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Comment by outime | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Reddit will die because of this nor I think this is the first time HN gets sensitive against a corporation's actions. It's happened several times in the past. The most recent I remember is the beef with Meta and WhatsApp, where a good chunk of HN was very sure everybody would move over to Signal and WhatsApp would be left to rot. Similar thing happened with Twitter and Mastodon. People get very emotional and cannot see through the fog.

It's just the same cycle over and over. As time has demonstrated dozens of times, HN isn't good at forecasting nor is representative at all of most end-users. The great majority of Reddit users (and this doesn't include me) use the official app or the official website and therefore besides this very short protest which will end soon as like many other protests in the past for different reasons, Reddit will just continue to be as popular.

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WhatsApp is fundamentally different from Reddit. WA matters if the people you want are on that platform or a different one. Reddit has a network-effect but you care less about specific people and more about content/discussion. If my brother in law is on WA then I might have to be on WA, Reddit is much more fluid. If somewhere pops up with enough content/participation then I'm good to move.

The other major difference is content. On WA you only care about the content your direct friends/family create, on Reddit the masses are dependent on a few to submit comment (and even comment, there are a ton of lurkers who never comment, might not even up/down vote). If WA content goes to shit you can tell your BIL to stop sending you crap, if Reddit content goes to shit (due to loss of power users or moderation) it's a much harder problem to solve.

The WA exodus always struck me as way too difficult, getting friends/family to switch messaging platforms is super hard. Reddit? Might be unlikely but I was in the Digg->Reddit migration and I'm 100% looking for where I want to move now that Reddit is acting this way.

> As time has demonstrated dozens of times

As time has demonstrated dozens of times, platforms, behaviors and manias come an go in regular (though not quite predictable) bursts.

Betting that nothing ever changes is not consistent with the general arc of developments in the broader technology space.

Actually the opposite is likely true. The digital landscape is very "disruptable" and relies on various dark patterns (oligopolies, user illiteracy) to lock-in some "stability".

The individual events you mention are not the flood, they are the thunder indicating a thunderstorm is brewing.

I mean if a group of people is constantly "predicting" that X will go down then some day indeed they'll be correct.

I'm not saying things don't change because it'd be dumb to believe that given known human history. However I just despise the fact that even here in HN, any event happening in corporate that's otherwise minor outside of these doors is confidently defined as the tipping point ("fastest suicide" is maybe one of the most dramatic ways) and the company will go bust. Just wanted to clarify that, I agree with your sentiment.

We're more sensitive about Reddit becoming an unusable mess for people like us. I don't care what happens to Reddit anymore, I'm going to Lemmy because it's the experience I wanted when I joined Reddit 12 years ago.

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