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We were told that the boycotts last year were the end of reddit, or at least a substantial brain drain. Reddit was going to be a lawless wasteland because no mo

• itsoktocry 3y ago
  Uh, reddit already won what exactly? How does going public have anything to do with success for a company like this? It's a way to raise capital and compensate insiders, nothing special Communities come and go. They are 95% reliant on the members, and some of their recent moves are adversarial. Everything there is becoming corporate, even the porn.
  • asdff 3y ago
    More active users than ever before just in the last 2 quarters of 2023 after stagnating for years. Its almost like the API thing backfired and that bad press was in fact good press and got more people onto reddit.
    • pmdr 3y ago
      The coup failed and whatever reddit's been doing is obviously good for business. I'd wager the majority of people boycotting reddit are still using it like nothing happened.
    • jazzyjackson 3y ago
      > more people how are you so sure the extra traffic is from people?
      • pmdr 3y ago
        VPNs, datacenters and Tor are pretty much blocked and API costs money, plus everyone I know uses it nowadays. I think it's mostly legit traffic.
        • sumedh 3y ago
          > VPNs, datacenters and Tor are pretty much blocked and API costs money There are services which provide a service so that your bot can still scrape from sites like reddit which try to block bots.
  • pmdr 3y ago
    > Uh, reddit already won what exactly? The right to do whatever they want and still keep the communities and content with pretty much no impact on their bottom line thereafter. > How does going public have anything to do with success for a company like this? It's a way to raise capital and compensate insiders, nothing special You raise capital if investors believe in the direction the company is heading. They're betting on reddit to make them money. > Everything there is becoming corporate Reddit didn't start out that way, at least it wasn't the impression that seasoned internet users got. It used to be developer-friendly and open, whether you were using Tor, a VPN or a datacenter's IP. It's, of course, their right to steer the company as they see fit and towards profitability. My only wish is that people providing valuable content and moderation work would start to see that the company's values have changed.
    • theonemind 3y ago
      For today. Even Facebook is in decline. Online platforms don't last forever.
      • pmdr 3y ago
        I thought so myself until reading the latest earnings call.
      • kbenson 3y ago
        Usually they do, either as some other company's acquisition or as a company that acquires others (like facebook/meta). Little actually is entirely gone, someone snatches it when the price gets low enough. Whether they grow themselves to the point they buy others or are bought is a distinction without a difference in this case. Their DNA exists in myriad ways, and even if they survived and weren't bought few few online companies are the same a decade later.
• Takennickname 3y ago
  Reminds me when someone declared that phpBB won.
• echohack5 3y ago
  Anecdotally I am seeing communities I am part of gone from Reddit and other public social media in favor of private or semiprivate ones like Discord, or avoiding digital entirely in favor of physical spaces. What I see on social media is more just the leftovers. There's little authentic interaction and engagement there.
  • NegativeK 3y ago
    Respectfully, this is a small sampling of what's happening. Reddit and Twitter, the two posterchildren of poor management, have plenty of actual interaction. They also have a significant amount of shitty noise, which is incredibly off putting, but the average person is still more likely to go there than where our niche communities end up. They might be dying slowly, but they're not even on life support yet.
    • pmdr 3y ago
      I think reddit is actually thriving. Everyone I know spends time there nowadays.
      • maxcoder4 3y ago
        I think Reddit used to be a niche site for hackers [1], hobbyists and enthusiasts. Now it's a mainstream site where regular people browse news and memes. Maybe Reddit alienated it former audience, but it doesn't mean it's dying - it just changed. [1] as in "hacker news"
        • idiotsecant 3y ago
          The internet used to be a place for hobbyists, hackers, and enthusiasts. That's not true anymore, at least not exclusively. But that supports your point - when the lake turns to saltwater you dont survive by being a freshwater fish.
    • nullserver 3y ago
      Twitter is doing fantastic. Just because people want to go back to more censorship doesn’t mean Twitter is dying.
• add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  The vast majority of people turned out to be highly passive and docile in the face of extreme enshittification. Sad, but that's where we're at. Reddit only "won" the Eternal September types. The others have moved on.
