5 ms·

17 year reddit member. Went from fark to digg to reddit. I guess its on to the next thing. The APi changes seem to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

• JohnBooty 3y ago
  Will there be a next thing? I mean, obviously folks will move on to something. But it seems like nobody has ever been able to make money off of huge Fark/Digg/Reddit style "big, public, multi-community" sites. I can't imagine anybody ever trying it again. I feel like the overall trend is just moving back to smaller independent communities. Kind of like the webforum days but with Discord instances instead of webforums.
  • EA-3167 3y ago
    There's always a next thing, there's too much VC money to siphon by promising the next big thing.
  • IshKebab 3y ago
    Reddit reportedly made $350m in revenue in 2021. If you don't know how to make a profit from that with a site that was basically finished a decade ago and outsources all its moderation to volunteers... There will absolutely be a next thing.
    • fho 3y ago
      I mean, they tried ... Ads, premium memberships, microtransactions ... If you have an idea how to monetize a reddit clone ... go for it.
      • skeaker 3y ago
        This is the part I don't get. Those things worked. They were successful and making millions. Why get greedy like this? I'll never understand it.
        • mynameisvlad 3y ago
          IPOs are a helluva drug.
      • IshKebab 3y ago
        They could easily turn a profit. Just: 1. Bring back old.reddit.com. 2. Make the app less insanely shit and annoying. (Didn't they buy a better app just to kill it at some point?) 3. Require third party apps to show ads. 4. Fire half the employees. No way you need 400. Easy peasy.
        • TofuEnthusiast 3y ago
          Yes, Reddit bought a third party app only to run it into the ground. In fact, the current Reddit icon was originally from that third party app.
        • johnnyanmac 3y ago
          1,2) don't turn a profit, especially if most users are indeed not using new reddit. It's probably better to let users customize new reddit and figure out a different stylesheet. Some 3rd party apps do this. 3) I'm guessing this isn't easy to do because there's still some division of ad revenue between the creator, the ad provider (usually google/apple in this case), and Reddit.And if you require ads and all ad revenue to go to reddit... well, there goes any incentive for others to make apps. 3rd party devs aren't charity cases either. 4) that is good for showing a profitable quarter, not good for generating actual revenue.
    • JohnBooty 3y ago
      Yeah, how do you not make a profit with that revenue? This is one of the big problems with running stuff in Silicon Valley. You have to pay so much f'ing money in terms of salary/rent/etc, even a business like Reddit that would be wildly successful by almost any standard anywhere else in the world is actually a money-loser apparently. I understand that Reddit was founded by some big brains like Aaron Swartz (RIP) and that scaling it is not trivial, but also it is not exactly cutting edge rocket science either. It's... a threaded discussion forum, lmao. They're kinda tricky to scale, because each logged-in user sees a customized view of every single thread. Which certainly defeats a lot of the most trivial caching strategies. But on the other hand they lend themselves pretty well to horizontal scaling via partitions/sharding/etc because the vast majority of your transactions will involve a single post or a single subreddit. They added realtime chat stuff, and that's trickier I guess, but also TBH they could drop that feature entirely and I don't know who'd really care.
  • Miraste 3y ago
    Discord "servers" aren't independent communities. Discord will be the next platform to get MBA'd, and then it'll be off to somewhere else. I'm not sure how they've survived this long, frankly. They have no visible source of income except Nitro, and I can't imagine that comes close to covering expenses.
    • sircastor 3y ago
      Wasn’t there some talk a few months ago about Microsoft putting in an offer to buy Discord and the creator of Discord not being interested in selling? I recall it being a big deal and then it wasn’t. - penalty because MS never actually, publicly extended the offer.
    • JohnBooty 3y ago
      No arguments from me on any of those. No hard feelings, but I feel your reply was a bit unnecessary? Did you read my comment and think I felt that a Discord server was actually... separate from Discord, the company? I wrote my post on HN, for an audience of people who understand that stuff already. What I meant is, for most purposes, a Discord server "feels independent enough" for most people. Yes, your data lives on Discord's servers and they could yank the plug at any moment. You don't actually own anything. Again, I wrote my post with the assumption that HN readers are knowledgeable about such things.
