The link contains db0’s views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it’s worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:
- a comparison between the current state of Reddit vs. Myspace near collapse;
- the illusion that everything is fine based on “raw” numbers like engagement;
- that Reddit was never a “good” site, but it had two positive points (open API and hands-off approach to communities), destroyed by the current events;
- the ongoing progression of the Fediverse as alternative to Reddit;
- the change in quality in both the content and the behaviour of the people still there.
The text mentions an article from Cory Doctorow. I’ve copied it to a pastebin, in case someone can’t access it.
EDIT: I hope that the author doesn’t mind, but I’ll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it’ll be a bit more accessible.
Reddit is a dead site running
from July 10, 2023
Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote
"The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah boyd, describing the last days of Myspace:
If a central node in a network disappeared and went somewhere else (like from MySpace to Facebook), that person could pull some portion of their connections with them to a new site. However, if the accounts on the site that drew emotional intensity stopped doing so, people stopped engaging as much. Watching Friendster come undone, I started to think that the fading of emotionally sticky nodes was even more problematic than the disappearance of segments of the graph.
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
This is exactly what is happening to Reddit currently. The most passionate contributors, the most tech-literate users, and the integrators who make all the free tools in the ecosystem around reddit which makes that service much more valuable have left and will never look back.
From the dashboards of u/spez however, things might looks great. Better even! As the drama around their decision making certainly caused a lot more posts and interactions, and the loss of the 3rd party apps drove at least a few users to the official applications.
But this is an illusion. Like MySpace before them, the metric might look good, but the soul of the site has been lost. It’s not easy to explain but since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time. half a month ago, posts could barely pass 2 digits, now they regularly break 3 and sometimes 4 digits. And the quality of the discussions is a pleasure to go through.
I said it before, but reddit was never a particularly good site. Their saving grace was the openness of their API and their hands-off approach to communities. The two things they just destroyed. It’s those 3rd party tools and communities that made reddit like it is. As as the ecosystem around reddit sputters and dies, the one around the Threadiverse is progressing in an astonishing rate.
Not only are the integrators coming from reddit aware what kind of bots and tools are going to be very useful, but a lot of those tools are shut off from reddit and switched to the lemmy API instead, explicitly cannibalizing the quality of the reddit experience. And due to the completely open API of the Threadiverse, those tools now get access to unparalleled access and power.
Sure if you visit reddit currently, you’ll see people talking and voting, but as someone who’s been there from the start, the quality has fallen off a hill and is reaching terminal velocity. But it feels like one’s still flying!
Not just the quality of the posts where only the most superficial meme stuff can rise to the top, not just the quality of the discussion, but even mere vibe of the discussions is just lost.
There’s now significant bitterness and hostility, especially as the mods who were responsible for maintaining the quality, have gone or are being hands off or just don’t have the tools needed to keep up. I’ve heard from multiple people who are leaving even while they were not originally planning to, because the people left over in reddit are just so toxic.
This is a very vicious cycle which will accelerate the demise of that site even further.
A house fire can go from a spark to a raging inferno in less than a minute. The flames consuming reddit are just now climbing up the curtains and it still appears manageable, but it’s already too late. Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die.
I’m OK with the full repost. It’s not like I’m running adverts 😁
Good to know! Thank you!
Tbh, on mobile your page’s not really readable with the double citation thing, so I’m glad that you are relaxed with the repost. Thanks!
Ye that’s annoying. I’ll see if there’s any sort of fix
You sound awesome.
It’s rendering well in Firefox Reader mode.
I was on reddit much longer than myspace and I still miss myspace more than reddit. lemmy definitely reminds me of the early days of many social network sites. reddit was just noisy programers faking users at the beginning…so perhaps we do that with our content again… I wonder if I spin up a lemmy instance If I can have midi playing on my page again?
Just as an FYI, MIDI does not make any sound; it’s just data containing pitch and velocity information (among other things). Virtual instruments use midi information to make the sounds. Windows (and I assume other OSs) have default virtual instruments that make the sounds that you would hear when playing a midi file, but that would sound different playing the same file through other virtual instruments. It’s a pretty common misconception.
