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Comment by edoceo | Hacker News Reader

Switching cost for users is near zero.

Except users don't switch because of network effects. None of the twitter, reddit, youtube alternatives have managed to put even a dent in them.

Something about acquiring users is low cost. For a while it seemed like each 1-2 year block of new HS students was picking up a different app.

That is still sort of true, it was instagram, then snapchat and now tiktok.

Time will tell how long tiktok lasts. I find as time goes on the internet is less fluid than it used to be.

The internet is maturity and mainstream and late adopters don't like new things.

Remember digg.com?

Digg was still relatively niche. Reddit is on a whole other scale. Did anyone over 40 even know of digg? Plus they committed suicide.

Digg's highest buyout offer was 252 million and they were very much the big dog at the time.

At the time being the key words.

People forget (or never noticed) all the credible tech press running articles questioning the future of the internet as recently as the early 2000s. Then the 2008 election happened and a lot of tech-hesitant people got online to tweet and blog about it until 2012 when Obama's victory tweet set record numbers that are now routine. Nobody seems to question it anymore, but the internet's future is no more certain. At least the open internet's future.

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.

Reddit's new UI is a decent first step down that road.

It's survivor bias to only look at existing incumbents. Reddit absorbed Digg users almost overnight, as one quick example. Another slower one is how AIM, ICQ, or MySpace lost the war of attrition.

And perhaps a "fresh start" for would-be moderators and tone-setters? i.e. the power users of reddit seem more than a bit ensconced.

Moderators have the most to lose by moving, it will be the people who don't post who have nothing to lose.

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.

> Switching cost for users is near zero.

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.

I think you might be making connections where none exist there

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