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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

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.
- joseph8th 3y ago
  Interestingly, I've found Lemmy to be surprisingly engaging and active after just a day of Reddit Migration. Sure, there's still a lot of "Reddit sucks" posts, but certainly not all, or even close to the majority. I was on Mastodon for the Great Twitter Migration of Nov. 2022, and yeah... it was pretty hard to watch. Never have used Twitter, but I saw a lot of Twits struggling with Mastodon. I don't think the migration went well. The Twitter experience didn't translate. Reddit, I think is a more traditional forum. And that does translate well. There are hundreds of threads with hundreds of comments on Lemmy, and it's really the same experience as Reddit. Reddit users find Lemmy familiar in a way that Twitter users did not find on Mastodon.
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    Agreed, and i should clarify that i didn't mean it was inactive or w/e, i just think it's less mature of a tech stack, less active as a whole, etc than Mastodon was in it's time of need. That difference i think has a meaningful impact on how quickly new instances can spin up, tooling available, UX of users, native mobile apps, etc. The shiny things that keep "normal users" around. Which isn't to say that it is plagued with problems or anything. I just think we have to remember that Federation and a FOSS development model alone will bring a large pile of challenges and confusion to the average user. As you said, we saw it with Mastodon. That friction is survivable if framed right, but any additional friction will be meaningful for normal users. Just my opinion of course, not making any factual statements here.
doublerabbit 3y ago
Voat won the show last time, then it capsized and sunk.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Voat didn't win shit. This is one of my favorite quotes from Slate Star Codex: > The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong. Voat immediately turned into a cesspool of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and harassment. If you think there is a place on the mainstream Internet these days where people can gleefully host "FatPeopleHate"-like forums and not capsize and sink, good luck.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - deleted 3y ago
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karaterobot 3y ago
Another thing they're betting on is that most users could care less about this, if they're even aware of it. Some very popular subreddits are going dark, and I'd bet as many users get angry at the mods of those subreddits than get mad at the C-suite of Reddit. In any case, most will just come back later after this is all done.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Don't agree with that. While people may have been unaware, the news is literally plastered all over reddit at the moment - it's impossible to miss. Most people may not care about it that much, but the "zeitgeist" if you will of general anger at reddit management permeating nearly every subreddit is impossible to miss. Just one example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/145jqcl/the_vote_is_in_raustin_will_be_going_private_at/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/145jqcl/the_vote_is...
com 3y ago
Have you checked out https://tilde.net https://tilde.net - I’m not connected to it (not even a registered user) but it looks solid.
- forbiddenlake 3y ago
  That gives me a cert error then an Outlook Web Acess login. What is it? edit: presumably, https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/ with an s
  - wds 3y ago
    >Tildes is currently in invite-only alpha Worked great for Google+!
    - nukeman 3y ago
      Because we don’t want the site to be completely overwhelmed and turned into Reddit 2.0. Currently, invites are turned off, but are likely to be turned back on in the next week or so. Normally, they are pretty easy to get (asking for one in the r/tildes invite thread).
      - skerit 3y ago
        I've seen a few Tildes threads that I want to interact with, but I can't because I don't have an account At first glance it looks like a nice place. Most other alternatives seem to turn into a right-wing hell-hole quite fast. So I understand the need to let new people slowly trickle in.
        georgebcrawford 3y ago
        Are DMs possible on HN? I have about 9 invites on Tildes :-)
        skerit 3y ago
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
> 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. Discord. I know, I know—it's built for real-time chat, it's harder to search, etc etc... but a lot of subreddits already have associated Discord servers. I could see a lot of communities naturally migrating there. Maybe as a temporary stop-gap, maybe permanently. Younger people in particular seems to use Discord for things I would think belong on a forum.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  if discord were smart they'd create some sort of built in wiki system or news aggregating and multi group search to essentially merge discord with Reddit like services..
- Panzer04 3y ago
  Discord won't make it. I find reddit useful because for any particular query I want a mostly user-based answer for I can google term + reddit. Discord jsut doesn't have the same discourse because it's designed for quick back-and-forth chats, not more in-depth self-supporting commentary. It just doesn't fulfill the same purpose. IME, I ignore discords from most subreddits because they do basically nothing for me unless it's a topic i'm extremely interested and engaged in.
  - moneywoes 3y ago
    What about discord threads?
    - Panzer04 3y ago
      More a way for already engaged users to start another conversation while in the same channel. It doesn't serve the same purpose as reddit. Regardless of anything discord does, the lack of searchability will always be a core problem compared to reddit.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
P_I_Staker 3y ago
Did the digg migration have anything to do with bad management or appeasing investors?

