I don't mean that to be patronizing...but I remember being on Digg and Reddit being a weird alternative. And after a series of huge mistakes, almost overnight Reddit was flooded with users and Digg relegated to nothing.
It really opened my eyes to how quickly an empire built only on its users can disappear.
Finally people stopped bringing up the old messengers. They had such tiny userbases. The comparisons don’t make sense.
As do all other older sites pale in comparison to absolute mammoths like Reddit now. Digg was so small compared to Reddit. It lasted for such a short period of time. People have finally stopped bringing up MySpace when touting Facebook/Instagram’s fall. MySpace peaked for at most two years 2005-2006. Before being a ghost land before the end of 2008. MySpace’s peak user base was peanuts. It also likely wasn’t very accurate in how they were able to report things. Their revenue and cash flow even smaller. The internet is broader with mobile and desktop usage. Cellular data and wifi. Global. Billions more users.
Comparing Digg to Reddit just doesn’t work. Reddit isn’t the site it was before 2010. During the digg exodus. The few years after that. And to nowadays.
———————- Edit: for some actual numbers. Copy pasting from my other comment:
Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year
Digg peaked at 30M monthly users. A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]: “Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion” These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...
I'm honestly not sure but I think there's an argument for it. The internet was a smaller place as a whole before Digg's collapse. They can't have had users that didn't exist.
On the other hand, maybe turnover can be more rapid when a domain such as the internet itself is rapidly developing.
Just seems to me there's broader factors to consider than Digg per se or reddit per se.
The only examples that I can think of are things like Yahoo Answers, Quora, Tumblr. Leaving Tumblr aside just to see if there’s any other examples, are there? We could expand it to 10 years possibly? I want to stick to the modern smartphone era.
I list many sites that rose and fell as well as apps like IM apps. How many of them had peaks or consistent growth for 10 years?
My thesis is to not look for people’s opinion on changes. Look at the actual numbers. Web giants once they get established in this modern era. Rarely get displaced like Digg did.
> On the other hand, maybe turnover can be more rapid when a domain such as the internet itself is rapidly developing.
Yes whether this is it or not as the reason is what I am saying based on what is happening
> Just seems to me there's broader factors to consider than Digg per se or reddit per se.
Yeah I didn’t intend to say I knew all the reasons why. Just that modern web giants can’t be compared to the web giants of the earlier web.
I think there might be some kind of memory bias in the sense that we're less likely to remember things that have receded into the background or even disappeared but I agree that as more users come on board because of network effects it's harder to let go of a service or to replace what it has to offer.
I'm one of the first people to bail when a platform or service becomes unusable and a new one becomes viable. I have zero loyalty: I started out in Usenet servers and with individual webpages and moved through to blogs/forums, then to Myspace and LiveJournal, and so on. (Including the Digg to Reddit migration).
This option is less available to me now because most new platforms are either bought out (Instagram) or require such high costs due to having to support multimedia bandwidth that there's nowhere for us to go. I'm not happy with the current platform options and I monitor them for meta-discussion fairly frequently and there is a portion of the Reddit and Twitter userbase that is ready to move IF something suitable comes along.
However, my desire for a new platform is directly at odds with the interests of the current companies and, unlike in the Myspace era, Zuck + the people running Reddit are aware of platform death and use their resources to keep their platforms 'alive' as long as they can. This is also why we see things like Instagram Reels and RPAN: The execs of social media companies know about platform death and manage for it. Think of Google's strategizing for the future versus Yahoo's: It's not that platform death can't happen, it's that they've been the ones sliding in that dagger so they want to defend against it.
It's like saying that calvary are irrelevant because somebody came up with anti-calvary tactics and strategies.
We're in this weird situation where those of us who like to explore new social frontiers and build new communities are only being given places to do so that either a.) Have strict social requirements already built in and that just kills our drive to see what happens if we put humans HERE and have them interact like THIS or b.) Are controlled by corporations who want to use that for their own benefit, and I'm NOT teaching, encouraging, or leading any more people to things I think will hurt or exploit them.
It's weird.
I didn’t include the bit in my other comment where Discord and Reddit do ban major communities. So portions of those userbases are forced to at least partially leave. We have seen what that has done to both platforms. Nothing.
Yes platform death can still happen of course. There are many reasons they haven’t happened. Many reasons they did in the Digg days. Not all of the platforms have done equivalent “anti-cavalry” tactics the way some have. Still there is at most one example of a platform death in the past decade. Versus so many before that.