On the other hand, don’t you dare try to bring back music autoplaying when you load a page from the myspace era!
don’t you dare try to bring back music autoplaying when you load a page from the myspace era!
You can’t have a good site without .mid files! Or without <blink>blinking text</blink>!
<img src="work.gif"> <marquee><strong>UNDER CONSTRUCTION</strong></marquee> <img src="work.gif">Wow, what a trip to the past!
Trying to figure out how my friend has a webpage at geocities.com/supercool and I have to have geocities.com/superawesome/superawesome.htmlI’m not seeing any
fonttags, sonny. You can’t have a real web page without<FONT FACE="Verdana" SIZE="3" COLOR="red">Welcome!</FONT>
Didn’t the inventor of the html blink markup apologize for creating it?
Or dancing baby icons. If it’s good enough for Homer J. Simpson, it’s good enough for you.
I finally understood midi by comparing it with emojis. The unicode standard only defines characters and their meanings, but it’s up to os or app developers to choose an actual visual representation to display.
Another anology would be sheet music.
Most browsers block audio autoplay now anyway, but you can always turn it off ;)
You can import basically any midi file in Guitar Pro and it’ll output a guitar tab
For sure; at that point it’s not even doing anything except formatting the data basically. If it’s a good program it might try to arrange things so that fingering is more efficient.
On the other hand, don’t you dare try to bring back music autoplaying when you load a page from the myspace era!
Yes midi, I literally want a player piano to start up on anyones random page but especially my own! ⁂
Similar to platform emojis being unique interpretations of the same information.
I feel like people had a stronger emotional attachment to Myspace than they have to modern social media. It was more like blogs (people were also fond of their own blogs, even bad ones). That’s perhaps even worse for Reddit because the “emotional cost of switch” is far smaller.
I wonder if I spin up a lemmy instance If I can have midi playing on my page again?
It’s probably doable, but odds are that you’d need to tweak Lemmy’s code for that.
no, it was that they were teenagers when they were using it. it’s pure nostalgia.
Yet I have zero nostalgia for Facebook.
I was almost 30 when I was on MySpace and I still loved it.
Perhaps this plays a role too, but I think that it’s more about its personal nature.
I might be an outlier, but I have zero nostalgia for my pretentious teenage emo-edgelord Myspace page - and I am glad it is lost to the graveyard of history
since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time.
This, more than anything happening at Reddit, demonstrates to me that people are leaving Reddit in droves.
Just weeks ago, Lemmy was slow, quiet place; it was rarely worth visiting more than once a day in terms of new posts. Since the Reddit protest, Lemmy has had a sea-change in volume, and that bespeaks a major migration.
I joined Lemmy 2 years ago and it was pretty much a desert, except for communities like privacy. I left after asking for a feature (a local intance feed, which has been implemented a while back!), because there wasn’t much else to do. Almost forgot about it until the whole reddit fiasco happened. I’m now so thrilled that threaded discussions are taking off in the fediverse!
I was really active on reddit, especially in a local city community. Answering tourist’s questions, posting local news, engaging in many conversations. I knew the regular’s usernames, I am sure many recognized mine. I haven’t posted since I’ve left and it honestly hurts a little, but I can’t go back anymore. Reddit is dead, it just doesn’t realize it yet. I’m happy to be a part of building Lemmy up.
I joined 3 years ago when I first heard about it in a zealous enthusiasm for open source projects, but quickly I realised it was just too small of a community for proper engagement - and the communities that were there felt a bit impenetrable with more close-knit and small userbases.
Now I can use Lemmy like I used reddit, for (reading and participating in) discussions with a semi-anonymous crowd on a multitude of topics and for looking at silly memes. And the future so far only looks more promising when it comes to the multitude part of topics available to discuss.
I didn’t really start to use Lemmy until after the API shutdown. And even in that length of time it’s been remarkable. The first week without reddit Lemmy wasn’t really able to keep me death scrolling, which was a good thing probably. I eventually used revanced to get Sync working again on my phone. Since doing that I’ve spent maybe 3 hours on Reddit and probably 3 or 4 times that on Lemmy as the communities get more active and I find more communities I want to be a part of.
