as much as I want the things I like.
So where on earth would the line be drawn between useful and spam?
As long as it’s transparent, why not. If the brands community isn’t good then people just won’t interact with it.
I think the question would be are the brands going to pay for the server?
I’d rather have brands host their own Fediverse spaces than have official subreddits. For brands that are truly toxic they can be fediblocked from all the major instances, but generally I would only recommend that for extremely offensive brands.
It seems more official to run your own forum anyways. This wouldn’t be much different than companies running regular forums except now you could interact with them from an account you already frequently use on other platforms. It would make it a lot easier to interact with than registering an account just for a brand-specific forum (that you then have to remember to visit occasionally if you want to follow discussion).
A downside to this is that when (not if) a company decides it doesn’t want attention to an old product, the instance would be killed and all content lost.
True, I guess I don’t know how this works when it comes to federation. From what I understand, federation works by mirroring content from one server on another (so your local server has a copy of the remote communities, you interact with them on your instance and it then uploads any changes back to the original instance).
Does this mean that mirrored communities work as archives? If the original instance goes down, can you still browse the copy of it on any other instance that federated (and interacted) with it?
I think companies hosting their own instances, locked down so only employees can be mods, is a smart idea for companies. Instead of giving editorial control, and ad revenue, to a third party, they get to retain control over their brand without intermediaries while still being part of a larger community for discoverability.