faceted. - Reddit: Killing a Giant by Bill | living life in SF
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Iâve been seeing a lot of angst and emotion on the Reddit migration, which results in either defeatism or blind optimism. In the end, it probably doesnât matter, but I wanted to do more fact-based research into the subject.
I put my findings and my analysis into what it would actually take to kill Reddit, based on the deaths of Digg and MySpace. tl;dr itâs a lot less dramatic than most people would think.
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Tracking the lastest news and numbers about the #RedditMigration to open, Fediverse-based alternatives, including #Kbin and #Lemmy To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/
- 0 users online
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- 102 users / month
- 3.27K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 552 Posts
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- Modlog
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Good article. Just going to say it again here. Forget about killing Reddit. Just stop using it, and tell people about the alternatives. Enjoy this peaceful time in the fediverse while it lasts.
Yeah, thatâs a good point. Right now, Reddit, like Google, has to deal with a lot of issues due to the size of the userbase, like spammers putting a lot of effort into specifically targeting them. If the Fediverse gets big enough, thatâs gonna be a problem too, but at the moment, one nice thing is that there isnât a bunch of bots spamming it because itâs more worthwhile to try to go after Reddit or whatever.
Might as well build some good memories now.
Another thing is - anyone who was there when Digg was still great knows â digg didnât die overnight and there was no big movement. People started using Digg and Reddit simultaneously, and gradually moved away from Digg. There were platform changes etc, but Digg was already dying at that point. It happened organically.
Can I just say I canât believe Iâm doing ANOTHER migration? I thought Digg to Reddit was a once a life sort of thing.
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Nothing you said refutes anything I said. My point was that reddit has value even if all the humans leave. Digg was sold, implying value, yes?
There will never be some end of the road, flipping the giant breaker on redditâs servers movie scene death. It will live on in some form no matter the outcome of the current drama.
Of course digg.com is a wildly different place today, the entire world is a different place todayâŚ
I donât know how to save the posts that really resonate and reground me outside of commenting on it. This is one of those posts. Thank you.
Agreed, we need a save feature!
What always helped centralized social was an environment of rapid growth. For the majority of people there wasnât a âbeforeâ to compare to whatever they signed up to, so a play like the one Reddit made, which isnât about the quality of the content but âwhatever gets people in the doorâ, worked - focusing all your energy on hypergrowth was the Web 2.0 strategy. But my own âbeforeâ goes back to browsing Usenet over a dial-up shell account(terminal access only). The technology used then was primarily characterized by being efficient to store and process, which led to a federated model that shared text threads.
The reason people switched from Usenet to early web forums was also a combination of not having a âbeforeâ, plus some new conveniences. Usenet moderation tools were very limited, ensuring that spam and derangement were common. Because the design was made just for text, you didnât have image-focused content, but you also didnât experience the things images get moderated for now - you could post a UU-encoded file that contained an image, or a link to an image, but you couldnât shove it in peopleâs face. And tree quoting replies was normalized, if rather disorganized - long-running threads often got âforkedâ.
The model of web forums that became most popular - flat topic threads, more images, centralized moderation - caused as many issues as it solved. Flat threading with no post ranking makes people reply âfirstâ at the top of the thread, images create a whole attack surface, and centralized mods have more power to trip on. But they could provide a better experience along the narrow set of things they wanted the forum to be about, and that made all the difference. Thatâs how the centralized model works. When I think of places like Something Awful or Newgrounds in their original heyday - itâs really gatekeepy stuff. There were tastemakers and you followed their lead or else.
Reddit started with a lot of link aggregation, which was also Diggâs thing - that model âpushesâ more content than a regular forum, so it helps build broad-audience engagement. But Reddit added more Usenet-like elements, and those gradually took over a lot of the niches as more people started using Reddit to ask questions and make statements addressing a specific community.
Something that I think defines the federated space is that there is less âpushâ. The power is more distributed, fewer gates to keep. Reddit represented those values for a while, and now it obviously doesnât, so the users who were there for that are going to drift this way very quickly.
As someone who came from a similar background and started on BBSs and Usenet, this is a very insightful post that I hope people internalize. The âenshittificationâ of what came before was a process that took a long time in many cases and with less of a factor of a specific group of people pushing a culture or taste this experience has a chance to grow into something completely different.
Great comment. I agree with everything you said.
As you mentioned, every common type of community forum has itâs own âquirksâ (I didnât want to say pros and cons or something like that) which make it suitable for a certain type of interaction.
Some are better for very large discussions joined by thousands of people, others are good for small groups talking about very specialized topics. Every style naturally promotes one type of interaction over the others.
Which is why I really like the federation system.
It allows people to create very different interfaces with different strengths and user experiences which still can share content between each other, even if the features of one interface isnât fully compatible with the content of another.