This gives me real, concrete hope that Lemmy is the future. I’m seeing it transform just in the last couple of weeks.
Also the old memes thing is funny af.
Yeah I’ve personally witnessed the growth in real time. I got on lemmy when the Reddit API changes where announced, and I was checking in on it at least once a day, because that was all there was to see.
Where as today it’s booming!
I think reddit will keep going for awhile longer, mainly just because of how big it is
But the damage has definitely been done, and the problem is I don’t believe reddit has any capability of patching up the damage long-term. Everything still looks good now, but it’s not like Twitter immediately looked bad when Elon got it either. Instead we’ll see them continuously, over and over, having to fix things that looking back were caused by this.
Once a number of the smaller hobby communities have their bases move offsite, it will be a big blow to reddit. I think it’s those types of groups that would be more likely to stick around. You can find political commentary anywhere, but finding a group that can answer your questions about a niche hobby is only in a few places, and chances are high that the subreddit ended up killing the old forum for it.
I think Google de-prioritising Reddit search results is huge.
It was my go-to secret. Try and find a specific solution/recommendation/review, I’d see what comes up normally then add “Reddit” and check out some threads.
Normally, the Reddit threads would have the gem I needed for my problem/question.Now, I’m faced with private communities or deleted posts. And - although it makes my googling harder - I’m all for it. I find myself adding “-reddit” now so I don’t get juked by search result caches.
I gave knowledge to that site. I gave my experiences within niche communities. I’d reply when someone asks a question on my post/comment a few years later.
That’s over for me.There is a long term lasting damage that they have done to themselves.
I used to do the same thing. I found that adding “forum” in place of “reddit” brings up more community answers on more websites. I hope it works for your stuff like it’s worked for mine
Removed by mod
db0 didn’t explore further on the types of damage caused by the current events, but once we do, IMO it’s clear that you’re right - there’s no way for Reddit to patch it up.
The main damage is that Reddit hit the trust thermocline. It has been abusing the trust of the userbase for a really long time, but the 3PAs and its “users? mods? nah, fuck them” approach that made plenty users go from “I trust this site enough to contribute with it” to “contribute??? with Reddit? Hell no!”.
And it’s funny because Reddit Inc. seems to be (historically) hellbent on avoiding the same mistakes as Digg did with v4 (where changes in interface pissed users and made them left), for example leaving old.reddit alone for so many years… just to do the exact same mistake as Digg did in the big picture (v4 didn’t cause the Digg exodus alone - it was v4 plus everything before it).
leaving old.reddit alone for so many years
Except they killed part of the old reddit experience earlier this year, when they decommissioned i.reddit
Digg is still around… but it’s nothing like it used to be. Reddit will do the same.
I mean, Digg is still up and running…
Splintering communities suffer from major attrition events that lower their value. We already have a model for where Twitter and Reddit are going – FB. Compared with 10 years ago it is a graveyard. If it weren’t for their ownership of IG, it would be far worse for them. It is now a site for older people and for an awful lot of fake accounts. Twitter and Reddit are headed this same direction, but it’s probably a 2-3 year timeline before it is really obvious. More generally, the model of centralized social media has already peaked. I am not disputing that they will still have large user bases but there will be a slow grinding down.
theres enough of us here now to make lemmy viable, we’re over the hump of any social media of getting enough people on that you can browse all day and still have real content.
I had my first “What time is it?!?” moment a couple days ago while browsing lemmy. Hours had passed, and I didn’t even notice.
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I agree with the self sustainability.
I started browsing fediverse a bit back, but there wasn’t enough content so I would go back to Reddit (mostly to catch up on news and discussions).
But I’m going to Reddit less and less now as there are more people engaging in fediverse content. I now mostly go back for specific subreddits, but not the general feeds anymore.Lemmy works so well because Reddit was always about interacting with normal, average users. Mastodon and Peertube don’t work as well as Lemmy because many people go on Twitter and YouTube for well known people with big followings, and those people will stay on whatever platform is most popular. This is just my opinion, I hope it changes someday.
