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Comment by markdown | Hacker News Reader

Digg users had an attractive alternative to run to. Reddit users don't.

That's actually not true, its just that the days of the big platform are over. It took a big company innovating to provide the value then that small dev groups are building left and right now. Those leaving reddit (and Facebook and YouTube and everything else) aren't migrating to an alternative site, they're spreading out into a diaspora. You've got software like Lemmy and Ruqqus and notabug.io and others and people are using them. There are lots of attractive alternatives, not just one.

Reddit is really not that special under the hood. Given the opportunity it can be replaced. It just suffers from people moving issue most social networks suffer.

A decentralized alternative Lemmy[1] is already quite feature complete and in many ways even better than reddit itself. It's just a bit of a ghost town and many of the instances are aimed towards and/or controlled by political/social rejects.

It just suffers from people moving issue most social networks suffer.

"just"? Reddit is the community, not code. Users aren't going to run off to Lemmy or any other site. It just isn't going to happen.

Are you saying that Digg wasn't a community?

The community came VERY close to jumping ship when a beloved low (mid?) level employee was terminated back in 2015.

But they didn't because there wasn't an alternative, as there isn't now.

The alternative site (and it has to be one site, nor multiple, topic-specific sites) has to either already be massively active when the triggering event occurs.

It stops being fun once there are more users. Decentralized solutions are the future or image boards.

yet

Digg never had individual communities on Reddit's scale. Reddit has subreddits for every obscure hobby, niche and fetish imaginable, and it's much harder to convince the users already there to jump ship.

Also, once you're logged into Reddit, the friction of exploring a new subreddit is essentially zero. Compare this with needing to sign up and email verify etc every time you want to join some random phpBB forum.

It’s different now. As one of those Digg refugees who has now been looking to ditch reddit for a long time, there just isn’t a good, obvious reddit alternative in the same way there was a good, obvious Digg alternative. The internet is too grown up, too parceled out, the big players are too dominant.

What do you look for in an ideal reddit alternative?

Reddit, but with a hivemind that agrees with my political views.

My covid side gig is a modest attempt at starting something: https://discoflip.com

I went there and thought it looked interesting, but quit after it wanted me to login to view the technology channel. Allow people to view (but read only) and it would go a long way to helping you grow I think.

Login is only required to create a channel or post. What actually happened is that #technology channel does not exist (you clicked it from a list of channel names recommended for you to create). The list right below it are the ones that exist (called recently active).

My design skills (rather lack of it) is to blame. Apologies and huge thanks for the feedback. I will improve it this week.

Nah, I think we're fucked now. The Internet is a completely different place than what it was in 2011. Any reddit alternative that springs up now is immediately populated with spammers, conspiracy nuts, identity politic types...you know the types; all the ones that reddit banned. They instantly bring the quality down which makes it unattractive to most people who want to switch. And then it gets shut down e.g. voat. Rinse and repeat.

With each passing day, the Internet looks more and more dire.

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