6 ms·

Reddit: Killing a Giant

157 points by _hypx 3y ago

aurizon 3y ago
The bleeding has started, management badgering the wound will keep it flowing - Oxen have died from large persisting sucking insects. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mosquitoes-swarms-drain-blood-cows-horses-b422000.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mosquitoes...
- e40 3y ago
  Hilariously apropos.
  - rospaya 3y ago
    Also, IIRC, The Independent was a reddit partner way back.
- aurizon 3y ago
  Yes, that large sucking IPO CEO insect...
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
That's why you don't let outsiders (third parties) dictate what and how. Later on they will start demanding things and shout about everything. Slowing you down, creating wounds on your company and the like...
- mikrl 3y ago
  Not necessarily, but always have a divestment plan laid out if you’re worried.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  Fucking useless customers who want shit that's not what you feel like giving them. Ungrateful vermin, the lot of them.
- dekatron 3y ago
  Social networks and platforms that people use to talk to each other should never have been dominated by profit-seeking businesses in the first place. Federated alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin that put community interests first look promising, and could very well be the future.
  - nucleative 3y ago
    Before the web 2.0 style social networks we had community forums, frequently run on phpBB or some other BBS forum tool (before that Usenet, before that... actual dialup BBS systems). My point is that while most were not profit driven, the VC profit models of myspace, Facebook, et al. attracted massive investment that enabled a much wider reach and therefore a superior network effect and accessibility. Suddenly you could tweet at your favorite celebrities or businesses and they might respond, and in many cases we found this a fair trade for occasional advertising. From what I can see the advantage of Lemmy is that you can use the same login across multiple forums that are independently operated with minimal central control, and you can take your reputation with you as you move between forums. Hypothetically, like the old days, some could be profit driven while others are fully community supported. This model does seem to offer many advantages, so long as they can continue to match the accessibility and performance of the centralized social networks.
  - blackpill0w 3y ago
    >Social networks and platforms that people use to talk to each other should never have been dominated by profit-seeking businesses in the first place. Well, someone needs to pay for the infrastructure needed to run those platforms, I don't think that relying on donations is a good long term strategy, especially when the platforms grows. Also, having knowledge of people's opinions, preferences, likes and dislikes sure attracts some people. >Federated alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin that put community interests first look promising, and could very well be the future. I am not sure about this one, federated social networks may have the same community divided across multiple instances, but maybe someone could implement a client which allows you to group communities from multiple instances under one label? This sounds like a reasonable solution to me but I don't know much about the inner workings of federated social platforms.
- aranelsurion 3y ago
  If only we could get rid of all those people who generate and moderate content for free... Then we wouldn't have Reddit to begin with.
  - lofaszvanitt 3y ago
    But people need some purpose and some are so desperate that they do things for free...
dredmorbius 3y ago
NB: the text states "one year after launch, Digg still had 8.5 million monthly US visitors". The link shows that Digg had 17.11 million MAU in October of 2011. I suspect a typo / brain-fart. The larger point that giants take time to fall ... is well taken.
- billllll 3y ago
  Author here. They had 17.11 million worldwide MAU, and said about 50% were from the US. I just did 17 / 2 to get 8.5 million. Probably should've just used the world-wide numbers tbh.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Ah, that's not clear and doesn't make much sense in context, as you seem to be trying to say that Digg was still larger than (or at least doing well compared to) Reddit at the time. Thanks though.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
the history is often overlooked: when digg imploded/shot itself in the foot, reddit was in the right place at the right time and got lucky. Somewhere for the exodus to go to. Reddit itself was failing fast and on its last legs at the time held afloat by its core users and that's it. They didn't know what they were going to do and I resent that some of its founders/execs from that time are heralded as some sort of visionaries when they just got lucky running what's not much more than a forum hosting site with a slew of very standard web 2.0 features.
- Sai_ 3y ago
