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Flashback to Digg.com... I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... it was the single most significant stroke of luck a

Flashback to Digg.com... I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... it was the single most significant stroke of luck a fledgling Reddit could have possibly hoped for.

hinkley 3y ago
What’s the new Reddit though?
- lobstrosity420 3y ago
  I don’t think Reddit being replaced is as much of a given as everyone seems to think. People might simply get tired of the concept altogether. Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives, and there is no shortage of social media in sight.
  - afavour 3y ago
    If that were the case people would have left long ago, Reddit has plenty of downsides. Personally I know of no other place where I can get discussions on such a wide range of topics (AskHistorians, biking, my local neighbourhood) presented to me in a simple format. I hope there will be but I’m not holding my breath.
  - ketzo 3y ago
    Why would the vast majority of users stop using Reddit because of, to the average person, a totally meaningless policy change?
    - chx 3y ago
      Because who wants to engage with an inane nazi cesspit? We know what happens to unmoderated spaces.
      - anthonypasq 3y ago
        i dont see the link between the api policy change and all of reddit becoming unmoderated.
        chx 3y ago
        When moderation heavily relies on bots which need API access and the latter becomes too expensive... what do you think happens?
        anthonypasq 3y ago
        moderator tools are excluded from the new policy
  - hinkley 3y ago
    The hobby and craftsmanship forums are a lot less link farming. You can take or leave politics and current events I suppose, but something like discord or slack can’t sustain a conversation over hours or days. It gets flooded out by other conversations in four to twelve hours and then poof it’s gone. And there’s also the “better moderation than YouTube comments” aspects. Whatever Reddit is or can be, it’s lot as toxic as YouTube. And better organized. I think we want something more cooperative. Not Reddit centralization, not full fediverse. For some reason I’m thinking of the local farmer’s market, where sometimes the vendor has to run to the bathroom, and their neighbor keeps an eye on things, possibly even processing sales. The thing with coops though is you need a way to tell if people are contributing fairly, and a process to deal with it, and I have no idea what that looks like. I don’t know if that’s because it could never work, or we still fully expect other things to work so no one has tried.
    - memefrog 3y ago
      Can reddit sustain a conversation over days? Except on the most inactive subreddits, nothing stays on the front page for more than about a day. The result is that the only people continuing the conversation are people responding from their inboxes, getting into back-and-forth arguments sometimes 50-100 replies deep. That's actually one of the things that I dislike most about the site, and the reason I've stopped using it: there's no institutional memory. Subreddits can have two stickied posts. One of them is usually some sort of daily discussion thread and the other is some sort of announcement. Anything that isn't stickied will fall off eventually even if it would stay active otherwise. On traditional forums, replying to a post bumped it to the top. Most posts would be recent, but not all. Posts died when people stopped replying to them. And you could have as many stickies as you liked. Most forums had threads that were dozens or hundreds of pages long. For example, MTG the Source has a 399 page thread about the Merfolk legacy deck which was started in 2008. The most recent reply was on the 26th of March this year - it's still active. You just don't get that sort of thing on Reddit. So you get people asking really basic questions forever. I think Reddit can be great for beginners to a hobby or a topic. It tends to cater to them relatively well. You can get lots of upvotes on your "Hey I made my first [X]" post, and the culture encourages people to hold the hands of people with basic questions. On traditional forums, the culture was usually "RTFM noob, read the sticky". Less kind? Yes. More productive? Yes. People get burnt out answering basic questions repeatedly pretty quickly. Subreddits have to invent all these new ways of maintaining information (subreddit wikis, sticky threads with links to other threads and external links, off-site information linked from the sidebar, etc). I think Reddit has the same problem just over a longer timescale. Discord can't maintain a conversation for much more than an hour. Reddit can't maintain a conversation for much more than a day. On both, people try to work around it by having special channels or posts that have links to external resources, etc. But what those communities should actually use is phpBB.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    There's a whole lot of inertia opposing people either replacing or discontinuing using reddit. Alternate subreddits gaining prominence is much more likely. Your average redditor has no clue what an API is or why some users and mods care about them. Generally, people need to have significant positive or negative incentives to change a years-long daily habit, and using r/radXYZ instead of r/XYZ will be a negligible change for most. I think reddit has a greater likelihood of strangling themselves by hobbling the overall UX with monetization efforts but their user base is entrenched enough that they could take it pretty far with the "boiling a frog" approach. Who knows, maybe what they've done so far combined with the blackouts will be enough to push people away, but I doubt it. I feel for them. Figuring out how to make a giant free service profitable isn't easy. It's too bad the tactics they've used seem to be so off-putting.
