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Reddit is the only all encompassing hobbyist forum still remaining on the internet. I follow my favorite youtubers on their subreddit. I have spent countless h
by screye 6y ago
Reddit is the only all encompassing hobbyist forum still remaining on the internet.
I follow my favorite youtubers on their subreddit. I have spent countless hours discussing manga, cars, soccer, politics (in a civil way), find prog bands, food science and so much more.
I can say this confidently: "None of those activities would be as much fun if I did not have my fellow redditors to enjoy it with."
The main subreddits are trash, but that's the point. Reddit might just be able to rapidly scale up to letting normies in, without letting the first-adopters feel like reddit has lost its charm. Specifically, there will be 2 reddits. One would be the front page with a tiktok-esque stream of memes, outrage and short videos; and the other would be the niche subreddits that function similarly to hacker news in terms of strict moderation and deliberate inaccessibility.
Now I am not sure if this genius of reddit is intentional or if the founders stumbled into what is probably the only survival plan for a business where scaling up inevitably leads to a huge drop in the value proposition of the platform itself.
Conde Nast made an incredible acquisition; and not having the market pressures of a public company might have something to do with Reddit's success.
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edit: because I must shill for them some more
Reddit is also THE PLACE on the internet for the best surreal humour and organic decentralized art as social experiences. Subreddits like r/196, r/2meirl42meirl4meirl and r/kenm are completely inaccessible without knowing the meta-story around them, but have me rolling on the floor like nothing else. r/place is the most well known reddit decentralized art experience, but r/hqg, and r/youdontsurf create humor and art from a constrained format that can be so meta that the entire front page could be purely self-referential.
- blacktriangle 6y agoThe bigger question is: why must hobbyist forums be all-encompassing? Setting up a phpbb is trivial, so what is the advantage to me the user having a single identity linking my professional conversations about software with my more casual conversations about unicycle rally racing?
- screye 6y agoConvenience and consistency. I was a big user of forums before reddit, and I am glad it has centralized. IMO, it is pretty obvious. It is the same reason any social media website has 1 identity for everything on it. > linking professional conversations and casual conversations You know you can alt accounts right ?
- mostlysimilar 6y ago“Having a single identity for all of your interests is more convenient” and “you can have multiple identities to keep your interests separate” seem like pretty contradictory statements.
- astrobe_ 6y agoYes they are, and yes some users want both at the same time. Users are complicated.
- mywittyname 6y agoI can think of many reasons, but I'll limit them to: 1. visibility - it is easier for users to find the community on reddit. Both from search engines, and "organically" on reddit. 2. foot traffic - users don't need to remember that you exist to visit, once a sub is in a user's feed, they will see all of the new posts. 3. Setting up a server and installing forum software might be "easy," but it is still much more difficult than setting up a subreddit. The only real benefit to setting up a phpbb server is that you might get some revenue from ad traffic once the userbase grows up some.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI think the difficulty in setting up a server and installing forum software is eclipsed by the time, effort, and liability stress from moderating the content and dealing with illegal or undesireable content / malware. To me, one of the impressive things about Reddit is how they have managed to be a mainstream site with porn, and how they manage to keep it off their front page.
- wccrawford 6y agoProbably true, but people don't learn that until after they've set up a subreddit and it's gotten somewhat successful. For their own site, they're immediately hit with a wall of pain as they try to figure out what all they need to know just to get their first user. And there's nothing driving those users to their new forum, either.
- opportune 6y agoI think the easiest way to implement the “2 Reddits” idea would to just have old.reddit.com’s contents be exclusive to old Reddit. I doubt many long time users like the facebook-ish UI which is designed to serve you full screen ads
- colineartheta 6y agoAs a fellow redditor, I just wanted to say that your final paragraph perfectly puts to words my enjoyment of those wildly strange and wonderfully creative self-referential subreddits. So, thanks, for your words.
- screye 6y ago:) I edited it in later. I felt an urge to say it, because it is an aspect of reddit that often goes unappreciated.