  Resenting someone's good fortune helps no one but certainly hurts the resenter by blinding them to what (could have) helped the other guys attain said good fortune. Yes, Reddit had standard Web 2.0 features but they had to build it and have it working when the masses arrived. Yes, they were helped by YC but they had to go out and market themselves to the people running YC. Yes, they were alive, if barely, when Digg suicided, but give them credit for being around. To me, the key takeaway is not to resent their success but to keep doing the little things that matter, stay in the game for as long as you reasonably can, and wait for the pack leader to falter. In fact, some pols make careers out of this - e.g., the October Surprise aspect of US elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise. It take hard work to get lucky.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    This entire comment is unnecessary. Nothing that they said is incorrect. Whether you, personally, consider it "resentment" or not is completely irrelevant.
    - Sai_ 3y ago
      Did you miss that the OP themselves used the word “resent”? Don’t know if they edited their comment to remove the word “resent” (haven’t checked) but it was certainly there when I replied to them.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
_madmax_ 3y ago
Bring back IRC!
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  No logs. Not indexable. Feels like a very different thing, with its own FOSS+federated alternatives. Discourse instances, Lemmy, or even Mastodon / ActivityPubs are probably a better fit
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    IIUC Lemmy (and Kbin) are built on ActivityPub.
  - anthk 3y ago
    IRC is for chat. NNTP it's the protocol which is the antecesor for Reddit and web fora. Usenet (https://www.eternal-september.org https://www.eternal-september.org) with Pan/SLRN as the clients has a much better pace, and the talks on tech circles are top quality, such as comp.unix.misc or comp.unix.programmer or comp.lang.c. No need to update or answer inmediately, you'll get much better answers to complex issues by waiting a few hours. Then there's FIDO and DOVEnet, which you can access thru Telnet (BBS'), SSH, web and Usenet. Most of it are old folks and ancient tech, but you have better talks on modern news (and some niche Unix talks) as they post long and elaborated arguments. Using a Usenet client againt FIDO/Dovenet thru cvs.syncro.net:113 it's like using any other Usenet client as the hierarchies are closeish and as a plus you get threaded discussions for free.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  IRC is basically unusable these days. Protocols which require a persistent open connection do not work on mobile devices.
  - ivank 3y ago
    The Lounge works pretty well in iOS Safari.
  - 3y ago
sieabahlpark 3y ago
[dead]
derbOac 3y ago
This is one of the more reasonable pieces I've read about this, something everyone monitoring the situation for whatever reason should be mindful of. It never occurred to me before reading this but I probably fall into the category of examples: I almost never visited Digg, maybe a couple of times, but did regularly visit Reddit later. The proportion of Reddit users who would even know about Digg is probably relatively small, and my sense over time is that it became increasingly part of the forgotten prehistory of Reddit for the typical user experience. This brings up another issue, which is user age. My guess is Reddit use, if it fades, will follow some pattern where resentful or unhappy users go build something else, and that something else increasingly becomes filled with people who were too young to be part of what caused its genesis in the first place.
donmcronald 3y ago
I think this post makes a good point. Reddit doesn’t have to collapse overnight to become irrelevant. They’ve made a huge mistake by upsetting enough people to cause the exploration of alternatives. I spent a couple hours browsing Lemmy instances today and I was shocked at how few users are needed to create replacement communities. Communities with about 2k users feel sparse, but good enough IMO. I now think Reddit is 100% replaceable, at least for me, and I really hope that more focused community aggregators like programming.dev catch on.
- nucleative 3y ago
  The subreddits with the most focused discussions are often those with just a few thousand subs. Perhaps the tipping point is around 10k users... when conversations become much less personal.
- dumpsterlid 3y ago
  > I spent a couple hours browsing Lemmy instances today and I was shocked at how few users are needed to create replacement communities. Communities with about 2k users feel sparse, but good enough IMO. It has become a joke on the fediverse that it is going to die any moment, tech journalists have written article after article over the years saying mastodon failed, it is going to die, it will never virally scale like venture capital funded corporate social networks did… What they never understand is the localized perspective of someone in one of the small communities on the fediverse. Who individually actually cares if 1000, 5000, 100,000, 2 million…… or whatever abstractly large number of users are active on the fediverse? If you look up and see a handful, perhaps 60 active users who all genuinely engage with you and are interesting to talk to then the presumed fantastical future of a freer, fediverse of connected social networks existing outside of the rat race of corporate, consumption focused social media is already here… Yes a small minority of people are currently experiencing that future, but it becomes undeniable that future can exist for everybody, it is a matter of simply more people waking to it when they please. The fediverse can exist as just a pebble on the shore of a corporate internet that dwarfs it, yet the potential always persists that the fediverse could destabilize and overthrow it all by virtue of being enough, just as a mere pebble, to bring meaning to the very next person who stumbles upon it.