    - jeltz 3y ago
      > I feel for them. Figuring out how to make a giant free service profitable isn't easy. It's too bad the tactics they've used seem to be so off-putting. I don't. Reddit could be profitable of they wanted to. They make a ton of money through Reddit Gold and ads. The reason they are not is because they have hired way too many devs and other staff, presumably because they plan to do an IPO so founders.and execs can become rich and investors make a profit.
      - chefandy 3y ago
        You clearly know more about their finances than I do. I don't really follow that stuff.
  - dv_dt 3y ago
    The thing is, killing or hobbling third-party moderation tools will significantly degrade what is available on reddit.
  - microtonal 3y ago
    Many communities are not simple link aggregators. Eg. I was active in the ergo mech keyboard subreddit and there it is mostly people showing their latest keyboard creations, sharing PCB gerbers, case STLs, and helping each other debugging issues with their keyboards. There are a lot of niche subreddits like that. And it would be a big loss to those communities if Reddit isn't replaced.
  - laserDinosaur 3y ago
    >Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives A link based aggregator, you are correct. There's more of them out there than TODO app tutorials. What I do find hard to separate from is the communities that have constant ongoing daily conversations. Cooking, AskCulinary, all the science subreddits, some indie video game ones. Having one non-discord like hub for a community is great, and I do miss checking in on my daily AskCulinary questions and helping newbies out. Really all I want from it is just a forum with the ability to upvote threads (rather than replies bumping them up) and the ability for anyone to be able to create their own sub-forum, but to heck if I can find something in that category that replaces reddit.
- DANmode 3y ago
  Discord
- dingusdew 3y ago
  The fediverse has places like https://kbin.social/ https://kbin.social/ or there are instances of Lemmy, (https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances) but most people will want to avoid the "main" lemmy instances for places like https://beehaw.org/ https://beehaw.org/ The main lemmy instance is under heavy load and its admins definitely have their own political slant, and if you're not comfortable with that (most aren't) it's best to find a different one or make your own instance.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    > its admins definitely have their own political slant, and if you're not comfortable with that (most aren't) it's best to find a different one or make your own instance. From casual use alone this isn't clear to me can you explain?
    - shagie 3y ago
      The admins of the main instance have displayed a distinctly pro-authoritarian and anti-US stance. The pejorative for this ideology is "tankie" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie ). Searching for that pejorative and Lemmy will find discussions about it with links (though not links to Lemmy itself since those sites are poorly indexed by Google). This came most recently to visibility with the comments on an NPR article posted to Lemmy about China tightening access to Tiananmen square and Hong Kong detentions in /c/worldnews a week ago.
- tomstockmail 3y ago
  Lemmy, tildes, and arguably pixelfed for those subreddits that were image heavy.
- mikrl 3y ago
  I don’t know, but hey you heard about that Ukrainian cat themed dating sim?
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
They of course know (at the time of the mass Digg exodus Reddit specifically changed their alien icon to welcome Digg refugees), but the difference is that they are betting on the fact that right now there is no immediately obvious alternative, like Reddit was to Digg a decade ago.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  I think they're right. Lemmy/Kbin exist, but they're not ready for it. They're in a worse (less mature) place than Mastodon was with Twitter, and even that was rough. With no alternative i think Reddit will be fine in this storm. I see many posts on Kbin/Lemmy discussing Reddit addiction, how they can leave it, etc, and those are niche people. The majority of Reddit users i suspect won't even know anything is wrong in a week. I suspect at worst Reddit will start suffering from lack of mods, but that's a solvable problem. Especially with IPO coming, they've got incentive to solve it in a way that they control with an iron fist. Regardless this event, similar to Twitter with Mastodon, has brought a large number of "new normals" to Kbin, Lemmy, etc. I myself am looking far closer at ActivityPub, working on my own implementation that iterops with the existing ecosystem. I actually think this will be quite good for the "fediverse". If not from massive direct usage, it will highlight scaling woes with the protocol, etc. Hopefully the next time this happens the Fediverse can be in a more mature position to leave CEOs like Spez feeling less invincible.
  - ItsMonkk 3y ago
