Will they go the way of MySpace or will this truly blow over in a few week?
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Unlike the Reddit vs Digg situation, there’s no mature product to mass migrate to. Digg collapsed because Reddit was an easy move over. There was already a polished alternative.
The Fediverse is great, and has a lot a of promise, but it’s not fully developed and easy to move to. Us migrants are building it out now.
Reddit will lose it’s soul. It’s been showing signs for ages anyways. Spez wants to create a doom-scroll “social network” that caters towards the TikTok and Facebook crowd. That kind of cancer has been creeping in for a while anyways.
The core of Reddit was always the discussion. The niche communities where you had real enthusiasts. You could get your retro gaming PC diagnosed. Trade parts for your imported Honda Beat. Ask questions about utility locating. That’s the heart and soul. And also the hardest thing to move.
Digg is just a newspaper now. Not a community aggregator. There’s no soul. It became a domain. You can’t Digg or bury. You can’t even comment anymore. That’s where they’d like to take Reddit. It doesn’t require effort or mods. Just a like button.
You said it better than I could. I’m hoping this or one of the alternatives can step up.
Youre 100% correct that all the niche communities and discussion are what made the magic.
Reddit is dead, long live reddit? /s
People are right, Reddit will live on as a shell of its former self. In time, people will forget that this happened and the API change and loss of third party apps that didn’t want to pay those high fees will also be forgotten by those on Reddit.
Obligatory: https://imgur.com/a/GrPwnrX
I enjoyed reading that song, but I can’t help but be bothered that the author kept adding an extra line.
The verses are sets of three lines, eventually followed by"The day the music died." All of the verses have four lines, and it’s freakin me out, man.
“The day the music died” line comes right before the chorus, not after it. These parody lyrics look alright to me.
It will survive, it always does, but it will lose a chunk of users.
Reddit went corporate a long time ago, and the only reason I ever went there was because I had RIF on my phone. Now I don’t, so I won’t, and I’m sure there are many like me.
But if they survived all their other controversies there isn’t any reason to think they won’t survive this one too.
Sad to say… Most people don’t care, they just consume.
Yeah I’m with you. Core reddit has been a disaster for a long time. I happily left a long time ago and eventually came back as 3rd party apps allowed me to have s completely different experience on mobile and I could finally stop using desktop (though res always lively fondly in my heart).
I’m moving away from Reddit for a least a while too see how things begin to unfold. Will try Lemmy, too, and see if it grows enough to be worthwhile and have the momentary to build some sort of critical mass offer time. Seeing some major said move here (Boost, for me) will be awesome.
But I don’t expect reddit to disappear. As was said, for a ton of people, the 3rd party so exodus is not impactful, if they’re even aware of it.
I’d guess Reddit continues for a long time, but becomes even more diluted than it has since the tencent investments and the huge leave-facebook migration from a few years ago.
I’m not sure this is true. Social media is very temporary - even thought people feel a sense of permanence it is false. It’s today’s content people consume, today’s users that matters. While there is a lot of interesting old content on reddit, the vast majority of people are there for the new.
So when a social media site goes into decline, it can be a rapid downward spiral. Digg has been mentioned here, but also MySpace was by far the biggest social media platform in its day - it imploded in less than a year or two when Facebook came alone. Tumblr was a big blogggin site until it started first forcing people to it’s app, and then outright banned adult content - it imploded almost immediately and people moved on to Twitter and Reddit with that content.
Reddit mistake is they did not value what they had - users generating content, and users moderating themselves. Reddit is nothing more than a host, but they see the content as their property to monetise. Today is not the first step on their own decline, but it will certainly accelerate it.
I suspect the fediverse will be the long term solution. This first major wave of migration brings in the early adopters, including crucially people who are interested in coding and development which will benefit Kbin and Lemmy. Further waves of users will follow and find more mature established communities when they arrives. I expect the next big battle to be over adult content - advertisers are already nervous about it with it’s use in protests, and the simplest solution is to ban it. Even if reddit reversed it’s course on the API, I think the damage is done and the course is decline to irrelevance.
But Reddit biggest mistake around the API is not the API itself; you’re right most users won’t care. But it’s big mistake is losing the users who care - they are the power users, the technically savvy users, the early adopters. Reddit big mistake is it has encouraged those people to leave and help develop it’s competitor and alternative. That is why this has been so important and that is why I think reddit is probably not salvageable now.