My entire point was to not use the platform deaths of the 00s as a reasonable direct retort to the shakiness of current web giant platforms. Especially when it includes things like wondering if others remember internet history. As if people who remember Digg’s fall are wise to something.
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Totally agree with your general vibe, sentiment, and your final paragraph.
Absolutely, but in the same way that moderators and admins are also outside the norm but still have a substantial impact on how/if communities grow and develop (provided a community has them). Communities in general rely on a certain percentage of people in them doing community-maintenance work, and at least some of it needs to be done due to love of the community. We're weird, but we're also the people who ran around showing a bunch of people Google in 1998, or who were encouraging people to switch from MySpace to Facebook in the 00s. We're the ones who articulate to the normal people why they should switch platforms, where they should go, and why the new place will solve the problems. Building a platform without us is difficult, and so is maintaining one if you're relying on community spaces.
I definitely think you're right that the situation is more complex than it was, but I think you're overselling the differences. Things are bigger so they take longer now, but that's the main difference. That and the financial interests involved; if anything is constraining platform death I would say it's that platform death costs MONEY now.
> My entire point was to not use the platform deaths of the 00s as a reasonable direct retort to the shakiness of current web giant platforms. Especially when it includes things like wondering if others remember internet history. As if people who remember Digg’s fall are wise to something.
Fair enough. I tend to err on the other side because so much of the Web is built to strip information of context and I adore digital history; there are so many things discussed where anything more than 5 years ago might as well have not happened. Still, there can definitely be an undertone of 'stfu noob' to stuff sometimes that is offputting.
I think if a new site is to succeed, it needs to have a heavy hand with moderation.
There is one other way a new site could succeed, I think: A Reddit competitor with decent search and archive abilities, better mobile/app UX, and (here's the killer) a complete ban on political discussion and brand accounts. Set up a place for people to have groups for hobbies without having to prove their vaxx status (or lack thereof) or whether they like trans people enough. People (regardless of their political persuasion) need breaks, rest, hobby, and connection.
While I think you're absolutely right, I think Digg made a number of other missteps with the Digg v4 launch that Reddit did not make. In particular, they shut down the old Digg site to reuse the servers for the new one, a mistake that Reddit was particularly careful not to make.
Digg was also already on the way down before their failed launch, and before the exodus to Reddit - a condition that doesn't apply to Reddit today. People have been making Digg comparisons about Reddit before I worked there, and now long after I've left. I don't think the 2 are comparable.
Will Larson writes about it here: https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
You are seeing a huge demand for more free speech platforms. Youtube is outofcontrol, Google is editing search, twitter is peering over the abyss now that Jack is gone and Reddit is right along them. It may take a while, but in a few years they are going to face steep competition. It may very well be an open source decentralized project like Mastodon.
As far as free speech platforms go you have things like Gab, Voat, etc which prioritize free speech in name. While that may be commendable as a value, the core audience they attract in the beginning is inevitably too extreme for the platform to go mainstream.
By the time Reddit replaced Digg, Digg was already losing users routinely. I don’t think any of the current social media players are in that position just yet.
Reminds me of the Freenode IRC network which pretty much stopped existing[1][2] overnight.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_...
[2] https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c164679...
Reddit has banned a number of subreddits too. With hundreds of thousands of active members. None of this curbs its popularity. And not everything they ban is problematic like inappropriate non consensual sexual posts or aggressive bigotry.
Reddit gains more users than all of Digg had at its peak at least twice a year or so. If it’s growing at 20% year over year
Digg peaked at 30M monthly users.
A few social network site numbers from a year ago[0]:
“Reddit revealed that it now has 52 million daily users, and the number appears to be growing quickly. Reddit told The Wall Street Journal that daily usage grew 44 percent year over year for October” “Twitter has 187 million daily users, Snap has 249 million, and Facebook has 1.82 billion”
These are daily. Not monthly like Digg. For monthly, Reddit is nearing 500M.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/1/21754984/reddit-dau-daily...
The only examples that I can think of is Tumblr.
If there’s so many examples before 10 years ago. And maybe 1 example in recent times. Your point can still stand. However it also doesn’t mean much when the resilience of web giants are totally different between the Digg Web time and after that
It was essentially just an infrastructure change, which is the nice thing about open protocols and server implementations. Libera has 40k users and over 1000 foss projects that were on freenode.
the freenode userbase and community is alive and well, just under a new link
When did you see anyone on TV mention Digg?
Reddit's become mainstream, it's quoted by serious news outlets, joked around on Last Week Tonight (and other politic joke shows), and I'd say it's as likely to disappear as Facebook. Which is to say, surely but very slowly.