This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.
But I think in truth they can do a lot before really destroying themselves, closing 3rd party apps is going to be barely noticable. In theory we could have some sort of decentralized dApp alternative, but since everyone working on that sort of stuff is a borderline criminal scam artist I don't see anything real will ever come out of this grift.
That's why the parts of the internet that are "essential infrastructure" would serve us all better if they were non-profit (or a Benefit Corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation).
Watching the promise of the Internet get flushed down the drain, I have developed a healthy appetite for paying cash to eliminate surveillance, ads and general enshitification. I'd much rather donate that cash to an organization that is actively trying to provide a public benefit.
I'd rather see a newer Usenet protocol... Say something that also integrates with the Fediverse. But there's no "money" for open protocols, even though companies again and again try to emulate "Usenet, but profitized".
This feels like a longer tail of the image hosting problem, btw.
The struggle is that it takes more than love of a subject to bootstrap a community. I could see someone broadly succeeding by building modern forum software alongside an optional discovery platform that links forums together. I know there are federated platforms out there, but I think a large portion of them have lost the thread of the user journey in attempts to meet the technical challenges of federation.
My vision is more of a combination of the best of Reddit, online courses, blogging, photos, video, learning games, and simulations. More of a slice across many different types of app, tuned to the topic at hand that interests me. It's fun to work on, even if my progress is slow.
Reproducing r/nuclear seems like a nightmare scenario. Lots of arguing. Tough to control the tone and screen out-dated information. It's the classic problem with social media, discerning the difference between reality and myth. Plus, reading through screaming matches is not a fun way to learn.
Aggregating these smaller nightmarish sites, who wants to do that?
Digg was the place to go, and then they fucked it up and everyone migrated to Reddit. Now Reddit is fucking it up, and even if everyone migrates somewhere else, that new somewhere else is going to fuck it up too once they get to the point of "we need to be profitable at all costs".
What we actually need is some way to convince users to pay for the services they use so that they don't start mining us for ad clicks as soon as they think they can get away with it, because as long as users are going to insist on everything being free companies are going to need to do shit like this to us at every opportunity.
This is how the fediverse works, and it's _vastly_ better than any subscription service (not least because it means that anyone, regardless of financial situation, can find a server to be a part of.)
There's a fedi version of Reddit (lemmy) but it seems to have been a bit of a half-cooked design, rather than something that could truly take over for Reddit anytime soon.
First they said no one had to pay, and they subjected us to ads... Then, they said, well, you'll have to pay, if you don't want to see our increasingly annoying ads... Then, they got our money. Then, they decided to subject us to ads, again...
Yes and that will most likely work great the same day that communism will. If users pay X the corporation wants X + Y. It is an age-old problem from way before the internet. Can you name one company that is okay with a healthy profit that doesn't get better over time? For example if they take costs and have X profit, will anyone still say X is fine with 100 times more users? After all it should become cheaper per user and theres zero reason the profit should go up. In my opinion the only way that will happen is with governments doing this - and not a government like in the US but more like Norway.
Here is the video: https://youtu.be/r3snVCRo_bI
>The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
For the most part, people are fine as long as the boat does rock TOO much, and for the most part Reddit's boat hasn't rocked to the extent Digg did back in the day. It may not even be possible for that to happen with the current population of users. Digg's exodus happened in 2005-6 right before the big boom of social media in 2008-10. The users were generally pretty saavy back then.
These days? Everyone uses social media, and inevitably with any mainstream, most people will only use it very casually, perhaps amongst a small friend group or for very casual browsing. They never comment,they may never even check comments. As long as the content comes, they won't even be aware of the sausage underneat from power users. But they are also the real lifeblood of the site.
These sorts of sites may be too big to fail now. You can't promote a site based on "hey we're not X". It just needs to have the right content at the right time a la TikTok. Sadly, one big incentive of that may include monetizing people for making posts and participating, and that sort of goes against the whole premise of the classic internet forums of the 90's/00's
I do think that Reddit could do with a massive overhaul.
If I was ceo tomorrow I would; - Install a bunch of new teams to focus on solving real problems for users - understand user pain points with the UX. why were people using third party apps? And fix the experience. Invest in better mobile apps - invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is. Most people think it’s just a place for memes - (random wild idea) try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content
I think with some targeted investment Reddit could do so much better for itself
I don't think traffic is indicative of whether a site has outstayed its cultural relevance (or efficacy).
I imagine HN readers can list off any number of sites that were in the top 10 traffic-wise and then suddenly were gone.
Mostly ads, are you going to remove that? How are you going to explain the revenue loss to the board?
> invest in some PR or similar to change peoples view of what Reddit is
They already do that, maybe you'd like to increase the PR budget? It might be tricky with the ad revenue loss.
