Honestly, it sounds like a great reason for the world to not care about Reddit.
I hope people start seeing the value in decentralization again.
I hope people start seeing the value in decentralization again.
But what either of us said doesn't negate the sentiment of my original comment.
Thanks, I struggled to express myself in words about that, and this is spot on what I am thinking.
Also it became a go-to place for search. I know a lot of people, including myself, now constantly use "site:reddit.com" when searching for information since the rest of the mainstream web is mostly crap.
As if we don’t all know that and have thought that forever.
All of this stuff WAS decentralized before Reddit. IRC was decentralized before Discord and Slack. Decentralization lost.
We can’t just be ideological about software we have to be pragmatic. You can’t just say “let’s throw up a decentralized Reddit” and boom problem solved. You have to figure out how to build something that is sustainable, that people want to use, without a bunch of money. That’s super hard.
It borders on obvious to anybody who frequents HN.
I think a more practical approach is starting software companies that aim smaller, and don't take on VC funding. Imagine a version of Reddit that doesn't need to IPO. That only has a staff of 50-100 employees. Same with Uber, or whatever.
I think ultimately, decentralized services will always fail over centralized ones because they're less controllable. If you look at a lot of the scandals that Reddit has had over the years - it was external forces putting pressure on the company to change what they allow on their service.
When there's no organization backing something, bad actors will be involved, muddy the waters and then all of a sudden the "fediverse" or whatever is associated with things you don't want to be associated with, so you either don't try it (because of what you've heard) or you don't promote it's use (because you're worried about what people will think of you) - additionally, any time it's open source and self hosted, the technical barrier will be too high for a large group of people.
If we can change software companies, stop thinking of them as "startups" and treat them more like normal companies instead of these potential multi billion dollar companies, I think that's a path to something more sustainable.
You could say this current upset is about Reddit management being pressured into censoring more to appeal to advertisers. What you call "controllability" is a double-edged sword.
> When there's no organization backing something, bad actors will be involved, muddy the waters and then all of a sudden the "fediverse" or whatever is associated with things you don't want to be associated with, so you either don't try it [...] or you don't promote it's use [...] - additionally, any time it's open source and self hosted, the technical barrier will be too high for a large group of people.
The same argument can be made for the Web as a whole, which despite appearances is still decentralised. When was the last time you heard a lay person say that they weren't interested in a website for their business because only unsavoury types use those?
This is an implementation problem; people will self-host (or rent from Linode or w/e) if that's simple and not too expensive, and they'll take the centralised, ad-funded option if self-hosting is too hard and/or the loss of privacy is deemed the lesser cost. While concern for privacy seems to be on the rise, ideology has never been the deciding factor for the plurality of users.
https://join-lemmy.org/instances says there's only 2.6k monthly active users in the entire "lemmyverse". That's not even getting off the starting blocks for even a single niche sub-Reddit.
Getting people to even humour the idea of going elsewhere when there's genuine value in pre-existing content is difficult, especially when it comes to troubleshooting, guides, advice et al, which unfortunately, Reddit is brimming with.
Windows Phone was a pretty good example of the "no users" problem: a solid alternative to iOS and Android, but not much in the way of big apps because of a lack of users, but the lack of users primarily stemmed from a lack of big apps. Chicken-and-egg scenario ad infinitum.
Not sure if all data is available anywhere? (Common crawl? Those big internet scrapes used to train language models?)
Most of the value that I derive from older content is being able to recontextualize it for the present day, especially with extremely niche stuff.
However, user hostility from Reddit itself is likely going to lead to an exodus of power users, just like with Twitter post-acquisition. It might not be huge numbers of people quitting, but they're meaningful users, which are a sad loss community-wise. Especially if you assume that way more people just view a platform than actually post things on it, which is apparently vastly skewed in that way for most platforms; "lurkers".
[1] https://academictorrents.com/details/7c0645c94321311bb05bd87...
(I also imagine something like >95% of all Reddit content was produced in-between 2012 and 2023.)