Reddit: Killing a Giant
faceted.social
faceted.social
I spent a couple hours browsing Lemmy instances today and I was shocked at how few users are needed to create replacement communities. Communities with about 2k users feel sparse, but good enough IMO.
I now think Reddit is 100% replaceable, at least for me, and I really hope that more focused community aggregators like programming.dev catch on.
It has become a joke on the fediverse that it is going to die any moment, tech journalists have written article after article over the years saying mastodon failed, it is going to die, it will never virally scale like venture capital funded corporate social networks did…
What they never understand is the localized perspective of someone in one of the small communities on the fediverse. Who individually actually cares if 1000, 5000, 100,000, 2 million…… or whatever abstractly large number of users are active on the fediverse? If you look up and see a handful, perhaps 60 active users who all genuinely engage with you and are interesting to talk to then the presumed fantastical future of a freer, fediverse of connected social networks existing outside of the rat race of corporate, consumption focused social media is already here…
Yes a small minority of people are currently experiencing that future, but it becomes undeniable that future can exist for everybody, it is a matter of simply more people waking to it when they please. The fediverse can exist as just a pebble on the shore of a corporate internet that dwarfs it, yet the potential always persists that the fediverse could destabilize and overthrow it all by virtue of being enough, just as a mere pebble, to bring meaning to the very next person who stumbles upon it.
I don't even use mobile, mind you. But I know that a company showing some users its middle finger will eventually show it to me. It did in the past, but sadly it was simply "casual abuse", not a big screwing up pissing multiple users at the same time.
And while anecdotal, this highlights for me:
1. The importance to keep a good relationship with your users. Trust is hard to measure through A/B testing; people might tolerate some abuse, but they won't forget about it. And once you do something that might look inconsequential, but breaks that trust a tiny bit further, it's "just enough" to make them leave, or fight back. Perhaps if Reddit hasn't been so abusive towards its users, people would look at the third party apps dying and say "oh well, I'll install the official app".
2. That that trust is also broken if you tell people blatant lies. If Reddit Inc. was actually honest with their intentions ("we want 3rd party apps gone"), or said nothing at all, people wouldn't be as pissed. It shows that the company expects them to be stupid, and not even the stupid like to be treated as such.
3. That some users are more important to keep happy than others. You definitively don't want to piss off the users necessary for your business model.
Mirrors my experience today as well. Dare I say, some communities like r/selfhosted seem to be better off in their Lemmy/kbin counterparts, these kind of communities benefit from the more dedicated posters anyway, and reddit alternatives seem to attract the right kind of people for them.
Anyway with this fragmentation I doubt we will get anywhere. Users will be scattered across non-federated silos (and not in a good "different special interest corners of the Internet" way, but just lost and disconnected).
If it was easily doable on fediverse I'd have loved that but it is not. I am just happy Facebook and Instagram are not going to be that place.
I would rather root for the return of forum era - maybe not federated. But then that kind of forum thing gave birth to one giant Reddit (I was a pre-teen back then so do not clearly remember how it started; so maybe this is totally incorrect).
It never occurred to me before reading this but I probably fall into the category of examples: I almost never visited Digg, maybe a couple of times, but did regularly visit Reddit later.
The proportion of Reddit users who would even know about Digg is probably relatively small, and my sense over time is that it became increasingly part of the forgotten prehistory of Reddit for the typical user experience.
This brings up another issue, which is user age. My guess is Reddit use, if it fades, will follow some pattern where resentful or unhappy users go build something else, and that something else increasingly becomes filled with people who were too young to be part of what caused its genesis in the first place.
Yes, Reddit had standard Web 2.0 features but they had to build it and have it working when the masses arrived. Yes, they were helped by YC but they had to go out and market themselves to the people running YC. Yes, they were alive, if barely, when Digg suicided, but give them credit for being around.
To me, the key takeaway is not to resent their success but to keep doing the little things that matter, stay in the game for as long as you reasonably can, and wait for the pack leader to falter.
In fact, some pols make careers out of this - e.g., the October Surprise aspect of US elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise.
It take hard work to get lucky.
The link shows that Digg had 17.11 million MAU in October of 2011.
I suspect a typo / brain-fart.
The larger point that giants take time to fall ... is well taken.
Probably should've just used the world-wide numbers tbh.
Thanks though.
Discourse instances, Lemmy, or even Mastodon / ActivityPubs are probably a better fit
Usenet (https://www.eternal-september.org) with Pan/SLRN as the clients has a much better pace, and the talks on tech circles are top quality, such as comp.unix.misc or comp.unix.programmer or comp.lang.c. No need to update or answer inmediately, you'll get much better answers to complex issues by waiting a few hours.
Then there's FIDO and DOVEnet, which you can access thru Telnet (BBS'), SSH, web and Usenet. Most of it are old folks and ancient tech, but you have better talks on modern news (and some niche Unix talks) as they post long and elaborated arguments.
Using a Usenet client againt FIDO/Dovenet thru cvs.syncro.net:113 it's like using any other Usenet client as the hierarchies are closeish and as a plus you get threaded discussions for free.
My point is that while most were not profit driven, the VC profit models of myspace, Facebook, et al. attracted massive investment that enabled a much wider reach and therefore a superior network effect and accessibility. Suddenly you could tweet at your favorite celebrities or businesses and they might respond, and in many cases we found this a fair trade for occasional advertising.
From what I can see the advantage of Lemmy is that you can use the same login across multiple forums that are independently operated with minimal central control, and you can take your reputation with you as you move between forums. Hypothetically, like the old days, some could be profit driven while others are fully community supported.
This model does seem to offer many advantages, so long as they can continue to match the accessibility and performance of the centralized social networks.
Well, someone needs to pay for the infrastructure needed to run those platforms, I don't think that relying on donations is a good long term strategy, especially when the platforms grows. Also, having knowledge of people's opinions, preferences, likes and dislikes sure attracts some people.
>Federated alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin that put community interests first look promising, and could very well be the future.
I am not sure about this one, federated social networks may have the same community divided across multiple instances, but maybe someone could implement a client which allows you to group communities from multiple instances under one label? This sounds like a reasonable solution to me but I don't know much about the inner workings of federated social platforms.
Then we wouldn't have Reddit to begin with.