A Guide to Unbundling Reddit
latecheckout.substack.com
latecheckout.substack.com
Maybe there really isn’t any business case any more for a standalone community for book lovers, and so I wonder how many of his other examples are not sound.
Maybe there really isn't any profitable business case.
The author of this article tends to focus on "unbundling" as a shift from a central platform towards many platforms whose primary mission is creating a profitable business.
Whereas the analog world also has plenty of examples of small and larger formal and informal communities of book lovers i.e. reading groups, libraries, writing classes, groups exchanging books,... that aren't profit based. People simply want to get together to share their experiences about that awesome book they read, right?
I think that platforms such as Reddit or Goodreads enabled those groups to converge in a single place not just because of the content, but primarily because of the cost of digital infrastructure, or lack thereof.
Outside of the technology community, few communities are willing to invest time and money in their own standalone private platform if there's an alternative who provides that core functionality to communicate and share information, and the complex infrastructure that supports it, for, seemingly, free and with a extremely low entry bar: just create an account, create a new group, invite others: you're done.
Scaling towards millions sounds like a great proposition, but non-paying users don't even cover operational costs of building and running infrastructure. The difficulty here is looking towards alternative sources of revenue.
As far as Amazon is concerned, the value of GR is that it's simply another sales funnel. That's why Amazon only invests minimally in GR: just to keep enough potential customers around. Which is a far cry from hosting communities book lovers in their own right. The other examples in the article each have their own business model in which non-paying users aren't really the immediate customers.
Going back to small communities of book lovers themselves, you could imagine a small non-profit offering a platform to its several hundreds of members. It's clear that such a non profit could never pool the financial resources together to hire a team of experts to build a dedicated platform that could rival with the likes of Goodreads. Nor would they want to do that since that would be clearly overkill.
Maybe it's interesting to broaden the focus beyond vast high-profile, for-profit services and look towards hidden communities on the Internet which are very much alive, such as mailing list servers or very small, independently operated bulletin boards and forums (such as there still are around).
I suspect there are a plenty of small, independent, active communities hidden under the surface that are never really seen. Much like famous dark matter in the Universe.
In fact, they could. A lot of the work on Goodreads has always been done by volunteers – adding new books, fixing bibliographic errors, and deleting certain instances of spam is crowdsourced. If those same volunteers were able to delete obviously spam accounts, than they would do that as well.
That means that only the website’s technology would require skilled staff, but Goodreads’ platform is antiquated and these days what it offers would easily be seen as within the reach of a small team of hackers.
The ultimately difficulty is the decline in reading books in the age of snackable content, and the dwindling interest in standalone review sites. That would make it difficult for any new competitor to grow membership regardless of how solid the site is technically.
> I suspect there are a plenty of small, independent, active communities
I wish. In most of my own hobbies, standalone forums have hollowed out drastically as people moved to Facebook or Reddit, there are no secret Shangri-Las left. Those who remain on the old forums skew heavily towards the elderly, and also the sort of cranks who want to trade zingers or fuel flame wars instead of contribute to on-topic discussion. It is like traveling through one of those many whole regions on earth where all the young people have left to the big city.
Your first point regarding differentiating between volunteers who manage content and skilled experts maintaining expert expresses my sentiment as well.
I've been a board member of several non profits and my (anecdotal) experience is that finding a small team of hackers who would do the work pro bono is a hard challenge.
Your comment on the 'snackable entertainment' is a take on the increased competition and pressure between hobbies and activities. In a world with so many fast changing options and rapidly changing expectations, it's hard to keep people's attention for a prolonged time.
So, more often then not, if an organisation or a community doesn't have the resources, access to expertise or the time to focus on setting up infrastructure, things rather quickly get relegated to centralised platforms because of their non-existent entry bar.
Your last comment is also on point: outsourcing and leveraging existing infrastructure at marginal costs is an engrained strategy in younger generations: don't waste time building technology, if you could readily use tools that are available to you.
Maybe the big differentiator that makes captivating communities a success or a bust is just plain old day-to-day governance. Rather then pushing a particular business model that's often at odds with the interests of the communities present on a platform.
It is literally just the footer at the bottom of all his articles.
In the case of r/LoL it's replaced TeamSpeak, and for quite a few other communities it's replaced IRC or other chat systems, but a lot of subreddits and old school forums have been replaced with Discord servers too.
For instance, many speedrunning communities are now primarily focused around Discord servers, as are communities for the Mario RPGs, the Luigi's Mansion series and most game mods/fan projects. An awful lot of communities focused around YouTube and Twitch personalities have made that jump too.
So while the article may have not given the best example, there are definitely a lot of instances where Discord has replaced, or at least significantly hurt the activity of a subreddit.
It used to be that any decently organized guild would have a private voice server (be it Mumble, TS3, or Ventrilo) and a forum. The first was for event communications and the second for organizing events (calendar, recruitment, roster management, documenting strategies, etc). Now, all of that happens in Discord and very few guilds seem to have a dedicated website much less an operable forum.
In FFXIV specifically there is a virtual item called the 'Linkshell' that lets you join a private chat channel in-game. The only problem is that you are limited to the number of Linkshells you can hold, each Linkshell has a cap of 64 members, and you have to be in-game to talk to them. At some point in their early stages, Discord offered an integration with one of the FFXIV databases and it displaced the linkshell communities seemingly overnight.
I didn't find the article very meaty, but I agree with the main point of it - that there is probably a lot opportunity in taking a Reddit community and creating something tailored to those users. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Reddit's attempt to become a social network will be one of the things that make it less cool/usable.
For an indie hacker, unbundling is one of the better concepts to keep in mind if you're looking for business ideas. Maybe you can't build a massive startup from a slice of Reddit, but you could have a pretty nice lifestyle biz.
"We need to unbundle Reddit."
"I'm with you there."
"It's a silo, and it's toxic."
"Indeed."
"Now, how do we do that?"
"Slap a better UI on Usenet and completely de-silo everything. I think we're calling it Mastodon now."
"I got a great idea! Move everyone out! Out! Far out! Out to dozens of silos, each topic-specific!"
"No. That doesn't solve the underlying problem."
"Indeed! Move everyone out to a network. A network where users will be free to be siloed."
"How is that any better?"
"It's much better! It's ten silos instead of one! Surely ten individual platforms can't possibly all go bad."
And then he went off to talk into his phone wearing a face mask and gloves.
All it claims is that sometimes small specialist companies can swoop in and outcompete big companies in a specific niche. Certainly true. Has nothing to do with technology or websites. The opposite is true of course too, that big companies can benefit from efficiencies of scale and pooling resources across different niches. This is literally business 101.
Be a part of a big community, find a niche you like in it, engage and listen closely, and try to build and cater to that specific audience.
A version of this is what I did as a 16 year old when a community I was part of was sold to a new owner, I forked a new one with my own content in it, and deleted my content from the older one, and redirected any users that would contact me via DM
That is* the beauty of anonyminity, where your worth is* measured by the merit of your words and arguments, and not by what you can do for someone else.
This blog post screams of vulture capitalism.
*was
This is Hacker News?
Gaaa. This makes my skin crawl. Slack came out yesterday and did not invent chat. Saying things like this shows a profound lack of knowledge about the internet and devalues the entire article.