Is it just me or has interacting with humans on reddit become a frustrating experience? People are only trying to get one over on each other, all debates I see seem to be about who can just get the harshest insult in before blocking the other person… i guess reddit’s popularity works heavily against what made reddit good in the first place, i think the more popular something is, the lower the common denominator
I said it before, but I think a lot of that toxic arguing was us being played by bad actors. People would say the meanest shit or have the worst takes imaginable to get a rise.
Those “bad actors” are users too though. They’re real people who enjoy causing outrage. We’ve had them since the invention of BBS. We used to call them trolls. I think we still call them trolls, but we used to too. Seriously though, so often now people jump to the conclusion that the guy with the shitty take and horrible attitude must be from some Russian cyber farm. Maybe he’s just an asshole.
Personally I suspect that a significant amount of the negativity on Reddit really was was organized by state actors in order to sow division. The constant ageism, for instance, always struck me as suspect. Someone would inevitably bring up how awful boomers were no matter how irrelevant it was to the discussion.
Yes, to some degree, it could also just be the usual toxicity that people explore when they get their first taste of anonymity on the internet. I like to hope that people eventually mature and grow out of it, but the younger you are, the less time you’ve had to work out those dark indulgences.
I don’t see that kind of talk being representative of real world interaction and whenever that happens it’s a useful reminder that some of what we see on the internet is kind of a glitch, like an artifact of an attempt at simulated communication that ended up failing because of broken mechanisms in the human component failing to translate real interaction into the virtual space.
Like the whole woke-war that bad actors are trying to drum up to increase cultural divide…the internet spotlights only the worst stories and segregated social groups know nothing about the out-groups except these rage-bait stories.
Well, except a bunch of subreddits straight up banned you for calling out trolls. Because it hurts the Facebook crowd’s feelings to be ostracized for being stupid.
I hear you and I agree they’ve been around since I first started using mIRC 27 years ago. But the trend now is that there are more of them than there are of us. It takes ten minutes to load up a large language model to behave like a right or left wing troll and let it loose on Reddit, or here for that matter. In fact, I’m going to code one up tonight for shits and giggles that spreads positivity.
How do you train the LLM? Just follow the ChatGPT docs and point it to the API as a source?
ChatGPT can work, but it’s expensive. You can use oobabooga and grab a model off huggy face then code up a personality. After that you have the API send generation requests to the model and post as if it’s a human.
Thanks! I’m going to give that a shot. I’ve been messing around with the ChatGPT API as a content generator for another project.
I made a bot that interacted with my Twitch chat using this! Very fun use of the model. I’ll warn you it always uses 100% when processing, usually for a couple seconds. It can cause stuttering while gaming.
And the number of times a perfectly rational and informative comment will get a huge pile of downvotes for no good reason.
I love how every comment you made will be acksuahllied by the most dumbest pedantic shit that will get a bunch of upvotes and sidetrack the entire conversation. Really good posts would get almost entirely ignored because someone claims to debunk it by disproving one of their dozen points and facts.
I’ve noticed it as well. My guess is that the average age of someone on reddit is decreasing, and combine that with the popularity of call-out culture you have what you have.
You brought up a great point - synergy between different platforms in the Fediverse. At least in theory we could build something here that surpasses Reddit, Twitter, IG, Youtube and Facebook, simply because it’s intended to operate together.
Reddit is just the first domino to fall.
More like the second. Twitter was the first, and Huffman aping Musk was part of the domino falling chain.
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Twitter is in large part like Reddit now: dead, but running. There’s still some anchoring as the orgs that you mentioned keep using it, but that won’t be for long.
It fell already. It’s still bouncing a bit, but it won’t stand up ever again, except perhaps by a big stroke of luck.
I read here on Lemmy a couple of days ago about at least one nation’s government that is building their own website to get off of Twitter because they consider it too unstable now.
I don’t think the fediverse is at sustainability yet. It’s still very much an early adoption phase. Pretty much every community is ok with content for the sake of content. If it weren’t for the constant stream of shit posting the fediverse would look dead. The next step is to start getting more quality to happen.