157 points by _hypx 3y ago

The bleeding has started, management badgering the wound will keep it flowing - Oxen have died from large persisting sucking insects. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mosquitoes-swarms-drain-blood-cows-horses-b422000.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mosquitoes...

e40 3y ago
Hilariously apropos.
- rospaya 3y ago
  Also, IIRC, The Independent was a reddit partner way back.
aurizon 3y ago
Yes, that large sucking IPO CEO insect...

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

That's why you don't let outsiders (third parties) dictate what and how. Later on they will start demanding things and shout about everything. Slowing you down, creating wounds on your company and the like...

mikrl 3y ago
Not necessarily, but always have a divestment plan laid out if you’re worried.
meepmorp 3y ago
Fucking useless customers who want shit that's not what you feel like giving them. Ungrateful vermin, the lot of them.
dekatron 3y ago
Social networks and platforms that people use to talk to each other should never have been dominated by profit-seeking businesses in the first place. Federated alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin that put community interests first look promising, and could very well be the future.
- nucleative 3y ago
  Before the web 2.0 style social networks we had community forums, frequently run on phpBB or some other BBS forum tool (before that Usenet, before that... actual dialup BBS systems). My point is that while most were not profit driven, the VC profit models of myspace, Facebook, et al. attracted massive investment that enabled a much wider reach and therefore a superior network effect and accessibility. Suddenly you could tweet at your favorite celebrities or businesses and they might respond, and in many cases we found this a fair trade for occasional advertising. From what I can see the advantage of Lemmy is that you can use the same login across multiple forums that are independently operated with minimal central control, and you can take your reputation with you as you move between forums. Hypothetically, like the old days, some could be profit driven while others are fully community supported. This model does seem to offer many advantages, so long as they can continue to match the accessibility and performance of the centralized social networks.
- blackpill0w 3y ago
  >Social networks and platforms that people use to talk to each other should never have been dominated by profit-seeking businesses in the first place. Well, someone needs to pay for the infrastructure needed to run those platforms, I don't think that relying on donations is a good long term strategy, especially when the platforms grows. Also, having knowledge of people's opinions, preferences, likes and dislikes sure attracts some people. >Federated alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin that put community interests first look promising, and could very well be the future. I am not sure about this one, federated social networks may have the same community divided across multiple instances, but maybe someone could implement a client which allows you to group communities from multiple instances under one label? This sounds like a reasonable solution to me but I don't know much about the inner workings of federated social platforms.
aranelsurion 3y ago
If only we could get rid of all those people who generate and moderate content for free... Then we wouldn't have Reddit to begin with.
- lofaszvanitt 3y ago
  But people need some purpose and some are so desperate that they do things for free...

dredmorbius 3y ago

NB: the text states "one year after launch, Digg still had 8.5 million monthly US visitors". The link shows that Digg had 17.11 million MAU in October of 2011. I suspect a typo / brain-fart. The larger point that giants take time to fall ... is well taken.

billllll 3y ago
Author here. They had 17.11 million worldwide MAU, and said about 50% were from the US. I just did 17 / 2 to get 8.5 million. Probably should've just used the world-wide numbers tbh.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Ah, that's not clear and doesn't make much sense in context, as you seem to be trying to say that Digg was still larger than (or at least doing well compared to) Reddit at the time. Thanks though.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

the history is often overlooked: when digg imploded/shot itself in the foot, reddit was in the right place at the right time and got lucky. Somewhere for the exodus to go to. Reddit itself was failing fast and on its last legs at the time held afloat by its core users and that's it. They didn't know what they were going to do and I resent that some of its founders/execs from that time are heralded as some sort of visionaries when they just got lucky running what's not much more than a forum hosting site with a slew of very standard web 2.0 features.