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  Populist protests usually fail, they only get their way when moneyed special interests are also lobbying for the same policy change out of coincidence, their interests usually pass regardless of public interest or not People waste their energy and call it “using their platform”, or just reminding people how irrelevant and inconsequential they are but bragging about it
• handsclean 3y ago
  Front page vote counts are now typically 1/10th what they were before the exodus, and bot content is visibly more prevalent. If you expected the website to die overnight, that was just an unrealistic definition of failure for a large website. Digg, the failure that founded Reddit, is still alive today. MySpace still exists. AOL is still selling dial-up internet. Failure at this scale is a slow slide to irrelevance, and Reddit is well on its way. The only winner here is the CEO.
  • pmdr 3y ago
    > Front page vote counts are now typically 1/10th what they were Is that really a reliable metric for activity there? Genuinely curious. What if more content is being published and popular posts don't get as much voting because of the churn? > before the exodus Exodus to where, exactly? A few thousand users switching to some obscure alternative isn't much. Sure, people left Twitter, but Threads and Bluesky are way bigger than any reddit alternative.
    • avery17 3y ago
      I left for HN. Not going back.
      • idiotsecant 3y ago
        I read HN more than I did before, but reddit has vastly more long-tail content than HN or anywhere else. Reddit is Usenet. There is nowhere else I can consume content about very specific interests all in 1 place like reddit.
      • cereal_cable 3y ago
        I dived deep into RSS feeds and decided to really just try and follow content creators instead of relying on a single site. It's been a process.
      • fagrobot 3y ago
        Daddy
• dotnet00 3y ago
  I do still insist that they've suffered a brain drain that has not recovered. A lot of niche communities are instead mainly on discord now (which is arguably worse due to no search engine visibility) and when I stumble onto reddit looking for info on something technical, I often see deleted/edited out comments instead of potentially useful responses.
  • illiac786 3y ago
    That. So much deleted content…
  • Sleepful 3y ago
    For anyone reading this and wondering about other good platforms... Discourse [1] is awesome. Of course, someone has to pay for the hosting. Can't have someone else's cake and eat it too. [1] https://discourse.org/ https://discourse.org/
• JeremyNT 3y ago
  It's just so much better than anything else even despite it all. Which, honestly, is perplexing. It doesn't seem like it would take much capital to replicate Reddit pre-enshittification, but nobody seems to even be trying. I guess nobody can imagine making money off of a less shitty Reddit. Maybe the things about it that suck for users are the only things that make business people excited.
  • commandlinefan 3y ago
    Lots of people tried (voat comes to mind), but they ran into the same advertiser pressure monetization problem that pushed reddit to become the abomination that it is today. For whatever reason, hosting is expensive, and too few people are interested in making it truly accessible.
  • al_borland 3y ago
    Before Reddit (and digg, and Facebook groups), forums were pretty popular. I was on many of them and they were simply run by passionate members of a community, not someone looking to scale to a multi-billion dollar company. It was just some guy willing to burn a little time and a little cash to talk to like-minded people about stuff they found interesting. It’s expensive when consolidated into one mega-site like Reddit, but very manageable for a smaller site. The people I know/knew running them were average people with average jobs.
    • account42 3y ago
      And such forums still exist, they're just not on the top of Google search results.
• Intralexical 3y ago
  Reddit reports something like 200 million active users. It could lose 99% of those, and it would still have more people than most cities. What, you want tumbleweeds to physically roll across your screen when you look up "reddit.com"? It's just a website. Use it, or don't. Save what you want, knowing it won't last. Sucks, but the Internet was meant for document delivery, not to become the one and only permanent home of certain social interactions.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    > Reddit reports something like 200 million active users. It could lose 99% of those, and it would still have more people than most cities Which would make it completely useless as an ad platform, which is the only way Reddit makes money.
• commandlinefan 3y ago
  Well, that’s just it - we can have a lawless wasteland, or we can have arbitrary and capricious censorship. There’s no in between. If prefer the lawless wasteland (I remember them, they were much better than what we have now). Unfortunately, I’m in the minority.
• wolverine876 3y ago
  The only thing stopping people is defeatism. People organized effective mass movements before the Internet - now it's infinitely easier, and so is the defeatist propaganda. The Reddit CEO has been successful - one absolutely necessary reason is a lack of defeatism.
• codingdave 3y ago
  Sure, it is public, but the price is going down, not up, as the IPO was just the exit strategy for all the investors who funded a site that never made a profit. And the overall vibe of the contents is bots and memes, not substantial content. There are exceptions to that, but that is exactly what they are - exceptions. I'm not saying it'll be dead next week or anything... on the contrary, it probably will find a groove to survive in. But "substantial brain drain" sounds like a perfect description of what it really is.