This is total pie in the sky naive thinking, but I used to think reddit felt a lot like the way ‘the net’ is described in the Ender’s Shadow novels. But now with the Fediverse I feel like we’re even closer to that.
PSA: card is a dick and a bigot who uses his platform to spread hate. If you want to read his books, don’t steal them just find a nice truck for them to fall off of.
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* Looks around *
Uhh, Mastodon’s been self-sustaining for quite a while now. There’s an order of magnitude more active users on Mastodon, and Mastodon’s federation with PixelFed keeps it sustainable.
The fact that Lemmy doesn’t federate well with Mastodon and PixelFed probably means that it’s not going to actually generate an outsized impact in that space.
Now, Lemmy’s federation with PeerTube could do some interesting things…
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We moved past critical mass and moved to a meme cycle. Shit-posting in response to shit-posting is like the heartbeat of the internet. Beans, retro memes, and making fun of Poland getting invaded again are the natural order of things.
Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die.
The mods and tools are leaving. Will the last one to go, please turn off the lights?
Nah, MySpace lights are still on lol
First of all, I cannot speak for the current state of Reddit myself because I literally never go there anymore.
I’ve been here for 5 days, and from my experience is this platform has gained a lot of traction even in that short timeframe. Hopefully it just doesn’t level off and then die suddenly.
Most importantly though, this article hit on the nose of what my opinion is on what made Reddit great… great 3rd party platforms (I loved Apollo) and the moderation/customization of its subreddits. Everything was so hands off. Both of those are gone now. Reddit killed off the very things that made it unique and so good.
In my 7 years on Reddit, I’d say over the last two-ish years we have slowly been seeing that leave. So many subs got shut down, and some definitely were questionable at best, but in it, Reddit organic feel and freedom. At first it was only the worst of the worst subs, but slowly more and more left. Not to mention moderation was being done by a shrinking number of people and it seemed the echo chamber in each individual sub got worse.
Some changes were directly administration’s fault, others indirect to varying degrees.
I’d argue Reddit has slowly been killing itself for awhile now, it’s just that the latest changes are the most abrupt, direct, and significant.
I’ve been checking Reddit once in a while. Mostly to archive a few things here and there, as people mention them in this sub. I feel like db0 is spot on, when talking about how the place is now bitter and hostile (it was already this way, but even more now). The current events were “just enough” to get rid of any sort of cooperativeness that you’d feel on the site before.
How is emotional stickiness measured? I feel like the article is hitting on something I’ve noticed about reddit ever since July 1st, but it’s hard for me to explain or support this subconscious observation that the quality content has slowed dramatically.
Reposting had always been a thing but it feels like the ratio of reposts to quality has increased, and the scroll of new posts on the front page or /r/all has slowed considerably. I have no way to back that up other than subjective experience though.
I wish that I knew a way to measure it; because I’m also feeling it, as I’m checking r/all for comparison right now, but it’s damn hard to explain specifically what is wrong.
Perhaps votes could be used to approximate this? At the end of the day, “upvote” = “I want this to be more visible”. If people feel less emotionally connected to the platform, odds are that they’re upvoting less on things. There’s a lot of noise in doing it this way, but at least it gives us some metric to refer to.
Yeah, I haven’t been around here too long either, but it feels like something interesting is happening for sure. There’s tons of memes, but there’s definitely also some interesting non-meme content. It’s shaping up to be a replacement for the core of what made Reddit work, hopefully while learning what not to do along the way. I know of at least 1-2 new apps on the way from seasoned 3rd party Reddit devs. Sync (!syncforlemmy@lemmy.world) will likely become my app of choice when it’s available.
The biggest issue I’m seeing right now is the amount of data we’re asking server admins to store as far as long-term sustainability. In a Lemmy Support community, I saw one admin saying their 1k-user instance was gobbling up an extra GB of disk space daily. I wonder if the devs could overhaul the content distribution system to reduce the number of copies of data stored? Maybe clusters where each cluster is a “core federation” inner circle that shares/mirrors content with each other (basically a pact to distribute seeding the network), then more loosely federated servers that are allowed to view/share data without fully mirroring all relevant content.
