I think this post makes a good point. Reddit doesn’t have to collapse overnight to become irrelevant. They’ve made a huge mistake by upsetting enough people to cause the exploration of alternatives.
I spent a couple hours browsing Lemmy instances today and I was shocked at how few users are needed to create replacement communities. Communities with about 2k users feel sparse, but good enough IMO.
I now think Reddit is 100% replaceable, at least for me, and I really hope that more focused community aggregators like programming.dev catch on.
I've been among those users creating replacement communities. Mostly about topics that I wanted to speak about, even in Reddit, but prevented myself to do so to not feed that awful company and environment. It feels good - you feel yourself important (I'm not important though), contributing with something.
I don't even use mobile, mind you. But I know that a company showing some users its middle finger will eventually show it to me. It did in the past, but sadly it was simply "casual abuse", not a big screwing up pissing multiple users at the same time.
And while anecdotal, this highlights for me:
1. The importance to keep a good relationship with your users. Trust is hard to measure through A/B testing; people might tolerate some abuse, but they won't forget about it. And once you do something that might look inconsequential, but breaks that trust a tiny bit further, it's "just enough" to make them leave, or fight back. Perhaps if Reddit hasn't been so abusive towards its users, people would look at the third party apps dying and say "oh well, I'll install the official app".
2. That that trust is also broken if you tell people blatant lies. If Reddit Inc. was actually honest with their intentions ("we want 3rd party apps gone"), or said nothing at all, people wouldn't be as pissed. It shows that the company expects them to be stupid, and not even the stupid like to be treated as such.
3. That some users are more important to keep happy than others. You definitively don't want to piss off the users necessary for your business model.
The subreddits with the most focused discussions are often those with just a few thousand subs. Perhaps the tipping point is around 10k users... when conversations become much less personal.
> I spent a couple hours browsing Lemmy instances today and I was shocked at how few users are needed to create replacement communities.
Mirrors my experience today as well. Dare I say, some communities like r/selfhosted seem to be better off in their Lemmy/kbin counterparts, these kind of communities benefit from the more dedicated posters anyway, and reddit alternatives seem to attract the right kind of people for them.
I like the BeeHaw instance, it's probably not everyone's cup of tea but the tone of the place is just so much more pleasant than Reddit has got over the last few years.
What reddit became was actually because it was a centralised place. Everybody had be on one platform with just one account and easily connect and the platform was cared for and tended (albeit with VC money and eventually that became the undoing it).
Anyway with this fragmentation I doubt we will get anywhere. Users will be scattered across non-federated silos (and not in a good "different special interest corners of the Internet" way, but just lost and disconnected).
If it was easily doable on fediverse I'd have loved that but it is not. I am just happy Facebook and Instagram are not going to be that place.
I would rather root for the return of forum era - maybe not federated. But then that kind of forum thing gave birth to one giant Reddit (I was a pre-teen back then so do not clearly remember how it started; so maybe this is totally incorrect).
> I spent a couple hours browsing Lemmy instances today and I was shocked at how few users are needed to create replacement communities. Communities with about 2k users feel sparse, but good enough IMO.
It has become a joke on the fediverse that it is going to die any moment, tech journalists have written article after article over the years saying mastodon failed, it is going to die, it will never virally scale like venture capital funded corporate social networks did…
What they never understand is the localized perspective of someone in one of the small communities on the fediverse. Who individually actually cares if 1000, 5000, 100,000, 2 million…… or whatever abstractly large number of users are active on the fediverse? If you look up and see a handful, perhaps 60 active users who all genuinely engage with you and are interesting to talk to then the presumed fantastical future of a freer, fediverse of connected social networks existing outside of the rat race of corporate, consumption focused social media is already here…
Yes a small minority of people are currently experiencing that future, but it becomes undeniable that future can exist for everybody, it is a matter of simply more people waking to it when they please. The fediverse can exist as just a pebble on the shore of a corporate internet that dwarfs it, yet the potential always persists that the fediverse could destabilize and overthrow it all by virtue of being enough, just as a mere pebble, to bring meaning to the very next person who stumbles upon it.
This is one of the more reasonable pieces I've read about this, something everyone monitoring the situation for whatever reason should be mindful of.
It never occurred to me before reading this but I probably fall into the category of examples: I almost never visited Digg, maybe a couple of times, but did regularly visit Reddit later.
The proportion of Reddit users who would even know about Digg is probably relatively small, and my sense over time is that it became increasingly part of the forgotten prehistory of Reddit for the typical user experience.
This brings up another issue, which is user age. My guess is Reddit use, if it fades, will follow some pattern where resentful or unhappy users go build something else, and that something else increasingly becomes filled with people who were too young to be part of what caused its genesis in the first place.
the history is often overlooked: when digg imploded/shot itself in the foot, reddit was in the right place at the right time and got lucky. Somewhere for the exodus to go to. Reddit itself was failing fast and on its last legs at the time held afloat by its core users and that's it. They didn't know what they were going to do and I resent that some of its founders/execs from that time are heralded as some sort of visionaries when they just got lucky running what's not much more than a forum hosting site with a slew of very standard web 2.0 features.
