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The risk within the “internet chat” sector is huge. Many popular discussion platforms disappear almost overnight. Slashdot, Digg, MySpace. I wouldn’t put a big

• CerealFounder 5y ago
  The fact that Reddit let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.
  • kryptn 5y ago
    How are reddit and discord related?
    • OJFord 5y ago
      Not GP, but I assume because 'subreddits' so frequently have an associated Discord 'server'. You could argue Reddit missed the opportunity to spot that, buy a younger Discord, and integrate it better.
      • Dwolb 5y ago
        This is the same for marketplace features across gear-related subreddits. Groups have to go off platform to trade/sell gear between subreddit users.
    • treis 5y ago
      They are both effectively threaded chats. Discord a bit more real time than Reddit and lower volume. But definitely can see people migrating from Reddit to Discord. Especially for smaller subs.
    • thaumasiotes 5y ago
      They are both popular forums to discuss games. If you want to join an online community around a game you play, reddit is an obvious choice. Discord has become some kind of awful de facto standard filling the same use case.
      • netr0ute 5y ago
        They have totally different formats though, with Big Red being slower and Discord being realtime.
        • thaumasiotes 5y ago
          That's not a difference in what they do or even in how they're used. There are plenty of subreddits that rely on real-time interaction between posters; arranging pokemon trades is an obvious example. The difference is purely branding.
          • Talanes 5y ago
            >The difference is purely branding. If I make a comment in a large Discord server, and then put my phone back in my pocket and continue my day, I am very unlikely to actually see any responses to what I said.
            • thaumasiotes 5y ago
              Discord will alert you to their existence, highlight them for you, navigate you straight to them, and jump you back to your original comment so you can read forward from there. That last option doesn't even require your responses to be marked as responses to you. If you don't see the responses, that's because you didn't want to.
              • Talanes 5y ago
                But "Read forward from there" is often just way too much text, with no clear delineation between different topics other than reading it. Reddit encapsulates topics into their own spaces that can live outside of an ever-increasingly long scrolling text screen. I regularly get so far behind on channels in an 11 person server that I just give up on reading whatever I missed that day. If Discord and Reddit can serve functionally identical purposes in your life, that's fine, but to deny that they have any functional differences to anyone is just provably false.
    • mintplant 5y ago
      When you get down to it, many Discord channels are shared topic-based streams of links/media interspersed with commentary.
    • cblconfederate 5y ago
      Lots of subreddits have a discord community, but i dont think vice-versa. communities are overlapping, and at some point admins will have to make a choice which one they will put their energy into. Some fringe subjects have moved from one to the other.
    • mbesto 5y ago
      People assume reddit is just the "reddit homepage", but its actually a series of long tail discussion groups. Want to discuss Ubiquiti wifi appliances and configurations? Guess what there's a whole community on reddit that is active there. Discord essentially has this too but actually much more privately/invite only style. I could probably find an Ubiquiti owners group there too.
  • jorblumesea 5y ago
    Fairly different apps/use cases.
  • qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
    The fact that (insert anything here) let Discord grow to what it is today always amazes me.
  • zer0-c00l 5y ago
    I completely agree. The fact that major subreddits all have Discord servers definitely speaks to Discord addressing some community need that Reddit is not.
    • dimmke 5y ago
      Reddit ended up adding a corny chat feature that is exclusively used for spam as their answer to it. Pretty awful. But to be honest, before subreddits had Discords they had IRC channels. This has always been a thing.
      • edoceo 5y ago
        Reddit Chat is my prime example of a Product Development Vice President rushing out a feature-clone of a complementary business to try and juke the stats for their OKRs. Buggy, annoying, pushy, rude. Reddit Chat is why I now visit Incognito and interact less.
        • crazy_horse 5y ago
          Does Huffman have no say? How did they go form lisp to this?
          • TeMPOraL 5y ago
            The Faustian bargain of venture capital. You get access to easy money early on, at the price of your (company's) soul.
        • dimmke 5y ago
          Reddit literally destroyed independent forums. That's such a huge swath of the internet and they effectively have a monopoly. Additionally, they top Google results for so many different subjects. I don't understand why they can't monetize that more. They shouldn't also need to half heartedly try to compete with Discord. They should drill down on what they excel at. Even though I am a daily Reddit user, it's mostly because there are no other alternatives. I definitely would not buy their stock.
  • tyrfing 5y ago
    I disagree, it's a totally different market, and your remark only makes sense in a myopic "everything is a competing social network" sort of way. 2 core features of Discord are voice chat and access control, both of which are necessary for groups like a guild in a video game. Adoption in small groups like that was huge, competitors like Teamspeak and Mumble had incredible friction. Even if you focus specifically on text communications, access control is a major feature. One example is the integration with Twitch, where there are servers limited to subscribers. Reddit focused on "the whole site is a community" rather than Discord's "start your own community, limited to very specific people." I'd argue that the overlap you see is Discord monopolizing a disjoint market and then encroaching into Reddit's market due to userbase size. "Why isn't there a Discord server?" is the sort of question that gets asked when everyone there is also on Discord. Personally, what amazes me is that Discord allowed Slack to grow to what it is. I was very surprised when they doubled down on gaming focus.