So many subs got shut down, and some definitely were questionable at best, but in it, Reddit organic feel and freedom
While I agree that deplatforming should be very cautiously and judiciously approached, I will say that there is some content that should be blocked for the sake of preservation of tolerance. I don’t care whether the topic of discussion is legal, I care if it’s ethical. Hate speech has, and does, encourage real violence against innocent parties. When the goal post keeps moving for the sake of attracting investors or silence activism, rather than focusing solely on user experience, we start to see unreasonable restrictions on free communication. With federation and open source software, there’s no way to stop neonazis from setting up their own network, provided DNS is willing to point to them, but that doesn’t mean we should assist in growing their ideology/platform.
Not to mention moderation was being done by a shrinking number of people and it seemed the echo chamber in each individual sub got worse.
I wonder if this might be a reflection on increasingly difficult times for many people as cost of living exceeds income? Moderation takes real work. It’s unpaid and generally quite thankless. If would-be mods are bogged down with real-world problems, they’ll have less energy to devote to volunteering.
Good points and I agree with all of them. I’ll also add that when Reddit started shutting down some subs, it was a good thing, as they started with the worst of the worst. My point is just that’s when it started, and it just went too far from there. Now there definitely seems to be too heavy of a hand.
Expanding on that, that all evolved to a point where Reddit is telling moderators how to moderate, and if they fail to comply, they will force you out and replace you with someone who will moderate exactly how they want. At this point, besides niche smaller subs, there is very little that is organic on that site.
The subs used to feel like they each belonged to their creators and/or moderators. To me that is what made Reddit great and unique in so many ways, it’s why there was something for everybody. The site could perfectly fit the content to anyone. That’s pretty much dead now.
There is certainly a change in character over there. I think we’re at the tail end of long, gradual decline. I’m not sure where along the way we dropped off - probably some proverbial frog boiling going on. But undoubtedly the quality of discourse in say, 2010-2015 was significantly better than today.
That’s a decent point I would say. I would say even pre 2010 was better, but I was still lurking at that point. It took me years to feel comfortable enough to create an account, probably because most posts were tech stuff that I didn’t understand enough to have a valuable opinion.
Sometime around 2016 it became really bad. Like really, really bad. I don’t think the election was the reason for it, but all those bots certainly didn’t help. Politics would literally creep into every comment section, even pics of fluffy kittens. The political bots seemed to get quieter after ~2018, but the vitriol, aggressive comments and people feeling the need to dunk on each other only seemed to get worse and worse.
There was a distinct point when I realized the site had changed when I made a reply to add some additional information to a commentors point and they immediately thought of it as a direct personal attack against themselves, not someone just furthering discussion.
That is actually a perfect way to phrase it - commenters taking everything as a personal attack. Add a personal opinion or extra context? I know, quit implying I’m stupid. Add a respectful disagreement? Fuck you, you’re wrong, I’m right. It really has gotten to the point where replying to anything is basically signing yourself up for a mini flame war.
MySpace didn’t nearly collapse, it collapsed. Whatever it is now is not the vibrant user space it used to be. Now it’s irrelevant to 99.9% of the people on the planet.
By “near collapse” in the summary I meant “close to the collapse”, or “a bit before it collapsed”.
Gotcha, thanks for the clarification. I very much enjoyed reading this post and engaging in the comments that spawned from it, so I hope I didn’t come across as dismissive. But I wanted to point out that it did in fact collapse, because I personally remember it happening. Shortly after Newscorp took ownership they purged the content database. Everyone lost everything. We lost our pictures, our profile settings, and for me the most damaging was blog posts I had spent a lot of time writing, which had a lot of engagement on them. Whatever investment people still had in MySpace died right then. The people left on the site immediately migrated to Facebook and the collapse was complete.
i really want to know why myspace’s owners even bother keeping the lights on any more. to my knowledge’s there’s no niche community of hanger-ons who still passionately use it (please correct if I’m wrong). most of the main content of the site (pics and music) have been purged so there’s no reason to even keep it up for nostalgia/historical purposes.
This is becoming like the “dead MMO” meme. Just because you no longer use it doesn’t mean it’s dead.