      • Miraste 3y ago
        No offense was meant. It seemed like your post drew a distinction where there isn't one. Even from a non-technical perspective, the Discord server system is roughly the same as the Reddit subreddit one. My point was it doesn't represent a shift to smaller communities or parallel old-school forums at all.
    • rkuykendall-com 3y ago
      Lots of servers I'm on are boosted. That's not something I can say about Subreddits.
    • jjav 3y ago
  • pixl97 3y ago
    >moving back to smaller independent communities How do you keep small independent communities both small and interesting?
    • dredmorbius 3y ago
      That's an excellent question. Does HN count? I've thought a bit about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas). There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans). These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools. As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories: - Many of these schools were either formed or saw a sharp growth following the Sputnik scare and emphasis on higher education in the 1950s. See particularly California's Master Plan for Higher Education: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Higher_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig...>, or the UK's "Green Book": <https://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/greenbook1941/greenbook.html https://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/greenbook1941/...> - There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.) - The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack. - The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors. - Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: <https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities>. Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard (~$50 billion), Yale (~$40 billion), Stanford (~$38 billion), Princeton (~$35 billion), see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...>). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions. So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions? I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so. The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however: - A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard. - A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC. - Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1] - Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent. - Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this. - On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure. - Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it. And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development. There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die. ________________________________ Notes: 1. "How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" <https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-tim-hwang.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...> Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.
  • gnoop 3y ago
    Most of the old guard is still going. How well is debatable. Ebaumsworld, Slashdot, Fark, Cheezeburger, and Something Awful, among others, are all still kicking around. Shadows of their former selves, but still around. I agree with you on things beginning to fracture off again. We've cycled forum expansion and consolidation since forums started. The big consolidations were Usenet and Reddit (aka Usenet 2.0). Their downfalls have let to the new expansions and we're seeing it. New web forums and Discord will be the norm for a while. We'll see the Usenet 3.0 challengers start the new round of consolidation until the new Usenet 3.0 comes in. That took a while last time.
    • epiccoleman 3y ago
      It is a positively wild thought that running Ebaum's World could remain profitable in 2023. Who on earth is their audience? I feel like as kids in the early aughts we already perceived Ebaum's as a sort of second fiddle reposter site to the primary sources we found dumb internet stuff. It's crazy to me they're still running all this time later. More power to 'em, honestly.
      • gnoop 3y ago
        Well, let's be honestly. Ebaumsworld is a mess these days. Complete garbage of a front page. Submissions with no comments. Seems like a graveyard that's still operating somehow but probably mostly on automation. I'll probably still end up on Reddit for whatever it can provide for a while. Seems like the death spiral will be a slow decay more than anything and I'm not seeing any replacement for random facts and tidbits of knowledge, memes, or shitposting at the moment.
    • worble 3y ago
      >Ebaumsworld Mandatory: https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/ebaumsworld https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/ebaumsworld I can't believe the actual animation of this isn't on youtube.
  • swayvil 3y ago
    Discord is awful. An echoey room full of screaming monkeys all trying to out-witty each other.
    • bobsmooth 3y ago
      Discord is a protocol. The people you interact with is entirely up to you.
      • swayvil 3y ago
        It's a dick protocol. It fosters incoherence. Thus its popularity with monkeys. Reddit. HN. Those are good protocols.
        • makin 3y ago
          There are some bad incentives to Discord the company, but at its core the program merely provides a chat protocol like IRC. I think you've only proven the point that any protocol can be used to be a dick.
        • stiltzkin 3y ago
          Reddit is astroturfed and censored by the American government. Reddit is like Twitter of social aggregators.
      • BlueTemplar 3y ago
        It's a platform. If it was a protocol anybody could run their own Discord server, which you cannot. (Discord "servers" aren't servers, and you don't own them, Discord does.)
  • matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Does it need to make money? All it needs to do is cover operating costs. Like Wikipedia.
    • account42 3y ago
      Even Wikipedia begs for more money they don't really need.
  • stiltzkin 3y ago
    There are already smaller social agregators to move as HN, Stacker News, Lobsters, Tildes and the biggest one Lemmy. Discord already added forum categories, this is their chance if they add something similar.
• zacharycohn 3y ago
  can always go back to Fark!
• Keyframe 3y ago
  Is slashdot still around?
• jimrob4 3y ago
  Same. Off to whatever Federated site on someone's old garage 486 is next.