The risk within the “internet chat” sector is huge. Many popular discussion platforms disappear almost overnight. Slashdot, Digg, MySpace. I wouldn’t put a big bet on this leadership team in such an unstable environment.
As far as the big internet companies go, it is hard to think of any company whose leaders have so routinely been criticized as out of touch with their users and downright incompetent with the one exception maybe being Yahoo. It is a almost a miracle that Reddit has survived it all mostly for the better, but I wouldn't put money on that continuing forever.
That doesn't appear to be what users or mods want. Lots of people want more active development and moderation. Just this week there were large scale protest across the platform regarding Reddit admins not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous COVID misinformation. Then Reddit released a rather bad statement refusing to give into user demands. They almost immediately went back on that statement and banned a big misinformation subreddit. It almost feels like they make decisions in a way to ensure they piss everyone off.
If you don't know why your platform works, for the love of all that is holy don't mess with it!
Reddit “pays” moderators through cachet to do unreasonable amounts of work.
Then, Reddit runs ads between all the highly curated posts, earning revenue off the backs of these mods.
It wasn’t so bad a few years back. The ads were mild and there were zero dark patterns.
Today, the setup seems more off balance than Amazon delivery driving was this spring.
It makes sense an IPO would be planned, they are pumping revenue.
I remember when I got the first "Chat", I was confused then immediately went to figure out how to disable it.
I wonder if it ever got traction.
We are seeing a consolidation of moderators of the major subreddits. The number of moderators on reddit is incredibly tiny, sub-sub-sub pareto level of control.
These subreddits are losing diversity of who moderates them and it's suspected by some that many full time moderators are fully paid up employees of PR firms. Even volunteer mods admit that its basically like a full time job. It makes total sense if I was in a marketing firm for Netflix to have an employee being a moderator on the largest internet forum about movies. This pull moves away from the organic, disorganized and diverse nature of reddit to a kind of centralization and conformity. I suppose recent events have also shown the power of these power moderators in shaping the platform to the will of those moderators, come to think of it. Interesting times!
I agree for the vast majority of users it costs nothing to move, and they will if there#s something better which there isn't anything yet
But, as before with all the other cases, those who move will be the early adopters. moderators are the old guard, stuffy, controlling, professional, they will be the last to move as they have to protect their investment. Those who move first will be the more independent and chaotic riding the wave. I look forward to it.
Time will tell how long tiktok lasts. I find as time goes on the internet is less fluid than it used to be.
Digg was a big fish in a tiny pond even as late as 2010 when it launched v4. Most people in the English-speaking world Digg targeted were some kind of online, but usage jumped as smartphones became normal. Twitter took most of that growth in use.
Not just that. Once we all have GPT-n power in our back pocket, it will become trivial to flood Reddit and all other forms of social media with absolute time wasting drivel.
Platforms will start to require government IDs. But these will also be falsified with thispersondoesnot exist.
And then we'll have to verify with a trusted identity provider or phone number. And that will be required for and stick to everything we do online.
Short text-based social media, long government tracking.
Suppose, as a thought experiment, you could create the ideal, perfect, social network or discussion board. Say, with 40 of the smartest, most creative, quirkiest, considerate people you knew. Hell: the 40 top exemplars of this on the whole planet. It would be a pretty awesome network.
(I know this because I accidentally created something like this, just by creating a small group with smart and interesting people in it. It really was surprisingly good.)
It can only get worse.
Because if you've already got the best, then anyone else you can add will be less smart, less creative, less quirky, less considerate, than who's already in the group.
And at some point you'll notice. Maybe at 50 people, or 500, or 5,000, or 50k, or 500k, or 5m, or ....
For a few reasons.
- Gradation of capabilities. These are ordinalities, not cardinalities.
- Limits to common experience and interest.
- Differences of opinion. Or morals. Or philosophy.
- Just plain scale.
See: https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/1058991
Ultimately, the original founding cohort starts looking for a fresh platform / greenfield with smaller scale, fewer problems, and a higher S/N ratio --- this is classical "clue flight" (or brain drain in an earlier metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_drain).
Reddit started off as a quirky, self-selected, geek-heavy crowd. It's anything but that now. At small scale, a free-speech free-for-all was tolerable. At large, it's harmful at international scale.
A key problem is what I call Woozle's Epistemic Paradox:
Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the commercial web to social media.
We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in the first place -- and we've now transitioned to a situation where many people are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...
