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Usual bait and switch from Reddit. Pretty much all investor funded companies follow this path sooner or later. Lock the platform, squeeze the profit. Sad, but n

Usual bait and switch from Reddit. Pretty much all investor funded companies follow this path sooner or later. Lock the platform, squeeze the profit. Sad, but not much can be done about it.

givemeethekeys 3y ago
Anyone else remember the giant exodus from Digg.com to Reddit? No one I know talks about Digg.com any more. But hey, maybe it is profitable.
- anoonmoose 3y ago
  Due to some quirk of when and how I used the Internet, I not only never used Digg but have only really heard of it in relation to the exodus you mentioned. So, interestingly, I don't remember the exodus but I also feel like people talk about Digg.com all the time (as a cautionary tale).
  - notRobot 3y ago
    Yes agreed, I'm in the same boat as you. I hear about the Digg Exodus all the time, have for many years. It's often mentioned when talking about the origins of Reddit too.
    - hipsterstal1n 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    Digg was a social bookmarking site like Reddit. It originally ran on user submission of links, user voting, and then user comments on those links. It had a separate slew of problems than Reddit does today but it did have a similarity in laughably myopic and user despising management. Digg decided that taking user submissions didn't make them enough money so they changed the model to letting sites pay to submit links. Digg basically turned into PRWire with a comment section. This and other issues pissed off a lot of users. Then there was a massive protest where all the submissions and comments said go over to Reddit. Reddit's user base ballooned with former Digg users. Digg went forward with its stupid submission changes and a significant percentage of users stayed on Reddit and Digg became a ghost town of PR submissions and astroturf comments. Like Reddit the value of Digg existed almost entirely in its user base. Once the users left there was no utility left in the site. It was a darling of "crowd sourced" content so without the crowd there was no content.
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      > Digg basically turned into PRWire with a comment section. Plus compared to Reddit, any kind of real discussion was a pain in the ass. (As opposed to a bunch of people sequentially shouting into the void in an un-threaded manner.)
  - stiltzkin 3y ago
    I used to read Digg heavily and joined the exodus to Reddit after, I think the outcome was similar but back then Reddit was popular enough and it had no power mod problems as Digg, also transitioning was easier because it was just web version and no native client. This time a third client alone as Apollo can make people go away.
- CommitSyn 3y ago
  Sure. But there was reddit.com for people to migrate to. Let's see the 99% figure out the fediverse.
  - ekanes 3y ago
    This change will be slower, but it seems a truth that in life, inside a company and in communities, there are some people who do much more work / have more influence than others. If the best / brightest / most helpful etc people leave, there's rarely much more than a shell left. I think the Fediverse will slowly pick up steam, and perhaps rival reddit in 5 or 10 years. Which is fine. One long-term advantage of the Fediverse is that it's more immune to corporate shenanigans. And ultimately, for all of us, this is a long game.
    - CommitSyn 3y ago
      That's a good point.
    - mulmen 3y ago
      I honestly can’t figure out how to engage with the fediverse. I keep asking but it just doesn’t make sense. This from a person who had no problem with IRC.
      - worrycue 3y ago
        https://lemmy.world/post/37906 https://lemmy.world/post/37906 I haven't tried it. Requires email to sign up.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- preommr 3y ago
  Reddit makes like half a billion, it's plenty profitable for what it is. The problem is that management is trying to make it into something that it's not in an effort to make even more money when the site just isn't geared for it. It's like if McDonalds instead of just opening more stores decided that it can make even more money if it turned into a bar and grill because steaks have higher margins.
  - greiskul 3y ago
    Agreed. The tech world keeps facing this problem, where to justify the valuations that companies end up getting, they need to keep trying to "take over the world". Sometimes it works, and we get stuff like youtube migrating away from just viral videos and video hosting, into supporting an ecosystem of content creators. But so many times it's just wasteful money and effort.
  - bshipp 3y ago
    Reddit management already did this when they began self-hosting all images and videos. It's pretty disingenuous to complain about excessive API call costs when you voluntarily decided to pay for hosting and streaming Petabytes of video and images.
    - Enginerrrd 3y ago
