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Comment by bmarquez | Hacker News Reader

I was watching the stream earlier. It was an exciting feeling to have 10,000 people viewing, and cheering on the chat whenever a new subreddit went dark.

I don't know if I should be excited or sad. Reddit is dying, but I'm seeing it live on Twitch with the community cheering on in a festive atmosphere.

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The stupidest part of all of this is all Reddit's problems are self inflicted. Reddit the company produces almost nothing. Reddit the users make the site what it is. The users submit all the content, make all the comments, and moderate the site.

Reddit's executives however seem to think they are somehow critical to Reddit's existence and utility. If they all got replaced tomorrow with competent people no one would fucking notice. Everyone would notice if all of Reddit's users disappeared tomorrow.

Reddit is making the same stupid value estimation Digg made.

Well to be fair, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else for all these users to go, right? So the executives do provide something.

Reddit has about as much technical complexity in its core product as Twitter—both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist.

It’s the network effects that made Reddit valuable: the people, communities, 3rd-party clients, platform integrations, etc.

Most of these things are fairly portable, so I think Reddit execs are mainly gambling in users not wanting to bother with finding a new place to gather.

I have to wonder why they didn’t just start off charging reasonable prices for the API and dial things up over time. Crummy either way, but less likely to alienate literally everyone they depend on to make the system work.

I’ll admit I don’t know much about the back end. I’m not that sort of dev. Is anyone working on a reddit clone to deploy, then? If there was ever a time, it’s now.

There exists Lemmy, which is a fediverse alternative. From what I've heard, the development of it, is a bit messy, but it seems to work well enough and has potential.

> both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist

Trivially? No. As can be seen by lack of alternatives of comparable quality.

I think it would be pretty easy to make a clone, but everyone who tries seems to end up getting nerdsniped making something federated instead.

Only federation defends from what is now happening with Reddit. See Freenode and Libera Chat.

Reddit was great for a decade, why can't we just switch website every 10 years?

Because you usually loose a large part of the community on the way?

I'm fine with that. Massive popularity is a poison pill.

Not only do you lose the community as already mentioned, but you lose the accumulated data (i.e. post content). This might not matter for a social community; it matters a lot if the community is of a more technical nature; i.e. repair/modding, analysis, etc. A lot of really great and useful content has been lost over the years due to forums going dark; lose a site like reddit and... my god. It's just really a huge step backward.

N.B. I have no love for reddit. I generally hate reddit, the site. However there's a massive amount of useful content there.

Why use an alternative when you can use the real thing? Reddit was open-source until 2017: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

I think that qualifies at trivial.

Running things like this is not exactly trivial, even if code works run well as-is 6 years later

There are a lot of alternatives that replicate Reddit's functionality. I've tested out three or four of them over the years.

The quality differences are 100% due to the differences in the communities. They are social deficits, not technical ones.

Creating a decent Reddit clone is a weekend project. I've done similar stuff as a demo teaching an hour long 'Intro to Rails' class at the local code school.

I remember a time when when people actually liked reddit. And would buy reddit gold with the intention of helping out host the site. Seems like Ellen Pao and the IAMA drama was the turning point that soured the users against the company.

I’ve never seen Reddit the company as valuable. People are valuable, and they just happen to gather on Reddit. If Reddit goes away they will gather somewhere else.

What makes reddit valuable are

1. The communities

2. The data that the communities havegenerated in the past

It seems like reddit is trying to monetize #2 to the point of alienating #1. It's bizarre how large the disconnect is between Reddit the corporation and Reddit the collection of communities

Isn't #2 freely available for anyone to scrape? And even if they shut down access now, presumably everyone training LLMs already has a mostly complete dump of reddit comments/links.

Yes, but actually scrapping it is a hard work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254485.

What would be funny is if as a result of this everyone moved back to Digg (where the Reddit users initially came from).

There's no Digg-that-was to move back to. Digg in 2023 is only connected to old Digg by a $500k check and domain transfer. They eventually added comments, but it seems sparse.

edit: apparently an ad company bought it in 2018. Doesn't seem to have affected the quality of links.

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