This is why the "it's just the Internet" or "just delete your Facebook" is not only an inadequate response, it's false. It fails to recognise that even for those not actively participating or engaging with those platforms, their lives are profoundly affected. The Arab Spring, genocide in Myanmar, the Hong Kong democracy protests, and the January 6 insurrection being four specific cases in point.
You could argue Reddit missed the opportunity to spot that, buy a younger Discord, and integrate it better.
Groups have to go off platform to trade/sell gear between subreddit users.
The difference is purely branding.
If I make a comment in a large Discord server, and then put my phone back in my pocket and continue my day, I am very unlikely to actually see any responses to what I said.
If you don't see the responses, that's because you didn't want to.
I regularly get so far behind on channels in an 11 person server that I just give up on reading whatever I missed that day. If Discord and Reddit can serve functionally identical purposes in your life, that's fine, but to deny that they have any functional differences to anyone is just provably false.
Additionally, Discord has private rooms suitable for small groups. Reddit as a platform is not so suitable for small groups of friends, even though it supports private subreddits.
And speaking of IRC, even some games like the original Quake used IRC for in game chat right? And Twitch the video streaming platform used to have its chat built on IRC but I don’t know if it still is. Either way, it’s evident that it is more suitable for real time conversation.
Reddit meanwhile made a half-assed attempt at real time chat, and it’s not good. I kind of wish they had just stuck with being what they were but I suppose at least trying is a good idea even so. But I don’t think their real time text chat is compelling nor competitive with Discord text chat.
Sure, IRC is all delivery and no permanence. But Discord is the opposite of that; it's all permanent forum posts.
"More suitable" is a weird thing to say. They refer to different things. IRC is a transport protocol. Discord is a website. The logical comparison would be between IRC and HTTP.
Sorry if that part was unclear but I was saying that Discord and IRC are more suitable to real time communication than Reddit is.
Discord essentially has this too but actually much more privately/invite only style. I could probably find an Ubiquiti owners group there too.
But to be honest, before subreddits had Discords they had IRC channels. This has always been a thing.
They shouldn't also need to half heartedly try to compete with Discord. They should drill down on what they excel at.
Even though I am a daily Reddit user, it's mostly because there are no other alternatives. I definitely would not buy their stock.
and that most active & upvoted redditors on a sub mostly don't use its discord
I added 'single login' as an after thought, because it didn't occur to me at first, but I think that must be a big reason. But even then there's Discourse, with not single but much easier and OAuth (signup/)login.
So, yeah, reddit is the searchability.
A "classic forum" trying to get off the ground would be competing with all of that. You could also argue, "why Discord? Why not IRC?" for much the same reasons.
As I said there, there is also Discourse, with only slightly more multi-community friction really, making it far easier and more standardised to do initial sign-up.
1. Relatively easy to create a subforum. 2. Someplace you can post [pseudo]anonymously. 3. Has a critical mass of people. 4. Is accessible to anyone on the web.
There's a subreddit for all sorts of topics, and if there isn't one, it's fairly easy to just start one. You don't have to deal with setting up forum software or paying someone for it, and if you want to you can create a post with a pseudoanonymous throwaway account. It's really easy to come and go, and there's enough moderation that it hasn't in general devolved into a *chan-style environment, but not so much it's alienating.
Pseudoanonymity is maybe underappreciated in social networking I think. It's really a key feature. Once you reach some mainstream critical mass, having that feature really moves things along.
If you could replicate those four things in a decentralized way, it might take off. But there's a chicken-and-egg issue with network effects.
2 core features of Discord are voice chat and access control, both of which are necessary for groups like a guild in a video game. Adoption in small groups like that was huge, competitors like Teamspeak and Mumble had incredible friction.
Even if you focus specifically on text communications, access control is a major feature. One example is the integration with Twitch, where there are servers limited to subscribers. Reddit focused on "the whole site is a community" rather than Discord's "start your own community, limited to very specific people."
I'd argue that the overlap you see is Discord monopolizing a disjoint market and then encroaching into Reddit's market due to userbase size. "Why isn't there a Discord server?" is the sort of question that gets asked when everyone there is also on Discord.
Personally, what amazes me is that Discord allowed Slack to grow to what it is. I was very surprised when they doubled down on gaming focus.
Their biggest mistake maybe?...controversy and discussion sells and they essentially banned that subreddit by subreddit. People dont like information platforms with information gaps.
Is there evidence of this? I want to believe this is true but the era of cancel culture and deplatforming suggests people want information gaps and echo chambers.