    > but that's a solvable problem This requires explanation. If they staff the moderation in-house, costs will rise significantly and there is no chance they can ever profit. The people with the time, expertise and patience necessary to mod will know of alternatives. Mods are niche niche. But the bigger issue that you allude to for reddit here is that they aren't pulling off the band-aid in one go. Once the apps die, they still need to kill old reddit and RES, they still need to end NSFW. Each time they do this the federated clones will be stronger, and each time more and more will jump ship.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    Reddit wasn't in great shape when the Digg thing happened either. Reddit is just a platform for forums. There are literally thousands of alternatives.
HeckFeck 3y ago
The Reddit source is out there, mercifully sans all the redesign code. It would just be a matter of funding + will.
- WXLCKNO 3y ago
  Having the code is fine but they do have infrastructure and the architecture of it which is necessary to run the site. That part someone else will need to figure out again over time and optimize.
  - Tao3300 3y ago
    The federated alternatives have collapsed under the strain. It's all about the infrastructure.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  Where
  - HeckFeck 3y ago
    Original: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit Improved fork: https://github.com/libertysoft3/saidit https://github.com/libertysoft3/saidit
Loveaway 3y ago
Not sure what the relation between YC and Reddit is these days, but wouldn't HN be in the prime position to take over? I feel all that is needed is to add sub-hn's. Reddit got Digg's business because Digg gambled away all of it's good will. That was a long time ago, Reddit since been going down the same path. Point is, all these companies are trying to monetize, generate profits, like they somehow responsible for the value the users are creating. All they're doing is hosting bunch of python scripts. Swallow your pride reddit, you're nothing but a message board and you don't own a single word your users type.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  I’d be really sad if HN turned into Reddit, tbh.
  - P_I_Staker 3y ago
    Fear not, it's basically impossible for that to happen
- lordnacho 3y ago
  You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics. You probably also want to make it a bit more modern, supporting images and video, or those subs won't come here. Plus scaling is not trivial. There's a gap between being the nerds' text-only board and the board for everything.
  - oilchange 3y ago
    > You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics. People forget that reddit was popular and succeeded during the digg migration because it was pro free speech and minimally moderated. It was one of the reasons people migrated to reddit instead of here. The first 10 years of reddit, the community and the company prided themselves on being a "free speech platform." It was explicitly stated on the reddit website. The selling point of reddit back in the day was that it was not censored like HN! It's amazing how censorship created a pro-censorship mentality in just a few short years.
oilchange 3y ago
> I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... People have been saying this for 10+ years. No reddit alternative has proven to be viable. So the people at reddit know that "mass migration" is an empty threat. Where will you go instead? That's right. No where. Rather than quickly bleeding out like digg, reddit has simply achieved a stable stagnant equilibrium. It doesn't grow, it doesn't shrink. It just stagnates and rots. The easiest tell is that nobody in the comments is posting alternatives. I remember during the digg migration, people unhappy with digg would post on digg telling everyone to try reddit.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  Necessity is the mother of invention. A CRUD app with a UX so bad people feel the need to use third-party clients isn’t exactly a moat. Half the people here could scaffold a Reddit clone in a week or less.
  - bstar77 3y ago
    To prove your point... https://www.sitepoint.com/reddit-clone-react-firebase/ https://www.sitepoint.com/reddit-clone-react-firebase/ Yes, it's basically just a scaffold, but something like this could be iterated on. The challenges are around infrastructure and funding to function at scale. I would personally rather see something that improves on the problems Reddit solves, but tries something completely new. Cloning a product is so uninteresting.
    - TX81Z 3y ago
      Yes and no, the tech of a forum is not interesting, but fostering a healthy community that generates value is an eternally novel problem as every success has been the result of good timing more than anything else.
  - hombre_fatal 3y ago
    The moat is that it has users, not that it’s impossible to clone. Though developers vastly underestimate the difficulty in cloning something as well. As someone who thought it would be trivial to clone phpbb, it’s a lot of work to reach just feature parity. Your clone isn’t even going to have users to motivate you beyond the first 0.1% of the work.
seanalltogether 3y ago
I think its important to remember that digg was changing the way content was generated and promoted to users. They kneecapped the entire democratic principles of the site, and reddit, a site entirely based on democratic promotion, was waiting in the wings. Reddit on the other hand is changing how content is accessed on their site, but not changing the visibility or generation of that content. And if 3rd party apps are very important to those users, it's hard to find an alternative to plug in to.
- Tao3300 3y ago
  Yeah, this isn't anything like Digg's ending. If you think it was, you weren't there.
  - HeckFeck 3y ago
    I remember the whimsical memes and comics made by the refugees. It was a different air; optimism that safer shores were ahead. This is more like confusion in the vacuum of space.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hinkley 3y ago