      And their hosting is REALLY bad. Videos have NEVER worked right for me on Firefox and it's been years with no progress. The redesign is basically unusable for me. And it's astounding how much data it has to pull down compared to old.reddit.com even with ads blocked just to load a page. Like, it's just really shoddy work from the ground up. If hosting really was the problem, there's a LOT of lower lying fruit for them to clean up.
      - redsaber 3y ago
        I did try to watch videos on the official app and it was bad, I tried changing to 3rd party apps and I was blown away that you could actually watch videos with it.
- afavour 3y ago
  That led directly to where we are today. But IMO the situation isn’t comparable: if Reddit is Digg then who is Reddit? There isn’t really a viable alternative.
  - stiltzkin 3y ago
    Now people use native clients and none of the alternatives have a good one even compared to the official Reddit client
- epage 3y ago
  For me, it was slashdot to Digg to reddit...
- mulmen 3y ago
  We have been talking a lot about digg recently actually. Mostly by comparison to reddit.
- nonbirithm 3y ago
  Wikipedia mentions the original founder of Reddit saying this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people." I feel some echoes of this statement with Reddit's recent changes. Maybe these exoduses are a cycle. I think it's a relatively recent phenomenon for a huge online service to last beyond one or more decades, and I'm not sure with these kinds of funding models and sheer user numbers it's realistic to expect these kinds of VC-funded services to last in perpetuity. Could they last 30 years at that size? 50? Maybe in another 15 years, whichever successor to Reddit is found unsustainable/unreliable (decentralized or not), everyone left with a dire need of niche online subcommunities shrugs their shoulders and moves on once again. I don't see them having another choice. The need for online communities will always be there in my mind, especially since the existence of Reddit has proven that it can be done, and someone will build something else that everyone conditioned on these forums will use eventually. I hold out hope, but an unlikely outcome is the mainstream somehow attaches itself to a service with a different funding model like Wikipedia or AO3, or these kinds of message boards are treated like public utilities. It will still be a massive burden to administer, but the outcomes could be different. I remember reading how "critical" subreddits were given a pass from the blackouts like /r/Ukraine because the value of their information trumps anything related to Reddit operations. A part of me thinks that Reddit's current playbook takes into account that some parts of its existence have become too important for mods/users to shut down, and that seems different to Digg's situation in 2010. They simply weren't as big as Reddit today. This is uncharted territory. Regardless, in my mind, a lot of things in life don't last forever, not just Digg or (soon possibly) Reddit. But lots of people rode the wave regardless for 15+ years, and have gained a lot of useful knowledge from Reddit in the meantime. So people will inevitably flock to other closed platforms like Discord because those platforms are the objectively superior choices, and they're not ideal for various reasons, but in my mind you just have to meet people where they are. And I think a service like Discord could absolutely implode with a few misplaced administrative changes. But at this point I tend to see these things as part of a greater circle of life, and it's (probably) not like they're going to implode almost immediately in quick succession. Just that your time spent there is a part of a particular nexus in a particular point of human history, and it's going to be limited. So, enjoy it while it lasts.
dmethvin 3y ago
Enshittification. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
- danielvaughn 3y ago
  As if on cue, I couldn't read past the first paragraph because of two different popups trying to get me to subscribe.
  - VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
    wired is the absolute epitome of enshitification
    - 23B1 3y ago
      Was WIRED ever not just the johnny-come-lately of tech hype-cycle?
      - drcongo 3y ago
        Surely that's boingboing. I always thought their tagline should be "last month's news, today!"
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - badtension 3y ago
    Try https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
  - notRobot 3y ago
    Get uBlock Origin and turn on the annoyance filter to make your life infinitely better.
    - 3y ago
tredre3 3y ago
> Usual bait and switch from Reddit. Providing an API for free for 15 years. Yeah, total bait and switch.
- arcanemachiner 3y ago
  15 years of leaving money on the table. Not quite at the level of Uber in terms of setting money on fire, but respectable nonetheless.
  - bshipp 3y ago
    The bots enabled by the free api was what allowed Reddit to transition from a small hangout into "the front page of the internet". Without the bots and tools enabled by the free api the site will rapidly devolve into a cesspool like Facebook.