    • elliekelly 5y ago
      Voice chat definitely started as a core feature of Discord (for gamers) but I think there are a ton of servers now that are almost entirely text chat.
    • OrvalWintermute 5y ago
      Discord is a solution that fits between the vastly better voice solutions in Teamspeak & Mumble/Murmur, and the much more enterprise features of Slack. As a pure chat solution it is way inferior to IRC or XMPP, however it has greater interactivity ala Slack. What it does really well is blend enough features from each into a coherent product that can replace them all in one go.
• eshack94 5y ago
  Serious question - why so much risk and instability in this "internet chat" sector?
  • edoceo 5y ago
    Switching cost for users is near zero.
    • sk5t 5y ago
      And perhaps a "fresh start" for would-be moderators and tone-setters? i.e. the power users of reddit seem more than a bit ensconced.
      • chippy 5y ago
        Moderators have the most to lose by moving, it will be the people who don't post who have nothing to lose. We are seeing a consolidation of moderators of the major subreddits. The number of moderators on reddit is incredibly tiny, sub-sub-sub pareto level of control. These subreddits are losing diversity of who moderates them and it's suspected by some that many full time moderators are fully paid up employees of PR firms. Even volunteer mods admit that its basically like a full time job. It makes total sense if I was in a marketing firm for Netflix to have an employee being a moderator on the largest internet forum about movies. This pull moves away from the organic, disorganized and diverse nature of reddit to a kind of centralization and conformity. I suppose recent events have also shown the power of these power moderators in shaping the platform to the will of those moderators, come to think of it. Interesting times! I agree for the vast majority of users it costs nothing to move, and they will if there#s something better which there isn't anything yet But, as before with all the other cases, those who move will be the early adopters. moderators are the old guard, stuffy, controlling, professional, they will be the last to move as they have to protect their investment. Those who move first will be the more independent and chaotic riding the wave. I look forward to it.
    • hncurious 5y ago
      Except users don't switch because of network effects. None of the twitter, reddit, youtube alternatives have managed to put even a dent in them.
• wombatpm 5y ago
  Slashdot is still around, but their previous tone deaf management killed it through neglect and stupidity. It will never regain its lost glory.
• slg 5y ago
  >I wouldn’t put a big bet on this leadership team in such an unstable environment. As far as the big internet companies go, it is hard to think of any company whose leaders have so routinely been criticized as out of touch with their users and downright incompetent with the one exception maybe being Yahoo. It is a almost a miracle that Reddit has survived it all mostly for the better, but I wouldn't put money on that continuing forever.
  • patentatt 5y ago
    I’d say it’s because they have kept the core platform unchanged. In other words, they haven’t really done anything. Heading on over to old.reddit.com is pretty much the same as it was 15 years ago (more or less). As soon as it’s actually impossible to avoid their push to their terrible ‘new’ site and app, I’m jumping ship. Classic Reddit is like Craigslist, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Just keep the servers running and DO NOTHING ELSE. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it.
    • slg 5y ago
      > Just keep the servers running and DO NOTHING ELSE. That doesn't appear to be what users or mods want. Lots of people want more active development and moderation. Just this week there were large scale protest across the platform regarding Reddit admins not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous COVID misinformation. Then Reddit released a rather bad statement refusing to give into user demands. They almost immediately went back on that statement and banned a big misinformation subreddit. It almost feels like they make decisions in a way to ensure they piss everyone off.
      • unethical_ban 5y ago
        You skipped the context of the rest of the quoted message, which was referring to features and UI, not moderation.
        • slg 5y ago
          They are intermingled. Mods are often asking for new tools to help them moderate their own communities.
• RivieraKid 5y ago
  Reddit is not internet chat. It's a collection of online communities.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • millzlane 5y ago
    It's forum software 3.0
    • DoItToMe81 5y ago
      Forum software (worse edition EXTREME)
  • tempest_ 5y ago
    That did not stop them from trying to strap a chat to it. I remember when I got the first "Chat", I was confused then immediately went to figure out how to disable it. I wonder if it ever got traction.
• trident5000 5y ago
  I used to be a hard core Reddit user for probably 10 years. I havent used it in maybe 2 years; I have no interest. People like me are probably showing up in their user data and the writing is on the wall internally. Thats when you go public to dump the bag. Their biggest mistake maybe?...controversy and discussion sells and they essentially banned that subreddit by subreddit. People dont like information platforms with information gaps.
  • throwawaysea 5y ago
    > People dont like information platforms with information gaps. Is there evidence of this? I want to believe this is true but the era of cancel culture and deplatforming suggests people want information gaps and echo chambers.
    • tjs8rj 5y ago
      A fraction of people participate in and encourage cancel culture
• diogenescynic 5y ago
  And the Reddit redesigns are all awful and not what the users actually want.