What’s the new Reddit though?

lobstrosity420 3y ago
I don’t think Reddit being replaced is as much of a given as everyone seems to think. People might simply get tired of the concept altogether. Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives, and there is no shortage of social media in sight.
- afavour 3y ago
  If that were the case people would have left long ago, Reddit has plenty of downsides. Personally I know of no other place where I can get discussions on such a wide range of topics (AskHistorians, biking, my local neighbourhood) presented to me in a simple format. I hope there will be but I’m not holding my breath.
- ketzo 3y ago
  Why would the vast majority of users stop using Reddit because of, to the average person, a totally meaningless policy change?
  - chx 3y ago
    Because who wants to engage with an inane nazi cesspit? We know what happens to unmoderated spaces.
    - anthonypasq 3y ago
      i dont see the link between the api policy change and all of reddit becoming unmoderated.
      - chx 3y ago
        When moderation heavily relies on bots which need API access and the latter becomes too expensive... what do you think happens?
        anthonypasq 3y ago
        moderator tools are excluded from the new policy
- hinkley 3y ago
  The hobby and craftsmanship forums are a lot less link farming. You can take or leave politics and current events I suppose, but something like discord or slack can’t sustain a conversation over hours or days. It gets flooded out by other conversations in four to twelve hours and then poof it’s gone. And there’s also the “better moderation than YouTube comments” aspects. Whatever Reddit is or can be, it’s lot as toxic as YouTube. And better organized. I think we want something more cooperative. Not Reddit centralization, not full fediverse. For some reason I’m thinking of the local farmer’s market, where sometimes the vendor has to run to the bathroom, and their neighbor keeps an eye on things, possibly even processing sales. The thing with coops though is you need a way to tell if people are contributing fairly, and a process to deal with it, and I have no idea what that looks like. I don’t know if that’s because it could never work, or we still fully expect other things to work so no one has tried.
  - memefrog 3y ago
    Can reddit sustain a conversation over days? Except on the most inactive subreddits, nothing stays on the front page for more than about a day. The result is that the only people continuing the conversation are people responding from their inboxes, getting into back-and-forth arguments sometimes 50-100 replies deep. That's actually one of the things that I dislike most about the site, and the reason I've stopped using it: there's no institutional memory. Subreddits can have two stickied posts. One of them is usually some sort of daily discussion thread and the other is some sort of announcement. Anything that isn't stickied will fall off eventually even if it would stay active otherwise. On traditional forums, replying to a post bumped it to the top. Most posts would be recent, but not all. Posts died when people stopped replying to them. And you could have as many stickies as you liked. Most forums had threads that were dozens or hundreds of pages long. For example, MTG the Source has a 399 page thread about the Merfolk legacy deck which was started in 2008. The most recent reply was on the 26th of March this year - it's still active. You just don't get that sort of thing on Reddit. So you get people asking really basic questions forever. I think Reddit can be great for beginners to a hobby or a topic. It tends to cater to them relatively well. You can get lots of upvotes on your "Hey I made my first [X]" post, and the culture encourages people to hold the hands of people with basic questions. On traditional forums, the culture was usually "RTFM noob, read the sticky". Less kind? Yes. More productive? Yes. People get burnt out answering basic questions repeatedly pretty quickly. Subreddits have to invent all these new ways of maintaining information (subreddit wikis, sticky threads with links to other threads and external links, off-site information linked from the sidebar, etc). I think Reddit has the same problem just over a longer timescale. Discord can't maintain a conversation for much more than an hour. Reddit can't maintain a conversation for much more than a day. On both, people try to work around it by having special channels or posts that have links to external resources, etc. But what those communities should actually use is phpBB.
- chefandy 3y ago
  There's a whole lot of inertia opposing people either replacing or discontinuing using reddit. Alternate subreddits gaining prominence is much more likely. Your average redditor has no clue what an API is or why some users and mods care about them. Generally, people need to have significant positive or negative incentives to change a years-long daily habit, and using r/radXYZ instead of r/XYZ will be a negligible change for most. I think reddit has a greater likelihood of strangling themselves by hobbling the overall UX with monetization efforts but their user base is entrenched enough that they could take it pretty far with the "boiling a frog" approach. Who knows, maybe what they've done so far combined with the blackouts will be enough to push people away, but I doubt it. I feel for them. Figuring out how to make a giant free service profitable isn't easy. It's too bad the tactics they've used seem to be so off-putting.
  - jeltz 3y ago
    > I feel for them. Figuring out how to make a giant free service profitable isn't easy. It's too bad the tactics they've used seem to be so off-putting. I don't. Reddit could be profitable of they wanted to. They make a ton of money through Reddit Gold and ads. The reason they are not is because they have hired way too many devs and other staff, presumably because they plan to do an IPO so founders.and execs can become rich and investors make a profit.
    - chefandy 3y ago
      You clearly know more about their finances than I do. I don't really follow that stuff.
- dv_dt 3y ago
  The thing is, killing or hobbling third-party moderation tools will significantly degrade what is available on reddit.
- microtonal 3y ago
  Many communities are not simple link aggregators. Eg. I was active in the ergo mech keyboard subreddit and there it is mostly people showing their latest keyboard creations, sharing PCB gerbers, case STLs, and helping each other debugging issues with their keyboards. There are a lot of niche subreddits like that. And it would be a big loss to those communities if Reddit isn't replaced.
- laserDinosaur 3y ago
  >Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives A link based aggregator, you are correct. There's more of them out there than TODO app tutorials. What I do find hard to separate from is the communities that have constant ongoing daily conversations. Cooking, AskCulinary, all the science subreddits, some indie video game ones. Having one non-discord like hub for a community is great, and I do miss checking in on my daily AskCulinary questions and helping newbies out. Really all I want from it is just a forum with the ability to upvote threads (rather than replies bumping them up) and the ability for anyone to be able to create their own sub-forum, but to heck if I can find something in that category that replaces reddit.
DANmode 3y ago
Discord
dingusdew 3y ago
The fediverse has places like https://kbin.social/ https://kbin.social/ or there are instances of Lemmy, (https://join-lemmy.org/instances https://join-lemmy.org/instances) but most people will want to avoid the "main" lemmy instances for places like https://beehaw.org/ https://beehaw.org/ The main lemmy instance is under heavy load and its admins definitely have their own political slant, and if you're not comfortable with that (most aren't) it's best to find a different one or make your own instance.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  > its admins definitely have their own political slant, and if you're not comfortable with that (most aren't) it's best to find a different one or make your own instance. From casual use alone this isn't clear to me can you explain?
  - shagie 3y ago
    The admins of the main instance have displayed a distinctly pro-authoritarian and anti-US stance. The pejorative for this ideology is "tankie" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie ). Searching for that pejorative and Lemmy will find discussions about it with links (though not links to Lemmy itself since those sites are poorly indexed by Google). This came most recently to visibility with the comments on an NPR article posted to Lemmy about China tightening access to Tiananmen square and Hong Kong detentions in /c/worldnews a week ago.
tomstockmail 3y ago
Lemmy, tildes, and arguably pixelfed for those subreddits that were image heavy.
mikrl 3y ago
I don’t know, but hey you heard about that Ukrainian cat themed dating sim?