Usual bait and switch from Reddit. Pretty much all investor funded companies follow this path sooner or later. Lock the platform, squeeze the profit. Sad, but not much can be done about it.

givemeethekeys 3y ago

Anyone else remember the giant exodus from Digg.com to Reddit? No one I know talks about Digg.com any more. But hey, maybe it is profitable.

anoonmoose 3y ago
Due to some quirk of when and how I used the Internet, I not only never used Digg but have only really heard of it in relation to the exodus you mentioned. So, interestingly, I don't remember the exodus but I also feel like people talk about Digg.com all the time (as a cautionary tale).
- notRobot 3y ago
  Yes agreed, I'm in the same boat as you. I hear about the Digg Exodus all the time, have for many years. It's often mentioned when talking about the origins of Reddit too.
  - hipsterstal1n 3y ago
    [flagged]
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Digg was a social bookmarking site like Reddit. It originally ran on user submission of links, user voting, and then user comments on those links. It had a separate slew of problems than Reddit does today but it did have a similarity in laughably myopic and user despising management. Digg decided that taking user submissions didn't make them enough money so they changed the model to letting sites pay to submit links. Digg basically turned into PRWire with a comment section. This and other issues pissed off a lot of users. Then there was a massive protest where all the submissions and comments said go over to Reddit. Reddit's user base ballooned with former Digg users. Digg went forward with its stupid submission changes and a significant percentage of users stayed on Reddit and Digg became a ghost town of PR submissions and astroturf comments. Like Reddit the value of Digg existed almost entirely in its user base. Once the users left there was no utility left in the site. It was a darling of "crowd sourced" content so without the crowd there was no content.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    > Digg basically turned into PRWire with a comment section. Plus compared to Reddit, any kind of real discussion was a pain in the ass. (As opposed to a bunch of people sequentially shouting into the void in an un-threaded manner.)
- stiltzkin 3y ago
  I used to read Digg heavily and joined the exodus to Reddit after, I think the outcome was similar but back then Reddit was popular enough and it had no power mod problems as Digg, also transitioning was easier because it was just web version and no native client. This time a third client alone as Apollo can make people go away.
CommitSyn 3y ago
Sure. But there was reddit.com for people to migrate to. Let's see the 99% figure out the fediverse.
- ekanes 3y ago
  This change will be slower, but it seems a truth that in life, inside a company and in communities, there are some people who do much more work / have more influence than others. If the best / brightest / most helpful etc people leave, there's rarely much more than a shell left. I think the Fediverse will slowly pick up steam, and perhaps rival reddit in 5 or 10 years. Which is fine. One long-term advantage of the Fediverse is that it's more immune to corporate shenanigans. And ultimately, for all of us, this is a long game.
  - CommitSyn 3y ago
    That's a good point.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I honestly can’t figure out how to engage with the fediverse. I keep asking but it just doesn’t make sense. This from a person who had no problem with IRC.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      https://lemmy.world/post/37906 https://lemmy.world/post/37906 I haven't tried it. Requires email to sign up.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
preommr 3y ago
Reddit makes like half a billion, it's plenty profitable for what it is. The problem is that management is trying to make it into something that it's not in an effort to make even more money when the site just isn't geared for it. It's like if McDonalds instead of just opening more stores decided that it can make even more money if it turned into a bar and grill because steaks have higher margins.
- greiskul 3y ago
  Agreed. The tech world keeps facing this problem, where to justify the valuations that companies end up getting, they need to keep trying to "take over the world". Sometimes it works, and we get stuff like youtube migrating away from just viral videos and video hosting, into supporting an ecosystem of content creators. But so many times it's just wasteful money and effort.
- bshipp 3y ago
  Reddit management already did this when they began self-hosting all images and videos. It's pretty disingenuous to complain about excessive API call costs when you voluntarily decided to pay for hosting and streaming Petabytes of video and images.
  - Enginerrrd 3y ago