> try to understand why users like Twitter how Reddit could attract those users over to Reddit to post content
They also already do that, the whole redesign with individual comments taking 240px height and user avatars are the result of that.
I'm not saying the executive team cannot do better, but doing it without getting kicked out is incredibly hard.
Since launch "new reddit" has been broken to the point where the page crashes if you copy and paste text in the comment textarea. You need a hard reload of the page to restore it, and then you lose your comment.
It's been what, 5 years now? I think it's safe to assume that nobody working on reddit's UX actually uses new reddit, and also most likely nobody else either.
The ability to edit text isn't a weird niche feature for powerusers. It's fairly central to using the service. Anyone who does more than passively scroll down the front page will run into this.
It's not because the issue hasn't been reported either. https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/search/?q=paste&restrict_sr=1
The SerenityOS guy will soon have built a fully functional web browser rendering engine in less time it's taken Reddit to restore the default functionality of a textarea tag. It's unbelievable.
A text area box that they could get for free from the browser. It's not like a text entry box is fucking rocket surgery. HTML forms have existed for almost three decades.
3rd-party apps, including RIF, do display ads already - I have a vague recollection of it becoming compulsory at one point. The difference is that they tend to be less intrusive than on the Reddit app.
Apart from that, I agree that it's a hard act - but it's also true that trying to be something they're not (i.e. Twitter) will inevitably produce a damp squid which loses what made Reddit unique (and it's happening a bit more every day) while not quite managing to be the other thing.
The social space is obsessed with "competition by copycat", instead of focusing on their core strenghts. Maybe because they all fear to be destroyed by this or that novelty feature, they all end up looking the same, regardless of whether it makes sense.
I paid $5 to get rid of the ads anyway.
All squids are already damp.
Mostly features.
Would actually act on this info if you found out that people using third party apps were a single digit percentage of total users and decreasing over time?
Between lowering the barrier to entry (and average age) with phones, astroturfing and bots, and the overall impossibility of moderation, I just don't see it happening anymore.
We need to go back to purposely small communities.
Part of this has to do with the gauges of success. Other first generation of this appeared on older forums, basic info like join date and post count served as an indicator of engagement and implied trustworthiness by the content creator.
The next big innovation was “karma” or “likes” which required very little effort on the part if the viewer but was a strong signal of audience engagement.
Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality. The only thing I can think of that’s different is something like the famously meritocratic GitHub, which is it’s own dystopian ecosystem.
I don’t know how to solve this exactly, but as long as incentives to create reward those with pure eyeball counts and not material quality, we will constantly run into this problem of low-quality, high production value content that serves as useless trash to sift through. I think GPT programs will be created to make a greater and faster tsunami of shit that will grace the internet and we will eventually be totally and completely overrun with shallow pieces masquerading as quality.
> Both of these indicators of engagement are inherently flawed because they incentivize quantity over quality.
The karma system has other arguably worse side effects. It incentivizes people to downvote things they disagree with and upvote things they agree with. I'd wager many of Reddit's longtime users think this is the point of karma, rather than a signifier of a post's effort and/or quality.
I agree that the incentive structure needs to change if Reddit or any competitor can remain viable places for discussion.
I think that's really the only way for this to work going forward if you want a reasonable volume of quality discussion. It's a job so mods need to get paid.
>We need to go back to purposely small communities.
I'm not against it. But I haven't seen an example of a modern (~last 10 years) small community that just ends up having a dearth of discussion. I'm talking less than one post and 5 comments a day kinds of discussions. It's really hard to find that sweet spot, and arguably harder to maintain it without ballooning out of control or stagnating and losing users.
Discord seems closest to this, but it has the same problems from server to server. either you are part of some small guild server and discussion only ramps up for large events or you have a larger general server and it's just a hose of random quips, barely different from a chat stream.
Now these communities are on Discord, which is not the friendliest to look for archived knowledge. If Discord can solve the UX for knowledge share, I can see it as the product with the better chance of replacing Reddit.
Its going to be a tough road for anyone who wants to create a public web forum at any scale especially if they get brigaded.
The only way to launch a competitor that is profitable is by going the Google/Meta way, but then users will just stay on reddit. Otherwise you need deep pockets or lots of VC money, but why would they invest in reddit clone that will just end up in the same place that the original finds itself in?
As for the corporations, you need them and their ad money, unless you want to run a subscription model. But that doesn't work either, because the majority of users will just stick to the free sites if you try.
A better model might be to start out with a small cost from the outset. Manage expectations.
Have been building an alternative at https://sqwok.im, the twist is that it uses realtime chat instead of comments, and no voting currently.