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

They of course know (at the time of the mass Digg exodus Reddit specifically changed their alien icon to welcome Digg refugees), but the difference is that they are betting on the fact that right now there is no immediately obvious alternative, like Reddit was to Digg a decade ago.

unshavedyak 3y ago
I think they're right. Lemmy/Kbin exist, but they're not ready for it. They're in a worse (less mature) place than Mastodon was with Twitter, and even that was rough. With no alternative i think Reddit will be fine in this storm. I see many posts on Kbin/Lemmy discussing Reddit addiction, how they can leave it, etc, and those are niche people. The majority of Reddit users i suspect won't even know anything is wrong in a week. I suspect at worst Reddit will start suffering from lack of mods, but that's a solvable problem. Especially with IPO coming, they've got incentive to solve it in a way that they control with an iron fist. Regardless this event, similar to Twitter with Mastodon, has brought a large number of "new normals" to Kbin, Lemmy, etc. I myself am looking far closer at ActivityPub, working on my own implementation that iterops with the existing ecosystem. I actually think this will be quite good for the "fediverse". If not from massive direct usage, it will highlight scaling woes with the protocol, etc. Hopefully the next time this happens the Fediverse can be in a more mature position to leave CEOs like Spez feeling less invincible.
- ItsMonkk 3y ago
  > but that's a solvable problem This requires explanation. If they staff the moderation in-house, costs will rise significantly and there is no chance they can ever profit. The people with the time, expertise and patience necessary to mod will know of alternatives. Mods are niche niche. But the bigger issue that you allude to for reddit here is that they aren't pulling off the band-aid in one go. Once the apps die, they still need to kill old reddit and RES, they still need to end NSFW. Each time they do this the federated clones will be stronger, and each time more and more will jump ship.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Reddit wasn't in great shape when the Digg thing happened either. Reddit is just a platform for forums. There are literally thousands of alternatives.