    And their hosting is REALLY bad. Videos have NEVER worked right for me on Firefox and it's been years with no progress. The redesign is basically unusable for me. And it's astounding how much data it has to pull down compared to old.reddit.com even with ads blocked just to load a page. Like, it's just really shoddy work from the ground up. If hosting really was the problem, there's a LOT of lower lying fruit for them to clean up.
    - redsaber 3y ago
      I did try to watch videos on the official app and it was bad, I tried changing to 3rd party apps and I was blown away that you could actually watch videos with it.
afavour 3y ago
That led directly to where we are today. But IMO the situation isn’t comparable: if Reddit is Digg then who is Reddit? There isn’t really a viable alternative.
- stiltzkin 3y ago
  Now people use native clients and none of the alternatives have a good one even compared to the official Reddit client
epage 3y ago
For me, it was slashdot to Digg to reddit...
mulmen 3y ago
We have been talking a lot about digg recently actually. Mostly by comparison to reddit.
nonbirithm 3y ago
Wikipedia mentions the original founder of Reddit saying this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people." I feel some echoes of this statement with Reddit's recent changes. Maybe these exoduses are a cycle. I think it's a relatively recent phenomenon for a huge online service to last beyond one or more decades, and I'm not sure with these kinds of funding models and sheer user numbers it's realistic to expect these kinds of VC-funded services to last in perpetuity. Could they last 30 years at that size? 50? Maybe in another 15 years, whichever successor to Reddit is found unsustainable/unreliable (decentralized or not), everyone left with a dire need of niche online subcommunities shrugs their shoulders and moves on once again. I don't see them having another choice. The need for online communities will always be there in my mind, especially since the existence of Reddit has proven that it can be done, and someone will build something else that everyone conditioned on these forums will use eventually. I hold out hope, but an unlikely outcome is the mainstream somehow attaches itself to a service with a different funding model like Wikipedia or AO3, or these kinds of message boards are treated like public utilities. It will still be a massive burden to administer, but the outcomes could be different. I remember reading how "critical" subreddits were given a pass from the blackouts like /r/Ukraine because the value of their information trumps anything related to Reddit operations. A part of me thinks that Reddit's current playbook takes into account that some parts of its existence have become too important for mods/users to shut down, and that seems different to Digg's situation in 2010. They simply weren't as big as Reddit today. This is uncharted territory. Regardless, in my mind, a lot of things in life don't last forever, not just Digg or (soon possibly) Reddit. But lots of people rode the wave regardless for 15+ years, and have gained a lot of useful knowledge from Reddit in the meantime. So people will inevitably flock to other closed platforms like Discord because those platforms are the objectively superior choices, and they're not ideal for various reasons, but in my mind you just have to meet people where they are. And I think a service like Discord could absolutely implode with a few misplaced administrative changes. But at this point I tend to see these things as part of a greater circle of life, and it's (probably) not like they're going to implode almost immediately in quick succession. Just that your time spent there is a part of a particular nexus in a particular point of human history, and it's going to be limited. So, enjoy it while it lasts.

dmethvin 3y ago

Enshittification. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

danielvaughn 3y ago
As if on cue, I couldn't read past the first paragraph because of two different popups trying to get me to subscribe.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
  wired is the absolute epitome of enshitification
  - 23B1 3y ago
    Was WIRED ever not just the johnny-come-lately of tech hype-cycle?
    - drcongo 3y ago
      Surely that's boingboing. I always thought their tagline should be "last month's news, today!"
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- badtension 3y ago
  Try https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
- notRobot 3y ago
  Get uBlock Origin and turn on the annoyance filter to make your life infinitely better.
  - 3y ago

tredre3 3y ago

> Usual bait and switch from Reddit. Providing an API for free for 15 years. Yeah, total bait and switch.

arcanemachiner 3y ago
15 years of leaving money on the table. Not quite at the level of Uber in terms of setting money on fire, but respectable nonetheless.
- bshipp 3y ago
  The bots enabled by the free api was what allowed Reddit to transition from a small hangout into "the front page of the internet". Without the bots and tools enabled by the free api the site will rapidly devolve into a cesspool like Facebook.