Last time someone tried to compete with reddit it was single handed and closed - Vo.at. Now it’s open source, collaborative and decentralised.
So… I have some harsh feelings about Reddit. It’s bittersweet. A reflection of humanity with both good and bad and corruption of power and so forth. Like many I spent a lot of time on there. Learned a lot; challenged my views; and threw my voice out into the void for whatever it’s worth. 10 years and a lot of server time given from gildings handed out and received. Oh well.
Whether Reddit persists is contingent namely on 2 things:
1) Will they revert some of the biggest grievances?
I find this to be highly unlikely. When Spez is quoting Elon Musk as doing good work at Twitter, you know that’s a bad sign. Spez was not the genius behind Reddit — Aaron Swartz was. Spez just wants to cash out and leave Reddit behind. They need to find a way to make an inherently unprofitable concept profitable — and so of course the users suffer. It’s little different to what happened to Digg, and what happened to Facebook when it navigated away from its original UI that was so elegant and simple. So I’m happy Reddit’s devaluation is continuing.
2) Is there a substitute to seize on this moment?
When Digg collapsed under similar circumstances, Reddit was already there. Of course Lemmy is here; Tildes is in progress; and now Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia is spinning up Truth Cafe (WT Social 2.0). All three have significant hurdles to overcome that don’t quite match Reddit 1:1… So we’ll see.
My estimation is that Reddit will “survive,” but with diminished value, reputation, and significantly-lower average monthly users no differently than how Digg has “survived.” My view is to not fix what isn’t broke — and to disrupt applications like Push Shift / RiF / Apollo and so forth that are cornerstones to Reddit’s success, along with a variety of other administrative choices — is shooting themselves in the foot. It’s the end of Reddit for me even as a lurker since I can’t use RiF anymore, and I’m excited for something new to take its place.
I’ll leave a Medium article I wrote going into detail further for those interested, along with a terrible experience with both Admin and Moderator incompetency and inconsistency.
Reddit will survive. I hope it does- we (Lemmy) need it to.
Fact is, not every Reddit user is a good fit for Lemmy / is someone we want to bring over to Lemmy. Reddit has been intentionally courting a demographic that just wants quick content scrolling, like TikTok. I think that’s a big part of why Reddit has gotten so much more hostile in the last few years- such people don’t generally have open minds.
I want to migrate the people who are respectful, open-minded, who want a discussion and a debate. I don’t want to migrate the people who just want to endlessly scroll through shiny videos and never produce an intelligent thought.
So I say let Reddit have those people- if Spez can monetize them, do it with my compliments. The site/company won’t be nearly as valuable, but who cares.
In a way I wholly see your point. Who wouldn’t want to surround themselves with more mature individuals with worldly perspectives whose first inclination at disagreement isn’t “winning the argument” but rather the mutual pursuit of truth and a gentle “shifting” of views towards it in kind?
The only reason I’d disagree on this to some extent is it reproduces what is already a key problem with the internet / social media: Echo-chambers. Unfortunately for society to improve, we need to drag along the ignorant and inform them whatever way we can. The nice thing with Reddit is that you’d get a lot of overlap with “reasonable people,” and those… Not so reasonable. I attribute this exposure to changing my views massively over the years (coming from a rural christian conservative background turned progressive non-religious). In my view somehow you need to court these folks so they can be exposed to a variety of outside opinions but also ensure they don’t get… Unruly either.
Based.
They need to find a way to make an inherently unprofitable concept profitable
I’m sorry, not trying to argue but this is incorrect. It’s not inherently unprofitable, it’s chronically mismanaged. Reddit generated $485mm in revenue in 2021 and $670mm in 2022.
For a relatively feature-complete and mature website, development costs should be a small percentage of that (especially considering in hindsight that Reddit didn’t really ship anything of value. Avatars. 🤮).
You don’t have to be an MBA to see they’re blowing all their money on too many middle managers and too much expensive real estate.
They pissed away their best chance to develop a new revenue stream when they fired Chooter and ruined AMA. At that moment, a competent board would’ve reigned in spending. Not halted, just acknowledge that future growth just got stunted.
Rip Aaron. Truly a legend among men.
He would hate this.
Yes, it will survive. I still use it and will continue to use it because for me, Lemmy is not a fully replacement for many of the niche communities I follow.