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.
joseph8th 3y ago
Interestingly, I've found Lemmy to be surprisingly engaging and active after just a day of Reddit Migration. Sure, there's still a lot of "Reddit sucks" posts, but certainly not all, or even close to the majority. I was on Mastodon for the Great Twitter Migration of Nov. 2022, and yeah... it was pretty hard to watch. Never have used Twitter, but I saw a lot of Twits struggling with Mastodon. I don't think the migration went well. The Twitter experience didn't translate. Reddit, I think is a more traditional forum. And that does translate well. There are hundreds of threads with hundreds of comments on Lemmy, and it's really the same experience as Reddit. Reddit users find Lemmy familiar in a way that Twitter users did not find on Mastodon.
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  Agreed, and i should clarify that i didn't mean it was inactive or w/e, i just think it's less mature of a tech stack, less active as a whole, etc than Mastodon was in it's time of need. That difference i think has a meaningful impact on how quickly new instances can spin up, tooling available, UX of users, native mobile apps, etc. The shiny things that keep "normal users" around. Which isn't to say that it is plagued with problems or anything. I just think we have to remember that Federation and a FOSS development model alone will bring a large pile of challenges and confusion to the average user. As you said, we saw it with Mastodon. That friction is survivable if framed right, but any additional friction will be meaningful for normal users. Just my opinion of course, not making any factual statements here.

doublerabbit 3y ago

Voat won the show last time, then it capsized and sunk.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Voat didn't win shit. This is one of my favorite quotes from Slate Star Codex: > The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong. Voat immediately turned into a cesspool of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and harassment. If you think there is a place on the mainstream Internet these days where people can gleefully host "FatPeopleHate"-like forums and not capsize and sink, good luck.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

karaterobot 3y ago

Another thing they're betting on is that most users could care less about this, if they're even aware of it. Some very popular subreddits are going dark, and I'd bet as many users get angry at the mods of those subreddits than get mad at the C-suite of Reddit. In any case, most will just come back later after this is all done.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Don't agree with that. While people may have been unaware, the news is literally plastered all over reddit at the moment - it's impossible to miss. Most people may not care about it that much, but the "zeitgeist" if you will of general anger at reddit management permeating nearly every subreddit is impossible to miss. Just one example: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/145jqcl/the_vote_is_in_raustin_will_be_going_private_at/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/145jqcl/the_vote_is...

com 3y ago

Have you checked out https://tilde.net https://tilde.net - I’m not connected to it (not even a registered user) but it looks solid.

forbiddenlake 3y ago
That gives me a cert error then an Outlook Web Acess login. What is it? edit: presumably, https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/ with an s
- wds 3y ago
  >Tildes is currently in invite-only alpha Worked great for Google+!
  - nukeman 3y ago
    Because we don’t want the site to be completely overwhelmed and turned into Reddit 2.0. Currently, invites are turned off, but are likely to be turned back on in the next week or so. Normally, they are pretty easy to get (asking for one in the r/tildes invite thread).
    - skerit 3y ago
      I've seen a few Tildes threads that I want to interact with, but I can't because I don't have an account At first glance it looks like a nice place. Most other alternatives seem to turn into a right-wing hell-hole quite fast. So I understand the need to let new people slowly trickle in.
      - georgebcrawford 3y ago
        Are DMs possible on HN? I have about 9 invites on Tildes :-)
        skerit 3y ago

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

> 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. Discord. I know, I know—it's built for real-time chat, it's harder to search, etc etc... but a lot of subreddits already have associated Discord servers. I could see a lot of communities naturally migrating there. Maybe as a temporary stop-gap, maybe permanently. Younger people in particular seems to use Discord for things I would think belong on a forum.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
if discord were smart they'd create some sort of built in wiki system or news aggregating and multi group search to essentially merge discord with Reddit like services..
Panzer04 3y ago
Discord won't make it. I find reddit useful because for any particular query I want a mostly user-based answer for I can google term + reddit. Discord jsut doesn't have the same discourse because it's designed for quick back-and-forth chats, not more in-depth self-supporting commentary. It just doesn't fulfill the same purpose. IME, I ignore discords from most subreddits because they do basically nothing for me unless it's a topic i'm extremely interested and engaged in.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  What about discord threads?
  - Panzer04 3y ago
    More a way for already engaged users to start another conversation while in the same channel. It doesn't serve the same purpose as reddit. Regardless of anything discord does, the lack of searchability will always be a core problem compared to reddit.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

P_I_Staker 3y ago

Did the digg migration have anything to do with bad management or appeasing investors?