Sai_ 3y ago
Resenting someone's good fortune helps no one but certainly hurts the resenter by blinding them to what (could have) helped the other guys attain said good fortune. Yes, Reddit had standard Web 2.0 features but they had to build it and have it working when the masses arrived. Yes, they were helped by YC but they had to go out and market themselves to the people running YC. Yes, they were alive, if barely, when Digg suicided, but give them credit for being around. To me, the key takeaway is not to resent their success but to keep doing the little things that matter, stay in the game for as long as you reasonably can, and wait for the pack leader to falter. In fact, some pols make careers out of this - e.g., the October Surprise aspect of US elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise. It take hard work to get lucky.
- flangola7 3y ago
  This entire comment is unnecessary. Nothing that they said is incorrect. Whether you, personally, consider it "resentment" or not is completely irrelevant.
  - Sai_ 3y ago
    Did you miss that the OP themselves used the word “resent”? Don’t know if they edited their comment to remove the word “resent” (haven’t checked) but it was certainly there when I replied to them.
- rcxdude 3y ago

_madmax_ 3y ago

Bring back IRC!

paulryanrogers 3y ago
No logs. Not indexable. Feels like a very different thing, with its own FOSS+federated alternatives. Discourse instances, Lemmy, or even Mastodon / ActivityPubs are probably a better fit
- Tijdreiziger 3y ago
  IIUC Lemmy (and Kbin) are built on ActivityPub.
- anthk 3y ago
  IRC is for chat. NNTP it's the protocol which is the antecesor for Reddit and web fora. Usenet (https://www.eternal-september.org https://www.eternal-september.org) with Pan/SLRN as the clients has a much better pace, and the talks on tech circles are top quality, such as comp.unix.misc or comp.unix.programmer or comp.lang.c. No need to update or answer inmediately, you'll get much better answers to complex issues by waiting a few hours. Then there's FIDO and DOVEnet, which you can access thru Telnet (BBS'), SSH, web and Usenet. Most of it are old folks and ancient tech, but you have better talks on modern news (and some niche Unix talks) as they post long and elaborated arguments. Using a Usenet client againt FIDO/Dovenet thru cvs.syncro.net:113 it's like using any other Usenet client as the hierarchies are closeish and as a plus you get threaded discussions for free.
Gigachad 3y ago
IRC is basically unusable these days. Protocols which require a persistent open connection do not work on mobile devices.
- ivank 3y ago
  The Lounge works pretty well in iOS Safari.
- 3y ago

sieabahlpark 3y ago

[dead]

derbOac 3y ago

This is one of the more reasonable pieces I've read about this, something everyone monitoring the situation for whatever reason should be mindful of. It never occurred to me before reading this but I probably fall into the category of examples: I almost never visited Digg, maybe a couple of times, but did regularly visit Reddit later. The proportion of Reddit users who would even know about Digg is probably relatively small, and my sense over time is that it became increasingly part of the forgotten prehistory of Reddit for the typical user experience. This brings up another issue, which is user age. My guess is Reddit use, if it fades, will follow some pattern where resentful or unhappy users go build something else, and that something else increasingly becomes filled with people who were too young to be part of what caused its genesis in the first place.

donmcronald 3y ago

I think this post makes a good point. Reddit doesn’t have to collapse overnight to become irrelevant. They’ve made a huge mistake by upsetting enough people to cause the exploration of alternatives. I spent a couple hours browsing Lemmy instances today and I was shocked at how few users are needed to create replacement communities. Communities with about 2k users feel sparse, but good enough IMO. I now think Reddit is 100% replaceable, at least for me, and I really hope that more focused community aggregators like programming.dev catch on.

nucleative 3y ago
The subreddits with the most focused discussions are often those with just a few thousand subs. Perhaps the tipping point is around 10k users... when conversations become much less personal.
dumpsterlid 3y ago
> I spent a couple hours browsing Lemmy instances today and I was shocked at how few users are needed to create replacement communities. Communities with about 2k users feel sparse, but good enough IMO. It has become a joke on the fediverse that it is going to die any moment, tech journalists have written article after article over the years saying mastodon failed, it is going to die, it will never virally scale like venture capital funded corporate social networks did… What they never understand is the localized perspective of someone in one of the small communities on the fediverse. Who individually actually cares if 1000, 5000, 100,000, 2 million…… or whatever abstractly large number of users are active on the fediverse? If you look up and see a handful, perhaps 60 active users who all genuinely engage with you and are interesting to talk to then the presumed fantastical future of a freer, fediverse of connected social networks existing outside of the rat race of corporate, consumption focused social media is already here… Yes a small minority of people are currently experiencing that future, but it becomes undeniable that future can exist for everybody, it is a matter of simply more people waking to it when they please. The fediverse can exist as just a pebble on the shore of a corporate internet that dwarfs it, yet the potential always persists that the fediverse could destabilize and overthrow it all by virtue of being enough, just as a mere pebble, to bring meaning to the very next person who stumbles upon it.