Resenting someone's good fortune helps no one but certainly hurts the resenter by blinding them to what (could have) helped the other guys attain said good fortune.
Yes, Reddit had standard Web 2.0 features but they had to build it and have it working when the masses arrived. Yes, they were helped by YC but they had to go out and market themselves to the people running YC. Yes, they were alive, if barely, when Digg suicided, but give them credit for being around.
To me, the key takeaway is not to resent their success but to keep doing the little things that matter, stay in the game for as long as you reasonably can, and wait for the pack leader to falter.
I don't think the resentment is for the good fortune, it's for the misattribution of the source of the fortune. It's a massive survivorship bias which happens everywhere: for every instance of someone working hard, waiting for the oppurtunity, getting lucky and having great success, there are many instances of people working just as hard on just as reasonable bets, for just as long if not longer, and not getting lucky, and you don't hear their stories. And because luck is such a strong component, looking at what successful people have done is a very noisy signal for what leads to success, especially once you get to any specifics. That's where the resentment comes from, the assumption that because these execs were successful that this was due to great foresight alone, and very little due to luck.
This entire comment is unnecessary. Nothing that they said is incorrect. Whether you, personally, consider it "resentment" or not is completely irrelevant.
Did you miss that the OP themselves used the word “resent”? Don’t know if they edited their comment to remove the word “resent” (haven’t checked) but it was certainly there when I replied to them.
Ah, that's not clear and doesn't make much sense in context, as you seem to be trying to say that Digg was still larger than (or at least doing well compared to) Reddit at the time.
Or you can use a protocol which actually just gives you this feature without needing to run another service to get it (which is basically all of IRC: it's a simplistic to the point of useless protocol which people have stacked a series of bodges on top of in order to actually make something approximating usable for highly technical users. It shocks me that anyone thinks this is good, let alone that it's better than the many alternatives now available).
That's just wrapping IRC in an actually usable protocol. At that point you aren't using IRC. Might as well use something like Matrix and be able to take advantage of a better protocol.
IRC is for chat. NNTP it's the protocol which is the antecesor for Reddit and web fora.
Usenet (https://www.eternal-september.org) with Pan/SLRN as the clients has a much better pace, and the talks on tech circles are top quality, such as comp.unix.misc or comp.unix.programmer or comp.lang.c.
No need to update or answer inmediately, you'll get much better answers to complex issues by waiting a few hours.
Then there's FIDO and DOVEnet, which you can access thru Telnet (BBS'), SSH, web and Usenet. Most of it are old folks and ancient tech, but you have better talks on modern news (and some niche Unix talks) as they post long and elaborated arguments.
Using a Usenet client againt FIDO/Dovenet thru cvs.syncro.net:113 it's like using any other Usenet client as the hierarchies are closeish and as a plus you get threaded discussions for free.
That's why you don't let outsiders (third parties) dictate what and how. Later on they will start demanding things and shout about everything. Slowing you down, creating wounds on your company and the like...
Social networks and platforms that people use to talk to each other should never have been dominated by profit-seeking businesses in the first place. Federated alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin that put community interests first look promising, and could very well be the future.
Before the web 2.0 style social networks we had community forums, frequently run on phpBB or some other BBS forum tool (before that Usenet, before that... actual dialup BBS systems).
My point is that while most were not profit driven, the VC profit models of myspace, Facebook, et al. attracted massive investment that enabled a much wider reach and therefore a superior network effect and accessibility. Suddenly you could tweet at your favorite celebrities or businesses and they might respond, and in many cases we found this a fair trade for occasional advertising.
From what I can see the advantage of Lemmy is that you can use the same login across multiple forums that are independently operated with minimal central control, and you can take your reputation with you as you move between forums. Hypothetically, like the old days, some could be profit driven while others are fully community supported.
This model does seem to offer many advantages, so long as they can continue to match the accessibility and performance of the centralized social networks.
>Social networks and platforms that people use to talk to each other should never have been dominated by profit-seeking businesses in the first place.
Well, someone needs to pay for the infrastructure needed to run those platforms, I don't think that relying on donations is a good long term strategy, especially when the platforms grows. Also, having knowledge of people's opinions, preferences, likes and dislikes sure attracts some people.
>Federated alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin that put community interests first look promising, and could very well be the future.
I am not sure about this one, federated social networks may have the same community divided across multiple instances, but maybe someone could implement a client which allows you to group communities from multiple instances under one label? This sounds like a reasonable solution to me but I don't know much about the inner workings of federated social platforms.
I spent a couple hours browsing Lemmy instances today and I was shocked at how few users are needed to create replacement communities. Communities with about 2k users feel sparse, but good enough IMO.
I now think Reddit is 100% replaceable, at least for me, and I really hope that more focused community aggregators like programming.dev catch on.