Overall, I feel like the experience on the fediverse, while familiar enough and easy to settle into, is very different than whatever systems everyone have been used to for decades. I think the reason for this is, as I said in the previous paragraph, that it gives developers a platform with already available content through other instances to test their interactive website ideas on, and provide the users with a whole lot of user experiences to choose from, while essentially keeping track of the same communities through it all.
Great article and demonstrates why we should not care about the demise of reddit. There is no clear date when the giant has been slain. It will simply attrit away over time if we all move on to the next thing, which is happening. Look forwards, not backwards, and enjoy the fediverse
Remember, Digg dying helped Reddit, but it didnât make Reddit. Reddit was already fairly well-established when Digg shat the bed. It was really easy for people to glom onto a pre-existing community that already had some people who posted on both Reddit and Digg. Lemmy and kbin arenât nearly as big or feature-complete now as Reddit was when all that Digg drama went down. However, we work with what we have, haha.
Iâve read that kbin had ~30 or so actual users before a few weeks ago. Look at them now. Lemmy is probably similar. New ideas take time to catch on and sometimes it takes a crisis to spur that into overdrive.
And now this is here, and development is being spurred on by the large migration, the next large Reddit crisis is likely to drive an even larger group here. Things will slowly build up and eventually youâll find that more things happen here than there.
Yup. Agree with everything OP said. Been saying it since last week. The 48-hour blackout wasnât going to kill Reddit. Hell, if all 8,000 subreddits had gone with indefinite blackouts, it likely wouldnât have killed Reddit either. The fallout from Redditâs decisions, and their response to the community, is going to take months, and probably even years, to really be visible.
Iâve been on Reddit for more than 10 years. I started using Reddit regularly after Digg went to shit. Iâve seen the drama, controversies, and protests that previously have taken place on Reddit. But whatâs been going on the last couple of weeks, I havenât seen before. As I mentioned in another comment, this is the first time Iâve seen a concerted effort to find alternatives, not just for a few undesirables (i.e. Voat), but for the community as a whole.
Yeah, the communities here are not going to be nearly as active as they were on Reddit, but people want communities, and just having a friendly place to gather will be enough to slowly attract others.
Peopleâs idea of what a dead social media site looks like is very different from what they actually look like.
People think âimmediate implosion and disappearing from the face of the internetâ, but social media sites die long before the last post is posted.
Forums with dozens of users used to die over months. Big social sites take years, and they die not by going dark or quiet, but by becoming generic and boring or filled with Nazis. Either way, they shift from being âstickyâ to being easily skipped over.
* MySpace has entered the chat*
Which it can do because it still exists. And shit, it was taken over at one point by Nazi enabler Rupert Murdoch.
I wasnât here for the digg->reddit migration (I stumbled upon reddit without knowing what digg was). But this is a very insightful take. The idea of becoming âtheâ place for niche communities is an interesting idea, because for a lot of these alt-platforms it honestly feels like the opposite (only the most shallow generic popular topics end up being active).
Maybe this means something like dbzer0 has a bright future? The article mentions reddit being âtheâ place for tech and facebook being âtheâ place for college students. I wonder what kbinâs equivalent is or could be?
Pardon me asking, but where is the link to the original posterâs article?
you have to click on the title of the post. :)
Very nice. I wasnât a Digg user when Digg dugg its grave, so itâs nice to get some stats from back then to give a better idea of what to expect now. Honestly, I was predicting a slow decline for Reddit even before this, I just thought it was a âdifferentâ way of collapsing than what Digg did. Turns out itâs more similar than I thought.
Iâm not convinced that this is going to be a Digg-style collapse, but I do think that there are legit points about Reddit attritting over time.
That being said, Reddit benefitted hugely from the Digg influx, and it left an impression on the community. Team Reddit clearly was concerned about doing a Digg over the years, and Iâm pretty sure that thatâs why old.reddit.com stayed around.
The parallels are kind of striking, though. I was on Reddit long before the Digg influx, and I remember all those new users feeling their way around, trying to figure stuff out. Using Digg terminology, mostly being angry with Kevin for the changes he was forcing on them. Reddit having load problems from the influx. I was explaining how Reddit worked to those Digg newcomers, the way the existing Fediverse people are now to me. Itâs like that all over again, just now Iâm looking at things from the side of the new arrivals.
As this article describes, even Diggâs collapse wasnât actually the Digg-style collapse that we commonly imagine it was nowadays.
Itâs interesting how human memory and historical records can distort things. Iâve been following the Ukraine war closely, for example, and thereâs a lot of people who are thinking that Ukraine has failed because their current counteroffensive hasnât achieved a rout in 2 weeks. Wars like these take years to unfold, and then we read about them in minutes on Wikipedia so people donât get an intuitive sense of that.
Actually a thoughtful and interesting article