Even victims of previous mass exoduses are still around. Take a look at the state of digg or fark now…
Whatever happens won’t be over in a week, a month, or even a year really…
Man, I forgot all about fark.
Yeah, I don’t think Reddit will fully go away but it might be in a death spiral.
It’s truly a mystery to me how the Reddit execs, investors, and board of directors think that these changes, and the way they’ve been rolled out, will be good for the long-term health and prosperity of the company. Even short term with an IPO on the horizon, none of this makes any sense. Maybe I just don’t understand the nuances of company valuations, IPO’s, executive pay, etc., but I don’t see how this move makes anything better for anyone involved. I could at least understand them shitting on the mods, communities, and apps if it meant a better payday for the investors and execs (it would be selfish and lousy, but at least I could understand it). I don’t understand the wisdom of this in the slightest.
The problem is that Reddit users are generally pretty savvy. They know how ad block works and they know not to click to dumb links. This is bad for investors.
Probably not, still too big to fail at this point, but hope CEO gets canned. Spez singlehandedly devaluated and depopulated Reddit while treating userbase as garbage. Fuck you Spez.
Reddit will fizzle out very very slowly. A bunch content creators and mods that use 3rd party apps have left. What is left is the mass horde. It will survive on tiktoc and Twitter reposts for a long time. Like years… and eventually it will become stagnant and boring and the horde will find something new and disperse. It won’t even be clear that this is what caused it or if it is the normal tide of the internet. To stay relevant you need to have progress that keeps people’s attention. This move is a regression that will kill it in the long term.
I’m really excited about Lemmy and the fediverse in general. I’ve grown tired of small “for the people” web services turning corporate and fucking us all by jamming ads into our face or delivering a bunch of bullshit content they want us to consume.
I went to the internet at an early age in part because I could find content that wasn’t littered with advertisements and all the other bullshit on TV. The fediverse seems like it can be a space more like the original internet, separated from the few big players (Meta, Twitter, Google, and I suppose Reddit now).
Yes, it will. But at what cost? Over time, the brain drain will likely become more pronounced as moderators jump ship and those who remain become a compliant group of lickspittles. As Reddit faces the consequences of its disastrous policies, it will become even more aggressive in securing revenue - and likely even more despotic. It can take years to build a reputation, and a few months to lose it. I suspect that their CEO has done an excellent job of accelerating this process.
That’s the bigger part of why I left; There’s probably 12-18mo of good content on the niche communities I liked, but 1) RIF and RES kept me away from the obnoxious format the site adopted, and 2) I know it’s just going to keep getting worse. Better to rip the band-aide off now.
I think reddit will eventually shrug it off. There’s an enormous number of users who think their app is perfectly fine and claim to not even notice the ad spam. Whether they’re blind or braindead is another question and I don’t get it, but most people don’t care.
The ones who do care are the ones who still know old.reddit and make the platform worthwhile with their expertise. As those people migrate elsewhere reddit will become even more mediocre and irrelevant.
Reddit will survive, just like Twitter and yahoo are still alive. But eventually nobody will even notice that it’s still alive.
As Lemmy picks up steam, more and more people will migrate over and leave Reddit in the dust. It’ll take a while, but it’s already starting to happen, and Reddit’s already starting to suffer negative repercussions as we saw with ad partners leaving them.
It will continue, just without the users that are most IT aware. The rest will stay and probably never noticed anything.
Same reason everyone except IT pros use Whatsapp. The masses are stupid, and go where the masses are. 🔄
My employer is planning on introducing WhatsApp for our customers. I want to die inside.
I was trying so much to get rid of that shit. No luck, everyone and their dog only knows of Whatsapp and will not use other apps
As much as I would like to boycott it completely, there are still too many big communities there, too much information you can’t reasonably find anywhere else.
I’ve stopped posting and commenting to stop contributing to the problem, and obviously I won’t be using it on mobile, but already before the API shutdown there were many users that were OK with using their official app.
Many mods gave up their protests when reddit applied pressure, instead of e.g. saying “you don’t like NSFW tags without NSFW content? Ok, for compliance, every post needs to contain a picture of an asshole”.
Reddit will probably either take over the remaining communities or let them die. It still has critical mass. It’ll survive, at least for a while, until something better comes along to replace it. I hope Lemmy will be able to do it but I doubt it. Too many rough edges, too many issues around federation and defederation, no critical mass (yet).