I think that it’s different. The author identifies two core points responsible for the popularity of the platform. And it’s easy to see why they’re so important:
- open API → third party devs coding features to use with the platform → higher user experience → higher user retention
- hands-off approach to community → Reddit being used in ways that the community managers didn’t expect → Reddit more suitable for a wider audience → larger potential market
By killing those two things Reddit might make some short-term profit, but it’ll be at expense of the value of the platform and associated company. Once that value goes too low, the profit margin itself will go down, encouraging further measures, that in turn will degrade its value even further.
Using MMOs as analogy what the Reddit devs did was to remove core mechanics essential for the main gameplay cycle, and left the players only with the optional quests and minigames. Even if you don’t really care about the core gameplay, you’ll eventually get bored, and leave. No sane game dev would do this, and yet that’s what Reddit did.
There’s an additional factor db0 didn’t mention through this text, that I believe to be essential for Reddit’s “aliveness”: user trust. It’s hard to measure, but it’s what prompts users to “play along” the platform and other users, explaining the bitterness and hostility - because for your typical user, everyone besides himself is “part of the platform”. And this tends to create a vicious cycle, since hostile interactions make people trust a platform even less.
Thanks for sharing this post! Doctorow has a lot of useful things to say about the current moment we find ourselves in with the Fediverse.
Yes! This guy shines in uncertain times, that’s kind of his brand.
People are leaving Reddit in droves but they’re a tiny minority. It’s far from collapse
Did you read the article? That is exactly what the author addressed and why he thinks it is heading towards collapse based on his experiences with Friendster and MySpace. Now Reddit is much larger than either of those sites, so it may be more resilient to users leaving (Twitter being a good parallel here, and potentially in the same boat), but they are very much following in the same footsteps as those other websites.
It’s like a house of cards - depending on which card is missing, the whole thing falls down. Although it depends on what “to fall down” or “to collapse” means in this case.
For “collapse” = “noticeable and irreversible change of the number of active users, and their overall engagement”: I think that the collapse will be slow-motion, because the content already in the site still retains a bit of the userbase. It won’t be as fast as Myspace’s. However the situation is looking similar to Myspace before the collapse.
Wasnt the point of the article that the tech literate people left? For sure the hardest crowd to please, but Id say they’ve settled here in Lemmy with the massive ammounts of tools and apps being created - with such a small userbase
The point is the quality, not the quantity. I see a common refrain on the threadiverse that the discussions are more in depth, insightful, thoughtful, etc. Slowly the rank and file of Reddit will get tired of how much less interesting and creative the content there is
Just waiting on some subs to start moving here. But yeah I’ve seen huge decreases even in the volume of posts. The quality of comments has also gone off a cliff. I think the most engaged users were a tiny subset.
Definitely lost the rational and measured discussion crowd although they were always shrinking as a percentage. It’s even more outrage and dumb hot takes now.
The 90-9-1 rule sure seems to apply to reddit, based on the decrease in most subs since the blackout.
IMO it is like the foundations of the building have been undermined , I do agree with the author , even if reddit looks ok numbers wise the heart and soul has been removed.
There’s now significant bitterness and hostility,
Yes, I’ve noticed this more than ever in the last year or two, it simply is not pleasant to interact with people on reddit anymore. Old accounts stopped posting months or years ago, new accounts either don’t take it seriously (therefor making the entire experience an empty and frustrating exercise in trolling) or use it purely to make bad faith arguments about politics.
Don’t get me wrong, reddit’s never been exactly a bastion of highminded discourse but right now it’s positively vile.
or use it purely to make bad faith arguments about politics.
How much did Hillary pay you to type this from Hunter Biden’s laptop?
That’s a serious example of laughable responses I’ve received on Reddit. I received them often enough to eventually completely block all political sites from my feed over there.
reddit’s never been exactly a bastion of highminded discourse
It had some subs and users that were generally nice and fun to interact with, but it has been a constant battle to keep the trolls out of the garden. With people now haven lesser tools to fight and lesser people that want a pleasant experience for all I could imagine those patches of joy would dry out. But now we’re here and I’m all for making the best out of it.