HeckFeck 3y ago

The Reddit source is out there, mercifully sans all the redesign code. It would just be a matter of funding + will.

WXLCKNO 3y ago
Having the code is fine but they do have infrastructure and the architecture of it which is necessary to run the site. That part someone else will need to figure out again over time and optimize.
- Tao3300 3y ago
  The federated alternatives have collapsed under the strain. It's all about the infrastructure.
moneywoes 3y ago
Where
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  Original: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit Improved fork: https://github.com/libertysoft3/saidit https://github.com/libertysoft3/saidit

Loveaway 3y ago

Not sure what the relation between YC and Reddit is these days, but wouldn't HN be in the prime position to take over? I feel all that is needed is to add sub-hn's. Reddit got Digg's business because Digg gambled away all of it's good will. That was a long time ago, Reddit since been going down the same path. Point is, all these companies are trying to monetize, generate profits, like they somehow responsible for the value the users are creating. All they're doing is hosting bunch of python scripts. Swallow your pride reddit, you're nothing but a message board and you don't own a single word your users type.

School-Cotton 3y ago
I’d be really sad if HN turned into Reddit, tbh.
- P_I_Staker 3y ago
  Fear not, it's basically impossible for that to happen
lordnacho 3y ago
You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics. You probably also want to make it a bit more modern, supporting images and video, or those subs won't come here. Plus scaling is not trivial. There's a gap between being the nerds' text-only board and the board for everything.
- oilchange 3y ago
  > You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics. People forget that reddit was popular and succeeded during the digg migration because it was pro free speech and minimally moderated. It was one of the reasons people migrated to reddit instead of here. The first 10 years of reddit, the community and the company prided themselves on being a "free speech platform." It was explicitly stated on the reddit website. The selling point of reddit back in the day was that it was not censored like HN! It's amazing how censorship created a pro-censorship mentality in just a few short years.

oilchange 3y ago

> I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... People have been saying this for 10+ years. No reddit alternative has proven to be viable. So the people at reddit know that "mass migration" is an empty threat. Where will you go instead? That's right. No where. Rather than quickly bleeding out like digg, reddit has simply achieved a stable stagnant equilibrium. It doesn't grow, it doesn't shrink. It just stagnates and rots. The easiest tell is that nobody in the comments is posting alternatives. I remember during the digg migration, people unhappy with digg would post on digg telling everyone to try reddit.

TX81Z 3y ago
Necessity is the mother of invention. A CRUD app with a UX so bad people feel the need to use third-party clients isn’t exactly a moat. Half the people here could scaffold a Reddit clone in a week or less.
- bstar77 3y ago
  To prove your point... https://www.sitepoint.com/reddit-clone-react-firebase/ https://www.sitepoint.com/reddit-clone-react-firebase/ Yes, it's basically just a scaffold, but something like this could be iterated on. The challenges are around infrastructure and funding to function at scale. I would personally rather see something that improves on the problems Reddit solves, but tries something completely new. Cloning a product is so uninteresting.
  - TX81Z 3y ago
    Yes and no, the tech of a forum is not interesting, but fostering a healthy community that generates value is an eternally novel problem as every success has been the result of good timing more than anything else.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  The moat is that it has users, not that it’s impossible to clone. Though developers vastly underestimate the difficulty in cloning something as well. As someone who thought it would be trivial to clone phpbb, it’s a lot of work to reach just feature parity. Your clone isn’t even going to have users to motivate you beyond the first 0.1% of the work.

seanalltogether 3y ago

I think its important to remember that digg was changing the way content was generated and promoted to users. They kneecapped the entire democratic principles of the site, and reddit, a site entirely based on democratic promotion, was waiting in the wings. Reddit on the other hand is changing how content is accessed on their site, but not changing the visibility or generation of that content. And if 3rd party apps are very important to those users, it's hard to find an alternative to plug in to.

Tao3300 3y ago
Yeah, this isn't anything like Digg's ending. If you think it was, you weren't there.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  I remember the whimsical memes and comics made by the refugees. It was a different air; optimism that safer shores were ahead. This is more like confusion in the vacuum of space.

deleted 3y ago

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