Indeed, I tend to agree with 4chan (in their tirade against http://9gag.com) that this type of stuff has become the "cancer" of internet culture. Even though they are responsible for spawning it.
But it didn't actually have to take over, right? It just had to build up a decent user base. Then it could be linked with identi.ca, and they would be linked to whatever came along next . . .
Meme creation isn't fully overdone until someone creates meta-meme creation: Where you fill in a few blanks, and the meme meta-creator gives you a website where people can create new memes tailored to some specific parameters.
I recommend taking the time to use it, especially with friends. When you're not just passively sitting and staring, but contributing to the content, it turns it something else. You become part of a conversation that's surprisingly addictive, and not something you come across in 'post random pictures here' sites.
If you're one of the founders, all I can say is stop doing stupid shit. I don't mean to offend-- finding pictures and clever captioning them is surprisingly addictive, but this really is a step away from social-games' Skinnerian conditioning. In short, it's addictive, not fulfilling.
Diaspora started out wanting to change the world-- creating something addictive may be profitable, but as other commenters say, underwhelming.
koji isn't a founder, but I am. I can understand why you think that way, but to some degree this is about a bigger problem that we lived through, first hand. That is, people don't know what they data is, so why would they use even the most perfect distributed system over something that provided basically the exact same functionality.
Owning the bits is an important problem that will get solved with time, but unless people feel like they are actually creating and making something of value on social networks, then it will be hard for any system to pull it off, even if it gets all the tech right. Turns out the 'social' in social networks is actually the hard part.
This is our stab at it. Sorry if its not for you :)
I'll buy it. Unlike a lot of tech/nerd folk, I actually don't think privacy/data ownership makes people jump platforms. If pictures+captions is the thin end of the wedge, that's great :)
I don't know why there are so many comments along the lines of "come on this is meme creation old and boring". But I do think this has value. What's created out of the whole activity(colloborative editing) may or may not be a big thing, but the participation works well and is missing in social networks. So +1. :-)
The problem is not in low value of memes creation. It may be useful and interesting for someone (and useless and not interesting for others). The problem is in the limited resources of the Diaspora team, which are scattered on another project now, leaving Diaspora underdeveloped. There is some talk that it's really for the sake of Diaspora architectural redesign, which will lead to improving federation and etc, but I'm not convinced yet, since now Makr is positioned as a "service" which drags in support and etc. reducing resources available for Diaspora even more. So you can understand why many people who support the Diaspora project are seriously upset about it.
Hmm. Now i understand the reactions better. But isn't it a little akin to going on to ubuntu/ any linux forum and asking(demanding??) for new features. As far as i can see, they haven't been able to convert the diaspora work into profit-making. So from their view point it does make sense to try something new.
It's value is completely orthogonal to the idea of a free social network. Making "Fark 2012" is what Diaspora meas to almost anyone I know who was previously excited about it.
I would argue that it's fundamentally non-Skinnerian. There's no intermittent reward mechanism and it's fundamentally communal. It's fun and it's a little weird, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.